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Comment by allyourdatas | Hacker News Reader

Why would I ever need IPv6 at home or in my office? Explain to me logically why I need it in my house or in my office?

I do not care about using up the last internet address because that is akin to the 'think of the children' crap used to justify things on an emotional level in order to manipulate people.

There's no way I'll exhaust the private address spaces and I not not see NAT as a negative.

I do not want my fridge or toaster on the internet. I do not want my phone always on the internet. Nor do I carry a smrt phone or use WiFi as everything in my house is hard-wired.

So it seems like all I would ever need is a 4-to-6 gateway solution of some sort . Devices in my house or office will not ever really need IPv6 or a 'dual-stack' and all that extra complexity is a waste of time... what problem is it supposed to be solving exactly?

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Logically? Because the world’s needs are changing and one day there will be something you want or need that will be accessible via IPv6, at which point you can either move with the times or be left behind.

IPv6 global adoption is on the rise whether you see the point in it or not. The religious arguments and nitpicking no longer matter.

It's much easier to build an IP layer 6-to-4 gateway (like NAT64) than a 4-to-6 gateway, because the IPv4 header doesn't have room for a 128-bit destination address.

The most practical "4-to-6 gateway" would be a SOCKS or HTTPS proxy, because those let the client connect directly to a hostname and not care about IP addressing. But configuring a proxy for all your home devices is probably more tedious than deploying IPv6.

If you don’t understand the engineering benefits, fine, not everyone needs to be an expert. I wouldn’t proudly brag about my ignorance of the subject, though.

What exactly are the "engineering benefits" beyond a larger address space? Most companies rely on private address spaces to logically separate them, and will ultimately end up using NAT66, ending up exactly where they started, but with significantly more complexity.

Every time this comes up, people come out of the woodwork to say, "Well, akually we talked about this exact thing in 1995 and decided this was the right way!" Yet, it's never convincing.

If it were a simple address expansion, we would have completed this upgrade around 1998. Yet here we are, 30 years later!

> Most companies rely on private address spaces to logically separate them...

Which is a hack driven by address scarcity. You can, and should, separate address spaces just fine if they're publicly routable.

> ...and will ultimately end up using NAT66, ending up exactly where they started, but with significantly more complexity.

Then those companies are managing their network very poorly. Which is their choice, but not really an argument against IPv6.

Telling people doing things like SCADA, who absolutely don't want their hot forging press to be globally addressable, that they're "doing it wrong!" is not helpful. This attitude is why nothing short of coercion and blackmail is required to get a large chunk of users to switch.

Literally no one is suggesting this. Having globally unique IPs doesn’t even slightly infer that they should be globally reachable. IPv6 still uses firewalls. It does mean that making an internal resource reachable when appropriate for that specific resource is vastly easier: you open the right firewall port and it’s done.

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