Why you need IPv6

Bugger off! I am an IPv6 evangelist by the way but feel sold short and here&#x27;s why:<p>IPv6 out of the box is not able to safely cope with multiple links to the rest of the internet. For example, you have a 100MB leased line and four FTTC connections to your site - which I happen to have. Each of those links has a IPv6 prefix and for me those are all &#x2F;56. So far so good - I&#x27;ve got a <i>lot</i> of IPv6 addresses.<p>So, I use SLAAC to dole out five lots of addresses to my systems. There is no way for my systems to know which links are up or even to decide which ones would be favourite unless I turn everyone into a &quot;router lite&quot; via say OSPF. So I have to use my router to do that and use NPT to do NAT by another name.<p>IPv6 out of the box does not work properly with multiple links to the internet.<p>I really do feel quite ashamed when I say that I think IPv6 is badly broken. I deploy the bloody thing because its all we have. I remember that back in the seventies that this internet thing was touted as being able to route around problems due to nuclear attack. That was IPv4. Which is shit.<p>We have been sold out big style, several times. IPv6 can&#x27;t cope with multi link without NAT via a different name and telephony has no useful ENUM.<p>Your internet is not run by genial Engineers. It&#x27;s fucked up by entrenched monopolies, worldwide.

They evangelize for IPv6 ... and then they ask for money for a single &#x2F;64? Seriously?<p>I would suggest anyone who wants a tunnel should look here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tunnelbroker.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tunnelbroker.net&#x2F;</a><p>Nothing wrong with earning money, but please stop selling broken products.

I pretty much agree with the article. Seems like quite a few of the .com companies exist because consumers don&#x27;t have public IP&#x27;s. With IPv6 suddenly replacing various services are easy. Assuming you have a router, raspberry Pi, or other machine you leave on 24&#x2F;7.<p>After all seems like most end user use of the cloud could be replaced by a raspberry Pi. Things like file sharing via dropbox, webcams&#x2F;security cams, photo sharing&#x2F;browsing, internet enabled door locks and garage doors, and monitoring temperatures, furnace, AC, solar, power use,<p>Sure it&#x27;s a bit of work, but I suspect many would happily run things themselves if there was a community solution that did it well. Last thing anyone wants to do is replace their smarthone because a random vendor died, lost interest, or was purchased. Like say google killing off Revolv after they bought Nest. Not to mention paying even a few $ a month for an internet enabled lock is silly.

&gt; You want to expose services of your home network? You can fiddle around with NAT, hack some proxies and waste a lot of time and energy on this setup.<p>&gt; With IPv6, you can assign <i>every</i> device in your network a public IPv6 address and decide on your router &#x2F; firewall, which services to expose publicly.<p>Yeah, I used to think like this. Now I&#x27;m older and wiser (grumpier? lazier?) and because with great power comes great responsibility.. and everyone (including me) is running shitty router boxes instead of a perfectly tuned OpenBSD gateway... I think it would be really nice to have it but I&#x27;m not sold it will make the internet a safer place, instead it will expose all those IoT devices that can be wormed.<p>I also wanted to self-host stuff at home. Back when I had access to a basement (and no proper connection) running decent hardware was no problem, now in an apartment even a small silent NAS is annyoing enough already. Also I don&#x27;t have no high hopes the fiber market in Germany will improve to a point where I can reasonably assume to have more than 10&#x2F;20Mbit of upstream behind a static IP.<p>So yeah, this is a freedom for (from my PoV) a few percent of people, the rest won&#x27;t bother or it will actively cause problems because nobody understands IPv6 firewalling and stuff. (Not you, dear readers, the masses that are happy if their wifi at home works, at all).

My cable ISP added IPv6 some years ago and recently my router finally got stable IPv6 support, so I decided to give it a try.<p>My use-case was exactly what the article highlights, putting my RPi on the net exposing a service.<p>As I quickly found out DNS was required, as the IPv6 addresses were just impossible to remember. The prefix I got from the ISP was a far cry from the 2001::42 shown in various articles on IPv6.<p>Then I discovered the prefix wasn&#x27;t stable across cable modem reboots, and I used autoconfig on the RPi, so the suffix wasn&#x27;t stable either. So that meant I dynamic DNS was suddenly a required feature, not an optional thing.<p>After spending half a day trying and failing to find a dynamic DNS service which supported IPv6 and which supported a client I could successfully and reliably use on my RPi, I gave up and went back to plain old IPv4 and NAT.

The fact that every device in your network is given a publicly reachable IP address is not something to brag about. It’s a security problem.<p>I’ll stick to my NAT, thank you.