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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's a "just doesn't work" experience every time that I try it and I don't experience any value from it, it's not like there isn't anything I can connect to on IPv6 that I can't connect to on IPv4.

My ISP has finally mastered providing me with reliable albeit slow DSL. Fiber would change my life, there just isn't any point in asking for IPv6.

Also note those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.

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Exactly. Spectrum delivers good IPv6 service in my area. I tried it when I upgraded my gateway. All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs, hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP, and lots of random things don’t work.

I went from being pumped to learn more to realizing I’m going to invest a lot of time and I could not identify and tangible benefit.

The biggest tangible benefit is you don't need to worry about NAT port mapping any more. Every device can have a public address, and you can have multiple servers exposing services on the same port without a conflict.

(The flip side is having a network-level firewall is more important than ever.)

You also don't have to worry about running a DHCP server anymore, at least on small networks. The simplicity of SLAAC is a breath of fresh air, and removes DHCP as a single point of failure for a network.

Few people care about exposing a server in the first place, even fewer care about multiple servers on a single port.

So the benefit is that you dont need to worry about NAT for a couple of port forwarded services you may use (which might well even use UPnP for auto setup), but the tradeoff is you now need to think about full individual firewall protection for every device on your network?

I'll take full security by default and forward a couple of ports thankyou!

> All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs

Loopback, link local and network assigned. What's that problem? Your ipv4 hosts are can reach themselves through millions of addresses already.

> hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP

Hostnames replaced? IPv6 doesn't do DNS...

> lots of random things don’t work.

Lots of random things also don't work on ipv4. :)

You can maybe connect to everyone over IPv4, but chances are that that path is strictly worse (in terms of latency, P2P reachability, congestion et.c) than a v6 one would be.

For example, two IPv6 peers can often trivially reach each other even behind firewalls (using UDP hole punching). For NAT, having too restrictive a NAT gateway on either side can easily prevent reachability.

I have tailscale on all my mobile/portable devices I use away from home. It punches holes so I don't have to, even makes DNS work for my tailnet in a way I've never been able to get to work the way I want the normal way.

Yes, Tailscale is great, and it does manage to traverse pretty much every firewall or NAT in my experience as well. Quite often, it even does so using IPv6 :)

> those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.

Huh? The packet sizes aren’t that much different and VOIP is hardly a taxing application at this point anyway. VOIP needs barely over dial-up level bandwidth.

It's not the bandwidth it's the latency. Because of the latency you need to pack a small amount of data in VoIP packets so the extra header size of IPv6 stings more than it would for ordinary http traffic

https://www.nojitter.com/telecommunication-technology/ipv6-i...

I have a lot of trouble believing IPv6 matters here. Your link only talks about bandwidth (an extra 8kbps) and doesn’t even mention latency.

Edit: NAT also adds measurable latency. If anything I’d think avoiding NAT might actually make IPv6 lower latency than IPv4 on average.

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