Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

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> There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP.

My ISP isn't handing out static IPv4 nor IPv6. However IPv4 works just fine while for IPv6 it's a giant pain.

The world isn't static though, so maybe IPv6 is the problem here? Or do you seriously suggest I should manually change all my device IPs just because I switched ISP? Why should I care about which prefix I get?

> In my opinion, DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, but we've managed to staple some kind of management ideals on top of it (as if someone couldn't just set a static IP on their device)

Even for my puny LAN I've managed to create address conflicts when doing static IP assignments. If I need to keep track of my devices in an Excel sheet, why not just use the DHCP server? I need something ala the DHCP server to hand out DNS and NTP servers etc anyway.

> when people encounter IPv6 in the real world they're scared and confused by concepts

When I went to school and learned about IPv4, IPv6 was just getting started. I'm not scared. Slightly confused yes, it's a non-trivial change from IPv4 after all. But the main issue is missing support, from hardware to software to ISP's.

Why would you care what address your PC is using ? If your ISP gives you an other IPv6 assignment your router should just advertise that and your PC will use it. You wouldn't even notice. If your router doesn't do that is has a bad IPv6 implementation. The protocol itself is perfectly fine for that. That is one of the big stumbling blocks for IPv6: bad implementations in networking equipment.

Causing a conflict in your LAN with address is a problem of IPv4 and the tiny address space it has. It forces you to keep a tight administration and use a bolt on address space management technology like DHCP. IPv6 does not have that problem and you'll have a service less to run.

Indeed, it's not trivial. Many parties will have to do something. I hope they'll get more motivated as the price for IPv4 addresses rises even further. When CGNAT solutions get starved of socket space and adding extra IPv4 addresses gets prohibitively expensive maybe IPv4 will get so slow and unreliable people will give up on it.

The graph of IPv4 address space pricing gives some hope: https://postimg.cc/QKKx847B

> Why would you care what address your PC is using ?

That's my point. I don't really care. Yet for IPv6 I suddenly need some way to automatically update the firewall rules etc, because the internal IP is also the public IP.

> IPv6 does not have that problem and you'll have a service less to run.

But how do you distribute DNS and NTP server addresses without something ala DHCP?

For DNS there is rfc6106. And for NTP and other services there is service discovery. Why would you set your own NTP server with DHCP ? Many clients like Android, iOS, Linux and Macos will connect to NITZ or predefined NTP server anyway and ignore the DHCP NTP settings.

> And for NTP and other services there is service discovery.

Do you have some links on how to configure this?

> Why would you set your own NTP server with DHCP ?

What kind of question is that? Because I have a local NTP server that I want them to use of course.

in regards to updating your firewall rules..

Having an outbound allow any and incoming deny any should be sufficient for home use (as it is with IPv4).

> Having an outbound allow any and incoming deny any should be sufficient for home use (as it is with IPv4).

The whole point of IPv6 is to allow peer-to-peer communication. For that I need to allow certain incoming connections.

If you seriously think that is a non-issue, then what does IPv6 bring over IPv4 (with or without CG-NAT)?

Sadly, the price on the cable network i'm on with ipv6 is performance, AND recently, no ipv4. Kid you not. I did tunnel myself for a while, but gave up. Static ipv4 to the outside. dual stack internal for testing network stuff. How bizzare is that. I live in germany.

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