Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

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stingraycharles

Definitely not a pain for a LAN. Case in point: navigating to your router’s web interface. Very easy to do with IPv4 to do, a pain with IPv6.

As my home router only supports stateless auto configuration, it’s an additional friction point to have stable addresses. Oh, and since the /56 is assigned by my ISP, it sometimes changes, so I can’t just rely on addresses being stable.

I’m not saying that IPv6 is necessarily bad — we _need_ the extra address space! - but it definitely requires a different way of working and I haven’t completely cracked that nut myself yet. I’m almost at the point that I’m just considering using NAT with IPv6, but I fear the IP gods will spell an evil curse on me if I dare to do that.

Any decent network stack supports mDNS and you don't need to enter an ip address to access your gateway or any other hosts in your lan.

I don't even know what's my workstation's IPv4 address. I just connect to desktop.local and my NAS with nas.local

Link-local addresses are what you want, and “fixed” endings or whatever they’re called - so the router is always ::1 for example.

Or just have IPv4 on the LAN.

Aren’t link-local only applicable to a single switch, rather than a more involved LAN with several subnets and routers and whatnot?

It is - but if you have multiple subnets on your local lan you should have local DNS or similar (or know prefix:1::1 is the router, etc).

But in that case, that is considerably more difficult than just IPv4, as I now need to remember the prefix. Which isn’t stable, as it’s often reassigned by my ISP.

Are ISPs really doing dynamic IPs for v6? That seems incredibly silly.

They usually “do” but very long lived - every time my modem died I got a new prefix. Lightning.

So routers should inject DNS for LAN devices, that's how mine is set up. Admittedly it can be a small pain with some browsers defaulting to DNS over HTTPS and bypassing the router's DNS, but that's pretty recent and fixable.

I go to `router.localnet`, not some IP I have to remember.

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