Cloudflare tunnel for IPv6 only connectivity

Cloudflare offers a powerful tunneling service that allows for a host on a private network to expose a service but retain protection using cloudflares’ powerful CDN tools. At the time of this post that service is a legacy IP first service, but with one minor tweak it can operate with IPv6-only hosts. Meaning one can provision an IPv6-only host, but provide a dual stacked service. If that sounds powerful, that’s because it is.

Building a host telemetry solution using Tailscale

An often overlooked dimension of data collection is flow data from hosts. This is not a new concept, there have been tools built for this for a very long time, but in many cases, and especially over the last 8-10 years, many system engineers have gravitated toward tooling like grafana and prometheus. While these are fine tools and if done well provide an excellent view of host health, they aren’t really a full picture of host behavior.

Developing and publishing a new IPv6 documentation prefix

One of the reasons for lack of blog post publishing is that my attention has been focused fairly heavily on working within the IETF. Toward the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the US Government published a new initiative - M-21-07, which requires the migration of all federally owned systems to IPv6-only. What does “IPv6-only” mean, you may ask. Well, that’s kinda nebulous. People define it in varying levels of extremism, I’ve chosen to define it as “a device that can operate without the use of IPv4 configured”.