mailcow repo to a provider who supports ipv6

ptlawrence

Hi, is there any chance you would consider moving the source code to a different provider than GitHub? I am trying to use mailcow in an ipv6-only environment, and it seems that github.com doesn’t work with ipv6. You can try this with a DNS lookup on its AAAA record:
nslookup -type=AAAA github.com

AWS is beginning to charge early next year for ipv4 addresses, so I’d like to move into ipv6 networking. GitHub is apparently in no hurry to convert.

Thanks.

mlcwuser

ptlawrence I am trying to use mailcow in an ipv6-only environment,

I don’t think that’s a good idea, because I’m pretty sure there are still many IPv4-only email servers out there.

ptlawrence AWS is beginning to charge early next year for ipv4 addresses, so I’d like to move into ipv6 networking

Maybe this is of any help: https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/let-your-ipv6-only-workloads-connect-to-ipv4-services/

I’m not an AWS expert, but I assume this works similar to CGNAT, so it’s probably not suitable for running a mail server, which ideally should also be able to exchange emails with IPv4-only servers. But I’m confident that it will at least allow you to clone the mailcow-dockerized folder from GitHub to your IPv6-only AWS instance.

ptlawrence

Thanks @mlcwuser. I’ll give those aws instructions a try when I’m out of bed later, and more conscious! For what it’s worth, mailcow seems to be functioning fine in the ipv6 environment with the exception of the upgrade.sh script. When I run that, it gets into trouble resolving the GitHub.com address, as I mentioned. I will admit, though, that I haven’t tried sending an email to an ipv4 mail server. I imagine that would fail without the aws translation in place.

mlcwuser

ptlawrence I imagine that would fail without the aws translation in place.

Yep that would definitely fail.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how the AWS NAT64 translation works, but I can imagine that it isn’t suitable for running a mail server. Your server needs a dedicated public IPv4 address with a corresponding reverse DNS (PTR) record in order to be able to exchange email with other mail servers over IPv4. Otherwise, the receiving server would most likely reject your emails, or at least classify them as spam.

You could of course use an external mail relay service, or maybe Amazon itself offers a solution, but I doubt that such a solution would be cheaper than simply adding an IPv4 address to your AWS instance. As I said, I’m not familiar with AWS, but Hetzner, for example, charges only 0.00086 €/h for an IPv4 address.

ptlawrence

Yes, AWS is going to charge $0.005/hr for using each public ipv4 address. That’s about $3.60 per month, which is more than I’d like to pay. Sigh.

Baspar

I’m in the same boat as you, and if it can make things easier, AWS states that The AWS Free Tier for EC2 will include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, effective February 1, 2024.
(See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/).
Hopefully by February 2025, the landscape will be better for ipv6 only mail server

DocFraggle

In the meantime you could create a free GitLab account, sync the mailcow repo there and change the repo location of your mailcow to your synced GitLab repo, as GitLab has an IPv6 address

boppy

Github and ipv6 is indeed a pain in the bottom… If you have any infrastructure that talks both, you could build yourself a proxy using nginx.

Config (in a stream {} context) would be as simple as

server {
    listen [::]:2000; # only allow ipv6
    proxy_pass 140.82.121.4:22; # forward to ipv4 of github.com
}

Then add a global URI replacement for git:

git config --global url."ssh://git@githubv6.example.com:2000/".insteadOf "git@github.com:"

(where githubv6.example.com has an AAAA-Record for your IPv6…)

I can confirm that working. You can also replace the domain name in the copied clone-string before each clone…