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The IPv6 Transition

potaroo.net

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Re: The IPv6 Transition

#51
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world of being told what to do was not the "dream" of freedom for the internet. If you want the government to mandate standards, vote with your feet and move to China where it has been mandated. I thought the point of the article is that perhaps IPv6 is ultimately unnecessary: worse is better? Why are we engineers so attracted to authoritarianism? The idea of just telling everyone to use the new version seems attra…

Agreeing on a common standard is not authoritarianism.

You said "government-mandated" - do you think your words matter?

That doesn't sound like agreement.

Agreement is how we have arrived at the imperfect solution we have now... Agreement between various technical and non-technical parties.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#52
In spite of its wider adoption issues, it's valuable for my personal infrastructure: each of my services/machine has an IPv6 globally routable address.

Why bother, when I could just do TLS SNI reverse proxying via nginx?

* Some services don't use TLS, or even TCP.

* A reverse proxy is yet another intermediary in the chain.

* Plain IPv6 routing is simpler than reverse proxying, and I already need a network layer anyway.

There are downsides:

* some software doesn't support IPv6. I haven't experienced this on the Linux servers I run.

* in a dual stack network, now you have two networks! I use NAT64/PREF64 like https://labs.ripe.net/author/ondrej_caletka_1/deploying-ipv6... to have most clients only be on IPv6. They get IPv4 connectivity over IPv6 via NAT64.

* If I'm in another country then I often don't have IPv6 connectivity. In this case I use any VPN that offers IPv6 (and have one available via my home, via Wireguard).

* Learning IPv6 takes time, but not much. It's one-off. It's not more complex than IPv4, but it is different. If anything, it's simpler. (SLAAC rather than DHCPv4; IP reachability rather than NAT/port forwarding).

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#53

The internet stopped being a network of peers where everyone needed an address and is now a split into producers (a handful of large companies) and consumers (everyone else). The consumers are not expected to need a public address where they can be reached - in fact, having a public address is actually a security and privacy risk.

That was in fact one of the promises of IPv6: Restore the network of peers where every host is in principle a server and a client and communication between peers is unhindered unless a policy is enforced saying otherwise (on the machine, on a firewall, etc.).

> having a public address is actually a security and privacy risk.

Services can be turned off or a firewall instructed not to pass traffic from the internet (by default). That represents exactly the same attack surface as having a service enabled and nobody being able to get to it from the internet because of NAT.

The privacy risk is mitigated by RFC4941 "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6". Granted that does not deal with the (delegated) prefix staying the same and when there are only one or very few users in that prefix, some individual behavior could be inferred. Because of that at least in Germany we have the peculiar horror of getting the IPv6 address and all delegated prefixes changed on every redial. That eliminates all privacy concerns while also continuing to make residential internet connections useless for hosting any services.

Anyway. The internet is already way down the road of functioning only as the delivery conduit for a few cloud / service providers mediating all user communication and access to content.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time has not been kind to this article. It's basically a compete list of fallacies that people believe about ipv6.

Oh, is IPv6 now backwards compatible with IPv4? No? I guess not a complete list of fallacies.

I can route to v4 endpoints on my v6-only network just fine. Shrugs

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#55

These charts that show IPv6 adoption really don't mean shit. The thing is: every single device out there isn't being used directly by a human bean (and a real hero.) They include things like sensors, smart lights, fridges, washing machines, a huge huge number of mobile devices, company networks, ... apparently even tooth brushes? Look at another sector and the story is ((quite horrible.)) I'm talking a regular fixed…

What’s funny is the last consumer router I bought had the opposite problem. It had a ridiculously low limit on DHCP leases, something like 32 devices. And one time, IPv4 routing just crashed completely and I had to reboot it. Meanwhile IPv6 was always rock stable. The crash was a weird one to debug at first since so many online properties work with IPv6, at first I blamed DNS

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#56

I have fully implemented IPv6 in my home network. I have even implemented an IPv6-Only network. It fully works, including accessing IPv4 only websites like github.com via DNS64 and NAT64 at my router. The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6. Other than this one use case,…

> I have even implemented an IPv6-Only network. It fully works, including accessing IPv4 only websites like github.com via DNS64 and NAT64 at my router.

What did you use to implement that? I found it surprisingly difficult to find software to do NAT64 on Linux.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#57

I've mentioned this previously. Without government-mandated standards, implementation could take years. We apply this approach to numerous areas; why should IP be an exception?

The DoD mandated v6 a few years back. The US government could easily dictate that all of their supplied software had to support it.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany, Vodafone. They support it, so I could get v6, but chances are that that'll switch me to CGNAT for v4, so I'm not willing to risk it.

Weird that you have to do an extra step for IPv6. Other ISPs in Germany have enabled it for every customer at some point. Unless your router asks for IPv6 addresses, nothing really changes anyway. So maybe just enable IPv6 on your router and see what happens? On a side note, there seem to be ways to get out of CGNAT when you got condemned to use it: It is sometimes an annoying source for client VPN instabilities and…

No, I have to ask customer service to enable it, my EdgeRouter X supports IPv6.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#59

I have fully implemented IPv6 in my home network. I have even implemented an IPv6-Only network. It fully works, including accessing IPv4 only websites like github.com via DNS64 and NAT64 at my router. The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6. Other than this one use case,…

I had to reluctantly deploy ipv6 on my home network because of ISP requirements + will to use pihole. Ipv6 is hard. I had to learn quite a bit to make it work and not only I see no value, but it is significantly more difficult to use dire to the address length. I think IPv6 is a missed opportunity, it was probably designed by experts that did not take into account the population that will use it (not the one users wh…

I struggled to get IPv6 running on my home network, then had issues with DNS dual stack once I got it going, so I turned it off.

That said, I think the difficulty of IPv6 is in the UI of the home routers that implement it, and a lack of sane defaults.

The ISP should give every SOHO/residential customer a /60. The router of a simple IPv6 should do prefix delegation. The router should default to SLAAC for local IP addresses, and configuring DNS with Router Advertisements. And residential routers can be set up to have an internal DNS server which populates the ".internal" domain with hostnames from the network.

As a network admin, you have to learn new things like the uses of IPv6 multicast, and ND, the lack of ARP, and some other things. Home users shouldn't have to care about that.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#60
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market price is only something like 5 or 10 dollars a month, but anyone having to pay that to be accessible is an embarrassing failure of the system . It doesn't matter whether it's a big dent in the number of IPs or not.

There are billions of people out there who can access the internet, and make themselves accessible through the internet the way they want, just fine without a dedicated IP address. Maybe you have a definition of "access" that is different from the usual one. That's fine, but let's be honest, it's not the usual definition.

Someone being able to connect to their device is the definition I use. What's your definition?

Being able to relay through a third party is a different thing.

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