I had IPv6 enabled for a few months but eventually turned it off since I wasn't confident I had configured my home network securely. When I tried asking for help, I was criticized and told that I should just read the RFCs...<p>Does anyone have suggestions for a beginner friendly home networking guide? How are others setting up their home network?<p>It's also a bit frustrating to me that routers provide so many options, yet it seems nigh impossible to find clear explanations of what different features mean, along with clear examples of use-cases of when I might want to enable or disable said features. I'll typically keep the defaults if I'm not as familiarized with a subject matter, but if experience has shown anything it's that most system's defaults are typically not designed with security as the top priority.<p>Can't say I saw any benefits during my brief IPv6 trial. First of all, typing out an IPv6 address is rather tedious. Second, I wasn't able to get a URL with an IPv6 address as the host to work with my browser. Maybe I had to include a scope, or perhaps I screwed something else up. I have no clue.
There's something to be said for aesthetics when it comes to anything human. IPv6 appears far more complex than the traditional 4 octets and its an immediate turn-off especially to those (most) who don't know that octal and hexadecimal are just different ways of representing the same thing. If they simply would have extended IPv4 to 8 octets (64 bits) I think that would have been a better middle ground solution from an intuitive standpoint. 128bit addressing is overkill and I doubt we will still be using the Internet Protocol if 2^128 (3.4X10^38) devices are ever online.
What irked me about IPv6 was extension headers. At first they sound like a great idea. It is very flexible to chain headers. However, hardware engineers <i>hate</i> them, because the number of IPv6 extension headers is potentially unbounded, leading to all kinds of "interesting" corner cases in networking hardware. So they end up not being supported in hardware, which means the either don't work at all, or they kick into a slow firmware exception path. I would not be surprised if there is eventually a DOS attack against IPv6 enabled gear using extension headers.
In my case it’s largely “I tried and it didn’t work so I gave up because I didn’t know nor care enough to figure out why”.<p>At this point it seems to me it’s more of a nice to have than a requirement.
For me, the turn off was that any ipv6 connection on Linux was ALWAYS slow as hell to resolve, often leading to timeouts. Tore my hair out for ages, only to discover after much frustration and searching online that the solution was as simple as disabling the kernel's ipv6 module.<p>With ipv4, never had a problem.
For the first three times I enabled IPv6 on my home network, it broke at least one functionality (typically, something involving apple and streaming).<p>More recently, I enabled IPv6 and everything Just Worked. Now I want to turn off IPv4...
Maybe it would be good to develop IPv5: just add another octet or two to IPv4 addresses, without the all the added complexity and overengineering that made the IPv6 rollout & adoption the failure that it is?