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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

I'm just a programmer with a tiny homelab, and it took me less than a week to understand enough to be able to set up an IPv6 LAN. This included learning enough to be diagnosing and fixing routing/DHCP/RA issues in my router OS and all the LAN machines, implementing prefix-delegation to one of the LAN machines to make it a subrouter for Docker containers, and setting up NAT64 and DNS64 on the router so that the LAN machines could even disable IPv4 entirely. And those latter two were just me flexing because it was a homelab; a regular LAN wouldn't go that far.

I'm not sure what this "ton of system administrators that don't understand it" is having difficulty with.

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>it took me less than a week to understand enough to be able to set up an IPv6 LAN.

Don't mean to brag but it took the 12 year old me less than an afternoon (armed with a CISCO book) to understand IPv4 syntax/routing/ARP/DHCP + whatever and roll it out to my 2 computers lan.

The difficulty curve jump from IPv4 to IPv6 is humongous (IPv6 + ancillaries took me 2 days to setup in my home, and that's with a decade of IT experience.)

The issue is there are just so many officially right ways to do the same thing. Even assigning 'static' addresses has 3 official methods. Yes I get why there are so many of them (flexibility!) but it's a lot of stuff to learn and put together.

Did you misread the 6s in my comment as 4s? I'm not sure why you're telling me that IPv6 is more complex than IPv4 when my comment said nothing to the contrary.

> Don't mean to brag but it took the 12 year old me less than an afternoon (armed with a CISCO book) to understand IPv4 syntax/routing/ARP/DHCP + whatever and roll it out to my 2 computers lan.

Nothing about that is different for IPv6 for your 2 computer lab.

But did you understand how your LAN differs from the internet, how NAT works, all about port-forwards, firewall traversal and why some apps could traverse firewalls (UDP) and some ones not (TCP)? Or did that come later?

IPv4 has tons of hidden complexities people conveniently forget exist when they lament how terribly inaccessible IPv6 "really" is.

> I'm not sure what this "ton of system administrators that don't understand it" is having difficulty with.

"It's different" is the primary thing I hear. I'm a network guy and I learned rudimentary v6 in college ten years ago. I'll be the first to admit I don't know as much as I should, but give me a day and a good resource and I can easily be back up to speed.

My boss on the other hand....."man, it's just so complicated, I hope we never change".

Maybe it was easy because it was your home lab. System administrators will have to deal with orders of magnitude more complexity and thousands of devices. Even if their home labs are meticulously IPv6, moving a corporation to IPv6 is a major undertaking. How can they justify the effort if IPv4 still works and costs nothing?

>>>and a ton of system administrators that doesn't understand it (and for a reason, it's too complicated for nothing).

My comment was a response specifically to this.

> How can they justify the effort if IPv4 still works and costs nothing?

I believe the problem is that IPv4 is no longer costing nothing. It's gradually getting more sparse, and thus more expensive.

Soon only the major data-centers (AWS, Azure, GCP) will be able to afford IPv4 addresses, and you as an IPv4 only company will be forced to use their platform if you want to continue running IPv4 only.

Sure, Setting it at home, or in lab is easy.

Now do it across complex collapsed core network with 1000's of devices spanning multiple locations with multiple WAN's of differing types that all have to route together

Where do I get a home router that has just a firewall for IPv6, and NAT for IPv4?

Well, the only one I have ready access to has that.

It's the freebie Technicollr C1100T that you get with a CenturyLink DSL connection.

My current home router is a cheap Microtik which does exactly what you describe. I also previously had a low end Ubiquiti EdgeRouter with the same setup as I have now. I am pretty sure the free router my ISP supplies does that as well but I have not had the opportunity to test it out.

I'm using an Ubiquity Edgerouter Pro PoE with exactly this configuration. I'm not saying it's the best product for this purpose, but I have used it in this way for several years now.

My main complaint about the model I have is that you only have hardware switching on the first two ports, making the remaining ports somewhat useless as the CPU isn't fast enough to route more than a few hundred Mb/s.

The Zyxel router my ISP issued me does exactly this.

Any home router that supports IPv6 would include this.

My fairly recent D-Link DIR-882 supports IPv6, and isn't even able to bring the IPv6 that the ISP modem router provides onto the LAN in any way.

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