The IPv6 Transition

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, IPv6 does nothing for me.

It doesn't work from most hotels, nor from my work lan, nor many other places because most "managed" networks are IPv4 only. It works better at Cafes because they are "unmanaged" and IPv6 is enabled by the most common ISPs, like ATT and Comcast and their provided routers.

Based on this experience, I think IPv6 is less valuable than us HN audience thinks it is. Private networks, NAT, Carrier Grade NAT are good enough, and internet really doesn't care about being completely peer-to-peer.

I think the adoption rate reflects this--it's a linear growth curve over the last 25 years. It should have been exponential.

I think cost of IPv4 reflects this--it is now below the peak, and has leveled off.

As surprising as it seems, IPv4 exhaustion has not been a serious problem. Internet marches on. IPv6 is still a solution looking for a problem, and IPv4 exhaustion wasn't one of them.

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 who do not care, but the layer above them)

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.

Sorry, but under no circumstances should an ISP router auto route internal computers from the network. Thats just going to expose so many internal services, most consumers wouldn't even know they were running in the first place.

If we are to have a transition to IPv6, and I am very much in favour of this, then by all means make the addresses be globally routable, but force people to select the ports and addresses to be shared in their router. Otherwise we end up with another mess ala "open wifi".