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Comment by bproctor | Hacker News Reader

Good point. I don't understand it very well, and haven't really spent a lot of time trying. When I need to get something going, I have the option of doing IPv4 only and being confident I've done it well. Or, also include a half-baked IPv6 solution that I don't fully understand and could have security holes and other problems. Since there's very little consequence for not implementing IPv6, it's hard to justify take that risk.

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Unless you're working on a really strange OS, for normal client software, v6 doesn't work any differently than v4. It's IP with a larger address space.

It's only when you get down to the level where you're doing things like acquiring an address [0] that you need to worry about the differences.

[0] Or -I guess- doing multi/broadcast. IPv6 substantially simplified broadcast. Send your packet to ff02::1 [1] to get the same functionality as IPv4 broadcast.

[1] http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-multicast-addresses/ipv...

This is a great comment and the kind of content that i think should be put in a single "fact sheet". I might give it a try and see if people find it useful...i have a 13 hour plane ride coming up, sounds like fun :(

> This is ... the kind of content that i think should be put in a single "fact sheet".

Things like that have been done before. [0] It seems to be difficult to get good Google juice. Perhaps your writeup will be the one that cuts through all of the SEOed clickbait and is the go-to guide for good IPv6 info. :)

However, don't let me discourage you from taking on the task! It's sure to be edifying... or -at least- something productive to do to while away that obscenely long plane ride.

Best of luck!

[0] http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/userapi-ipv6.html

Wow this is a great resource you've linked to, thanks! It's pretty long and probably a touch more than most people want/need to read, but it is very complete.

Unrelated, yeah Sydney to Toronto Canada (via SFO) terrible flight.

If you're setting up a network that might one day be connected to another network, or used via a VPN by users working from home, it's well worth using publicly routable addresses for it. It just makes all the routing setup so much easier.

If you have enough publicly routed IPv4 addresses to do that with IPv4 then then knock yourself out, but IPv6 ones are much cheayer.

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