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Comment by hitpointdrew | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want any of my devices on my network to have a publicly route-able address?

> Why would you make everything gratuitously complicated by having two separate forms of addressing?

How is IPv6 itself not "gratuitously complicated". You think I am going to remember the IP of my firewall, my network switch, if it is that mess of characters that is an IPv6 address? I can easily recall 10.10.10.1 is my gateway, or that 192.168.1.1 is my gateway. You think instead setting up local DNS server and domain so I can do myrouter.lan is somehow "less complicated"?

Hard pass.

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fe80::1 is your gateway, fe80::2 can be your switch, fe80::blah can be your server. Let the device automatically get it's temporary public address it uses when talking through fe80::1, you shouldn't really need to know it or use it. If you really do feel free to use DHCPv6 or a static SLAAC offset or mDNS but you're just making more work for yourself if it's a home environment.

I felt this way until I learned that the RFC1918s we all love (10. 192.168. etc.) have a nice v6 equivalent: fd80::1 fd80::2 ... etc.

https://www.ripe.net/participate/member-support/lir-basics/i...

>Why would I want publically routable addresses

Hate to break it to you but that is how the internet was intended to work for end-users. Firewalls are cheap and easy to install :)

> Why would I want any of my devices on my network to have a publicly route-able address?

So that your addressing works normally, and you don't have to deal with the same machine having two different addresses depending where you are (e.g. my photo server's address is the same whether I'm travelling or at home). Even if you only ever access your home network from outside via a VPN (which may well be a good idea), having globally unique addresses eliminates a whole bunch of possible issues - no more weirdness because the coffee shop you're in picked the same private subnet as you did.

> How is IPv6 itself not "gratuitously complicated".

IPv6 is needed for the public internet, there are just too many hosts for anything else. So you either learn IPv6 or IPv6 + another similar, but somewhat different thing.

My internal v6 addressing is as such:

fd65:<16-bit-mnemonic>:<vlan-id>::/56

The 16-bit-mnemonic is something memorable to me (e.g. b37a:7357 would be addressable l33tsp34k for "beta test" - that's not the one I use :P). In this case, VLAN 10 would be in the fd65:b37a:7357:10::/56. Gateway for it is fd65:b37a:7357:10::1.

It's really not harder than IPv4 for these cases.

Servers and services are assigned static IPs either via DHCPv6 or directly on the boxes (or both as I kinda use the DHCP table as a poor man's IPAM). Other devices internal IPs and globally routable IPs are assigned through SLAAC with privacy extensions where available.

The main reason would be to do p2p without hacks / servers.

Why are you so militant against the idea?

Sunk cost fallacy.

Why would you need a DNS server? That's what mDNS is for.

Some people might have more than one subnet. Or road-warrior VPN and VPN-ing in. It is nice when your networks name resolution works, even if you are outside your network.

If you have multiple subnets, you almost certainly have an advanced enough router that it supports mDNS forwarding. There's no reason why it can't work across a VPN either.

mDNS forwarding doesn't work on Tailscale :(

mDNS has some downsides that can be important for some. For instance, the fact that you can more easily set the same host name on multiple machines, or the fact that it uses a lot of bandwidth.

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