Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I can't see any advantages at all. I deployed it at home and in a few networks my company runs. We had nothing but stupid issues and zero benefit, and I was looking for them.

Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs had no idea which one they should be using.

I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved. If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability, probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off except for a few networks that just provide client internet.

View on HN

There are many advantages. I listed some in a reply to another comment.

It is like carrying a Swiss Army knife in your pocket. Until you start it seems like you’d never need it. Once you do, you won’t live without it.

It's more like carrying an overly complex Swiss Army knife that somewhere has a knife function, but that knife function doesn't intuitively work like a regular knife and has all kinds of weird failure modes and edge cases, when all you want is to slice an apple.

IPv6 is in most ways simpler than IPv4. There are a couple of gotchas but honestly all you really need to do to see this look at the IPv4 and IPv6 packet header structures to see that they difference is minimal and IPv6 has less room for complexity. You lose NAT (it is possible but nobody really does it), your TTL is now just a hop count, the netmasks are more or less like the old IPv4 class networks instead of the classless setup we use today. Each network gets a minimum of /64 (that is 4 billion squared addresses), and you actually have proper and functional link local networking.

But yes it uses colons instead of dots. Sorry about that.

I set up IPv6 at home and realized every single device in my house got a globally routable IP by default and was confused for a second.

Oh! This is how the Internet was supposed to be!

Remember, we only even bother with NAT bullshit in the first place because there aren't enough IPv4 addresses.

The difference between "has a routable IP" and "this should be routed" is exactly the problem for 99% of the population.

I'm not saying NAT is a good thing but at least it's one more thing from preventing network shares of everyone's pictures on shodan. I'm also not saying it's a good protection, but it's not zero.

Maybe if ipv6 had been the default since the beginning, then OSes and default configs would have been written in a better way.

I really don't see why we wouldn't end up in a world where home routers had a firewall by default and the user (or their agents) would open up ports as necessary.

Still like NAT, but better.

You're talking about v4, right? Because that's the one that works weirdly and has weird failure modes and edge cases. You've gotten so used to dealing with the weirdness that you struggle to even see it, but that doesn't mean that it's not there or that there's no value in removing the need for it.

Is there a good resource for newbs in small-midsized networks you can recommend?

The company stuff is super-simple, but my home is as you described in the other comment -- i'm getting into large counts of IoT and other devices.

I would start with the Tunnel Broker tutorial/certification process.

A lot of cheap IoT WiFi devices do not have IPv6 support but pretty much anything to do with ESP32 or even ESP8266 does have that support now. Ping me if you want to talk more about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com