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Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

> how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)?

Under IPv6, won't customers just need a hub or a switch? Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP, completely eliminating the need for home routers. Of course, devices still needing IPv4 would need some other solution.

Of course, that doesn't come without a tradeoff (as mentioned in the submission). Those IPv6 devices will need to be aware that they are connected to the Internet at large, and security will need to be addressed accordingly.

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> Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP

No thanks, because unscrupulous ISPs will then start to charge people per device connected. It isn't (or shouldn't be) any of my ISP's business how many devices I have connected, any more than the high-level meaning of the bits I transfer is their business. Their business is to move bits.

Well yeah, you'd have to buy IPs in blocks of, say 100. If you don't buy them from an ISP, you'd have to buy them from your local RIR in /48 blocks!

Some parts of the world have competition. So this issue shouldn't stop us globally from getting rid of routers at home.

The plan is to still have home routers in IPv6 because the ISP will assign a prefix to each customer, and the customer's router will route between their prefix and the ISP. Here's the spec: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-cpe-router-... It's going to become an RFC soon and then people can start complaining that vendors don't support it.

I think that's specifically why people will still be using routers. Nowadays, most single computers still are sitting behind routers, despite the fact that they don't actually "need" to, specifically for the firewall protection. It's a lot easier to plug into a router and forget it than it is to have to deal with setting up a firewall every time you reinstall your OS.

If we're talking about a box that primarily performs firewalling, let's call it a "firewall" instead of a "router". (Although as I said above, routing is still necessary in IPv6.)

It's still a router. It just doesn't do NAT.

FWIW, NAT is typically done by the firewalling code, whereas routing is done in separate code.

So "router" is always correct, but "firewall" does not always apply

I'd much prefer that noone calls any piece of software a 'firewall' ever again. It's been over-applied to the point of meaninglessness.

Your vision for a migration to IPv6 involves everyone getting a new home access point, so that devices can autoconfigure from their ISP instead of from the Linksys box in the living room?

"Security will need to be addressed accordingly." You say that as if it were a small thing. Indeed, as if it were a thing with a known solution. In reality this "security" issue of consumer pcs directly on the internet is a bigger problem than v4 address exhaustion. Today it is perhaps a multi-billion dollar a year problem due to worms, viruses, botnets, ddos, etc. Intentionally making the problem worse is a recipe for catastrophe.

People will still need routers to serve as wireless access points, since the vast majority of web connected devices are connected via WiFi.

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