title: via-ipv6.com: enabling IPv4 sites for IPv6 only networks
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pub_date: 2019-10-17
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author: Nico Schottelius
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twitter_handle: NicoSchottelius
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_hidden: no
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_discoverable: yes
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abstract:
We launched via-ipv6.com to enable legacy (IPv4) sites in IPv6 only networks
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body:

Have you ever been in an IPv6 only network and wanted to reach IPv4
sites without NAT64?

Inspired by talks at [RIPE79](https://ripe79.ripe.net), I decided to
give it a try, whether we can easily expose some IPv4 only sites with
a proxy to the IPv6 Internet.

Turns out, using a bit of nginx magic and an
[IPv6 only VM](https://ipv6onlyhosting.com/) with NAT64 this is
actually not too hard.

## How it works

First of all, all sites are enabled on a site-by-site basis, so this
is not a generic IPv6-to-IPv4 proxy.

For every "site", be it Hackernews, Twitter or Reddit, I created a
subdomain below **via-ipv6.com** like:

* [reddit.via-ipv6.com](https://reddit.via-ipv6.com)
* [twitter.via-ipv6.com](https://twitter.via-ipv6.com)
* [hackernews.via-ipv6.com](https://hackernews.via-ipv6.com)

Each of the sites have their own SSL certificate, not the one used by
the actual site. The reason for this is that I needed the client to
access the proxy instead of failing to access the site (like
reddit.com) by not finding an AAAA entry.

The disadvantage of this is that I have to decrypt and re-encrypt the
traffic. So while I am not interested in your data, I advise to use
this service knowing that the TLS connection is decrypted and
reencrypted on the path.

## List of sites

You find the current list of sites on
[via-ipv6.com](https://via-ipv6.com). If you would like to have
another site added, just ping me on [IPv6.chat](https://IPv6.chat).