[tor-relays] Auto-detect and enable IPv6 // Re: Please enable IPv6 on your relay!

Roman Mamedov rm at romanrm.net
Fri May 22 11:34:51 UTC 2015


Hello,

> We still have a depressingly low number of relays that support IPv6
> (currently only ~120 of ~1900 relays). If your host supports IPv6,
> please enable it, especially if you run an exit! This has to be done
> explicitly.

If you (supposedly) care so much, then can you please make it automatic?

There is no need to explicitly put the ____IPv4____ address into the torrc.

And there is no need to explicitly put the IPv6 address into the config file of
virtually any other IPv4+IPv6 supporting software I can think of: web, mail,
NTP, XMPP servers, those are all capable of automatically figuring out which
IPs the host has.

Can't think of any reason of why this has to be otherwise in Tor, aside from
perhaps a certain lack of understanding of best IPv6 implementation practices
from the Tor developers side and/or nobody simply giving much thought to this
yet.

I currently run 15 Tor relays, 14 of those IIRC are IPv6 capable. But since
you did not bother to make enabling IPv6 in Tor anywhere near user-friendly
[1], I am simply not going to bother pecking the IPs into each torrc
individually. [ One of the practical reasons being that I sometimes need to
migrate the Tor 'identity' (torrc + /var/lib/tor/*) between machines and
providers with v4/v6 addresses obviously changing. ]

Aside from migrations between providers, the requirement to specify the IP is
also impractical in many other situations, e.g. my ISP at home provides only a
__dynamic__ IPv6 subnet which changes to a different one with each new PPPoE
session.

[1] Ideally there should be no 'enabling' at all!!! IPv6 should be active by
default, IF the relay has determined it is able to make a successful IPv6
connection with a dir-authority -- oh and also that's how you can discover the
actual working IPv6 address to use; or at least with a simple "IPv6Relay 1,
but certainly with no requirement of specifying the IP address in the config
file.

-- 
With respect,
Roman
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