IPv6 support for Transfer Family servers - Amazon Transfer Family
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IPv6 support for Transfer Family servers

Amazon Transfer Family supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints for the following resources:

  • SFTP public endpoints

  • SFTP/FTPS/FTP VPC internal endpoints

  • API endpoints

With dual-stack support, your Transfer Family endpoints can communicate with both IPv4 and IPv6 enabled clients. This enables you to gradually transition from IPv4 to IPv6 based systems without needing to switch all at once, meet IPv6 compliance requirements, and remove the need for expensive networking equipment to handle address translation between IPv4 and IPv6. For details, see DNS and Endpoints in the Amazon Transfer Family API Reference. For a complete list of available endpoints, see Amazon Transfer Family endpoints and quotas in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.

IPv6 limitations

The following Transfer Family resources do not currently support IPv6:

  • VPC-Internet endpoints

  • Web apps

  • VPC_ENDPOINT endpoint type (deprecated)

The FTPS protocol supports the PASV and EPSV commands for requesting an open data port for file listing, getting, and putting operations. However, PASV doesn't work with IPv6 because it requires an IPv4-specific response. EPSV continues to work because it returns only port information.

To use FTPS, we recommend one of the following:

  • Configure your FTPS client to use EPSV

  • Use IPv4 instead of IPv6

SFTP supports both IPv4 and IPv6. We recommend using SFTP instead of FTPS when working with dual-stack endpoints.

Configuring IPv6 for servers

When creating a new server or updating an existing server, you can choose the IP address type:

  • IPv4 (default): For backwards compatibility, the server will only accept IPv4 connections.

  • Dual-stack: The server will accept both IPv4 and IPv6 connections.

To update an existing server's IP address type:

  1. Stop the server.

  2. Edit the endpoint details.

  3. Change the IP address type to Dual-stack.

  4. Start the server.

Note

For VPC-Internet endpoints, dual-stack mode is not currently supported.