Hi, Jonas, On 6/3/25 09:47, Jonas Lochmann wrote:
My goal is to use multiple uplinks, but not only for redundancy. Most of the time, all (in my case 2) uplinks are available and then the question is how to make use of both of them.
With IPv4, NAT is common and thus the solution is quite simple. In my case, I am using the mwan3 package from OpenWrt. It uses iptables rules to add firewall marks to connections. If multiple uplinks are available, then the mark/uplink is chosen randomly and assigned to this (e.g. TCP) connection. This firewalls marks are used during a policy based routing. With a masquerade/source NAT, the right source address for the used route is picked and everything just works.
In case of IPv6, everything is different. NAT is uncommon. One solution is to enable NAT and then everything works as with IPv4. Alternatively, RFC 8678 describes that clients can be informed about multiple uplinks. The limitation: I do not see any option for load balancing.
To put it bluntly, multi-router/multi-prefix is currently broken. This is not the first time someone raises/notes this, but this is probably the last instance of it: * URL: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-gont-v6ops-multi-ipv6-02.txt * HTMLized: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-gont-v6ops-multi-ipv6 (as noted, it's not just about the source address, but also about using the right combination of source DNS resolver, source address, and next hop). Once *that* problem was addressed. one might come up with something for load *sharing* (whether that's having hosts select the source address/prefix randomly (or other things being equal), or other options). In a lot of scenarios -- despite rather religious claims against that direction -- you may solve the problem as suggested doing NAT for IPv6. (particularly if this is one of the many problems you have on your table to solve, as is the case for many organizations)). Thanks, -- Fernando Gont SI6 Networks e-mail: fgont@si6networks.com PGP Fingerprint: F242 FF0E A804 AF81 EB10 2F07 7CA1 321D 663B B494