Transcript
False meme image that says “bad news ipv4 fans. linus torvalds has announced removing ipv4 support from the linux kernel after the maintainers of the network stack got into a fight over WHAT KIND OF HRT gives the best results. this incident will impact 5 billion people and will make 95% of all network equipment on Earth binnable.” with fake screenshots of the linux kernel mailing list a girl calling another one a slur from 4chan over HRT choices and Linus Torvalds saying he will drop IPv4 support and asking the maintainers to learn to shut the fuck up.
Ipv4 is simpler and therefore easier for my brain to comprehend.
I deliberately disable IPv6 on all the devices on my home network because it’s really f**n annoying when some service tries to bind to localhost but picks up the IPv6 localhost instead of the IPv4 one
I’ve encountered way too many administrators and network admins who swear that “IPv6 does nothing but cause trouble” but the truth is, the trouble it’s causing is because you can’t half-implement IPv6. You either roll it out to the whole network or you don’t, and the longer you kick that can down the road the harder it’s going to be.
Basically too many professionals who haven’t learned a new technology since 2005 and refuse to try new things keep holding the world back
I will happily enable and use it once doing so doesn’t break any of my connectivity.
I’m not managing an enterprise network, it’s just my home, but my ISP doesn’t support IPv6 so that’s one extra layer of complexity right off the hop. On top of that internal services switch which previously required no manual configuration just seem to randomly not work.
IPv6 is not going to see widespread adoption unless it can be implemented completely transparently for the end user, full stop.
IPv6 is widely adopted
Can’t even attempt to learn it if my ISP won’t provide addresses though.
Not been able to use it to even try, but doesn’t IPv6 not have subnets at all? No 192.168.1.1 on your local network with a different public facing 85.136.52.142 (and with NAT444 you also have ISP facing 10.183.23.6). So does your ISP provide you a range of IPv6 addresses?
Correct, the ISP would assign you a /56 of public IPs that all share a prefix which you can slice and dice into however you see fit. All devices receive a publicly routable IP which your router/firewall would limit access to. So no running out of IPs ever, no network/IP collisions if you have to connect to another private network, etc.
Why can’t you just use it on your local network? Don’t need ISP for that.
Yes, your ISP provides you a large quantity of adresses. Not really, the adresses has several parts. Your ISP provides you with the prefix. Your devices complete the rest of the address automatically. You can also use a DHCPv6 server, but I don’t and some devices don’t support it anyway. Yes, all those adresses are globally routable, they are “Internet” adresses. You can still use locally routable adresses too if you want, called Unique local address (look it up on Wikipedia), but that requires manual configuration.
I don’t think unique local addresses require manual configuration. On linux at least, I get an
fe80::address derived from the interface’s MAC address even if there it can’t find any router. If the host receives a router advertisement, it will add a local address (the same suffix as the fe80 but with afd8b:something::/64)and the “internet”2003::.I’m not an expert and this may be just the configuration of my router, but all my linux installs automatically got these three addresses without manual configuration or issues.
That’s a link local address [0].
That’s a ULA [1]
This one is a globally routable address (Global Unicast Address, or GUA) [2].
As you observed, link-local addresses are generated completely independently. ULAs and GUAs are self-assigned using SLAAC or assigned by a server using DHCPv6 after your host has seen a router.
For a GUA or ULA to be assigned, the router or DHCP server has to have a prefix delegated to it. A GUA prefix would come from your ISP. A ULA prefix would be configured on the router itself. If yours has one without you setting it up, maybe it does that by default?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-local_address [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address [2] https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-unicast-address-assignments/ipv6-unicast-address-assignments.xhtml
Yeah, I guess my router just decided on an ULA prefix on its own. Thank you for providing the right terminology and explaining how a host gets these addresses.
You are confusing unique local adresses and link local addresses. Unique local adresses can only be configured manually or, in theory, with DHCPv6. On Debian, I edit the file “/etc/network/interfaces.d/<interface name>”:
This gives you: autoconfigured IPv4 address, autoconfigured (slaac) IPv6 address, an IPv6 unique local address, temporary IPv6 adresses (privacy extensions) and your IPv6 link local address.
That’s SLAAC not a ULA
I don’t even have an ipv6 address, my ISP doesn’t provide them yet. Not much to do about it then lol.
You can maybe change ISP
If it ain’t broke…
I always bring it up when the network is experiencing problems that they wouldn’t have with IPv6. Running out of IPs in a given scope, increasing costs of public IPs, etc.
Imagine arguing that ‘solutions’ like NAT444 isn’t broke as fuck
“IPv4 is running out of IP addresses so therefore every local network needs to move to IPv6” is a full clown move.
IPv6 is literally designed to solve the scalability issues with IPv6
First of all, enterprises usually have at least one public IP (the one I work at right now has more public IPs than they have server VMs)
Secondly enterprises have big enough and complex enough networks to see other benefits of IPv6. For example IPv4 has some problems when broadcast domains are too large, so your internal network sizes are artificially limited when following best practices. Without private networks you don’t have to worry about IP collisions between different private networks that you have to route between (comes up more than you’d think!) etc etc.
IPv4 is very much not simpler. You just as used to it.
Just remembering an address alone is much simpler.
4 numbers > a combination of numbers and letters in 8 groups
In a local network there is no point in using ipv6.
It is interesting when you run out of ip addresses for the amount of devices you have.
So in the open Internet.
Unless I am missing something.
Why not? It’s as easy as ipv4
A couple of things that IPv6 does better for local networks is link local addressing (fe80::). and multicasting.
In IPv4, they kind of hacked something out of 169.254, but if you have more than one NIC, it pretty much becomes useless.
If you have a service designed explicitly never to be accessed over a router, then you can live in fe80:: a lot more easily than trying to do the same thing with 169.254.