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Comment by yesco | Hacker News Reader

All networking is complex.

I asked the other guy this, but I'll also ask you. Please provide me the level of documentation you are looking for, but for an IPv4 network. If you have some grand tutorial that explains it as easily as you make it out to be, then I truly would love to see it, I will include it in my onboarding documentation at work.

Because I understand both IPv4 and IPv6, and do not consider IPv6 the more complex protocol by any measure. I suspect your "whiff" is more a bias towards what you are comfortable with, rather than a true reflection of IPv6's complexity.

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> Because I understand both IPv4 and IPv6, and do not consider IPv6 the more complex protocol by any measure.

You mentioned "new hires" while i mentioned hobbyists. You're talking about a business network where people are paid to do it, I'm talking about home networks and home labs.

You're basically confirming my statement that IPv6 was designed for enterprise needs?

There are millions of people using IPv6 without knowing it. The ISP has everything preconfigured and if you use a third party router it's normaly one or two options to set. And it just works like for IPv4.

I have that. Not enough at hobbyist level though.

>Please provide me the level of documentation you are looking for, but for an IPv4 network.

Could help to get an idea what you see as "hobbyist level". Setting up IPv6 has been pretty straight forward on plain Ubuntu as a router just with replacing the dhcpd subnet configs with a radvd config, enable ipv6 forwarding in addition to ipv4 forwarding and replace the iptables NAT rule with a only forward RELATED,ESTABLISHED connections (which already is optional).

Two fiber connections coming inside my home. One is a home connection with a router that sends ipv6 to any machine that asks for it (which i may not always want), the other one is a business connection that goes into an Ubuntu router that has to run pppoe.

The path of least resistance with ipv4 was to have static ips for every PC and change the default route where I cared about which connection the PC used. Also was using the dhcp from the home router.

Now ipv6 has addresses that are auto generated by the OS on boot, addresses that are forwarded from the router and are in a subnet assigned to home ISP #1, and ... whatever I'd need to assign manually?

It's still hobbyist level not enterprise level if you ask me. But it's a lot to read for a network that works just fine thank you.

This auto configuration mechanism is called stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) so "Your OS disable IPv6 SLAAC" or something like that in your favorite search engine should give you the answer. After that you should be able to manually configure your address and gateway like you would for v4. If your prefix is dynamic it gets a bit ugly then you have to use link local addresses and something like NPTv6 or NAT66 on the gateway. A better alternative IMHO would be to use different VLANs for the two networks but then your switch and possibly access point have to support it.

> If your prefix is dynamic it gets a bit ugly then you have to use link local addresses and something like NPTv6 or NAT66 on the gateway.

The home connection is probably dynamic. I asked them about paying extra for a fixed IP and they said they're all out. They meant IPv4 of course but that doesn't mean i get fixed IPv6 now.

> A better alternative IMHO would be to use different VLANs for the two networks but then your switch and possibly access point have to support it.

... and it might be fun getting the internal machines to talk to each other? I ssh around all the time.

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