Context:
People have been asking for IPv6 Support on GitHub since years (probably a decade by now)
… and someone even got so annoyed that they decided to setup a dedicated website for checking this: https://isgithubipv6.live/
Working in computing for years and this is what I’ve heard
2000: IPv4 is about to dry up, we really need to start moving to v6!
2005: OH NO THE SKY IS FALLING IPv4 IS ALMOST GONE! IPv6 IN THE NEXT YEAR OR TWO OR THE INTERNET WILL DIE!
2010: WE’RE SERIOUS THIS TIME IPv6 NEEDS TO BE A THING RIGHT NOW! HELP!
2015: Yeah, okay, NAT has served us well so far, but we can only take it so far, we really need v6 to be the standard in the next 5-10 years or we’re in trouble!
2020: Um… guys? IPv6? Hello? Anyone? crickets
2024: IPv6ers are now the vegans of networking
this may or may not be satire, just laugh if unsure
But new IPv4 allocations have run out. I’ve seen ISPs that won the lottery in the 90s/2000s (when the various agencies controlling IP allocations just tossed them around like they were nothing) selling large blocks for big money.
Many ISPs offer only CGNAT, require signing up to the higher speed/more expensive packages to get a real IP, or charge extra on top of the standard package for one. I fully expect this trend to continue.
The non-move to IPv6 is laziness, incompetence, or the sheer fact they can monetize the finite resource of IPv4 addresses and pass the costs onto the consumer. I wonder which it is.
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I’m not using it because by and large it’s not implemented properly on consumer hardware, and my ISP doesn’t care if their IPv6 network is broken.
I’ve tried multiple times to go IP6 only. I mostly thought, despite my reasonable understanding of IP4, that I was the problem in trying to set it up. I found my dns host was being forgotten multiple times a day, set to something invalid, then it would time out and revert back to the working one. I couldn’t figure out how to connect two computers together for Minecraft.
Now I hear it was just garbage consumer hardware and software? Fuck me. So much wasted time and effort to say nothing of believing I had turned into a tech idiot.
You’re not an idiot. You’re using tools that don’t really do what they claim because it wasn’t considered an important use case.
IPv6 is great, but we haven’t seen enough pain yet to really drive adoption on the home LAN.
My solution uses the ISP box to deliver stateless auto conf, and bridging a consumer router. I can’t open ports but at least I get an IP.
Why should we care? So address space may run out eventually - that’s our ISPs’ problem.
Other than that I actually don’t like every device to have a globally unique address - makes tracking even easier than fingerprinting.
That’s also why my VPN provider recommends to disable IPv6 since they don’t support it.
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You’d better hope that you can NAT ipv6 because if you aren’t behind a CGNAT and then your LAN is completely exposed without a NAT you’re very likely going to have devices exploited.
NATs on people’s boundary has been doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting for everyone’s security at home.
The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.
NAT does not provide security whatsoever. If the NAT mapped your (internal IP, internal port) to a certain (external IP, external port) and you do not have a firewall enabled, everyone can reach your device by simply connecting to that (external IP, external port).
I haven’t seen routers that do not come with IPv6 firewalls enabled by default.
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