Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity

After all these years I still don’t see a compelling reason to spend days pulling my hair out switching all my machines and home lab to ipv6. I just find port forwarding and firewall rules more intuitive vs the prospect of spending weeks troubleshooting everything, reconfiguring firewalls, renunbering my network.

What am I missing?

You're missing that it's not that difficult. Unless you have a very complicated home network, setting up IPv6 should take you an evening tops. For my network and my ISP (Comcast), it's literally just turn on IPv6 in the router, it will pick up a prefix from the ISP and advertise it locally, then I add a firewall rule for whatever I want to be accessible from outside (which isn't much).

Nothing. In the enterprise world the benefits vs the negatives of implanting ipv6 is not there. I manage around 3500 devices, 7 buildings and have 2 ten gig wan connections and one 4 gig wan connection and use NAT along with about 26 public ipv4 addresses.

To this day I have no compelling reason to adopt ipv6. Dual stack setup adds unnecessary traffic and complexity for little advantage.

To this day it is still hard to get assigned a block of static ipv6 addresses, have applied twice and been denied.

So not only is there little upside it is also still hard to even get allocated a block.

https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/

“Step 1: Verify You Qualify If you meet any of the criteria below, you qualify to receive IPv6 address space:

Have an IPv4 assignment from ARIN or one of its predecessors Intend to immediately be IPv6 multi-homed Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year Use 2,000 IPv6 addresses within one year Use 200 /64 subnets within one year“

> What am I missing?

Right now, nothing major. At some point the big companies (Google, cloud flare, etc) may very well tire of having to pay more and more for ipv4 address that they may provide incentives for IPv6 (eg they could start throttling IPv4). There are some early moves going on already here. AWS used to only charge for unused IPv4 elastic IP addresses and now charge for them regardless of their use.

Honestly, the next time you upgrade your gateway/router you may as well set it up to be ready, but you're otherwise not missing anything right now. You can also use IPv4/v6 at the same time. You can enable it on your router and your IPv4-only devices will still work perfectly fine. One note, auto-discovery on IPv6 was a bit of a shitshow (SLAAC, IPv6 auto-addressing, and DHCPv6 all were a thing and the original auto-addressing didn't even support getting DNS servers), but things are settling on SLAAC (though ISPs will be using dhcpv6 for a loooong time).

The problem goes way back to the IPng days. With the project being designed by a committee who would choose random hills to die on, wasn't adaptive to new needs and used sticks more than carrots.

Some of those have been changed but typically after trying to implement it broke so many things that people just quit trying.

Some were well intended like the 'no NAT' in the days of FTP and before reverse proxies etc.

Others were intentional pain points to for adoption like when resolvers were not permitted to return A and forced to return AAAA records even when you ISP didn't support IPv6 etc...

Mix in problems like the max prefix size being too large for scanning a local network space to be practical etc... and people have been trained for decades that the pain is worse than any benefits.

Yes, today it isn't hard on small home networks where IPX will an IP gateway would also work fine, but things break as things get more complex.

Somewhere someone probably has a copy of the mail lists where I pointed out in around ~1996 that forcing globally unique IPs was a leaky abstraction and that there was more nuances and tradeoffs that needed to be considered.

It was obvious to me because I was stuck on a Altavisa firewall, but I was roasted.

On the IPv4 side, user needs were addressed through CIDR, carrier grade NAT, FTP passive connections etc...

I still tried to move companies to IPv6 a few more times and was bitten ever time.

Almost every time it was due to arbitrary global decisions, when they should have been focused on maintaining good will and making adoption as easy as possible.

The effort depended on a collition of the willing, and just changing 'must' to 'should' in key RFCs would have dramatically improved the chances of adoption.

I am actually glad you have an ISP that allows you to even do this, mine still does not.