Apologies if this would be more suitable for IETF v6ops rather than IPv6-WG, I'm not overly familiar with the v6 development community. As is painfully apparent, most of the world if v4 only at the moment - and the various DNS ALGs etc for getting v4 connectivity onto v6 only connections seem "hackish" at best, and have real problems when it comes to things such as 1500-byte v4 packets needing fragmenting to travel over v6 nets. While playing with my local ssh daemon, I was reminded that inside my ssh client is a SOCKS5 server - I can connect to it by just setting my global SOCKS setting to use the localhost and all the traffic is forwarded down the tunnel to the remote host for processing. I was wondering whether anyone had any experience in setting a SOCKS proxy on a v6-only host, where the DNS/SOCKS proxies have both v4 and v6 addressing, and whether they can then access v4 services like web sites, mail servers, gaming applications etc. The basic idea is that you would use the v6 internet where possible, and go through your ISPs v4 SOCKS gateway for anything that didn't return a AAAA record. Is that idea right, and if so, is it sustainable? Assuming for the moment that I've made a correct assumption, is there a way we can make the process easier? Back in v4 world, there's DHCP option 252 which allows you to configure a WPAD file that would be downloaded and parsed by your web browser, setting HTTP proxies etc for certain classes of service - non-local traffic etc. Is it feasible to add an option to DHCPv6 so that a "v4 compatibility" string could be set, whereby a fall-back SOCKS server is used for non-v6 connections? Thinking off the top of my head, it would work as follows for the "no-clue" home user: User's router talks to ISP via DHCPv6: gets response detailing address to use also gets prefix delegation for local LAN usage also gets v4 compatibility string, which it stores for relaying to clients User's router listens for DHCPv6 requests, issues clients on local LAN public v6 addresses: sets option for v4-compatibility for clients User's computer turns on, asks for addressing information: gets v6 address via DHCPv6 gets v4-compatibility string and sets global SOCKS proxy variable, if not manually configured gets other string - DNS servers, routes etc. I stress that this idea is for v6/v4 co-existence, and isn't designed for "islands of v4" or "islands of v6", it would of course assume that v4 availability is restricted and a real effort to move to v6 was made. It's a transition mechanism that should be easy to turn off once most of the services have been migrated (hopefully transparently to the end customer). If there is a major flaw in my idea, I'd greatly appreciate constructive criticism and feedback! Matthew Walster