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Comment by heinternets | Hacker News Reader

Please can we do away with NAT forever. Why are we still encouraging this? It’s caused the world to do horrible kludges and continues to do so.

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1.) IPv4 is still heavily favored over IPv6.

2.) Market segmentation: keeps home users from easily hosting their own services without spending $$$ on an upgraded plan.

3.) Adding on to #2, I've seen claims of providers putting IPv6 behind NAT, so don't think full IPv6 acceptance will solve this problem.

> I've seen claims of providers putting IPv6 behind NAT, so don't think full IPv6 acceptance will solve this problem.

I get annoyed even when what's offered is a single /64 prefix (rather than something like a /56 or even /60), but putting IPv6 behind NAT is just ridiculous.

What is a single /64 prefix not enough for?

Multiple local networks while still using SLAAC.

Separating out main, guest, work, internet-of-shit, security & VPN subnets

This shouldn't be mistaken for an anti-IPv6 post. There's also some steps you have to go through to enable IPv6 on your VPS networks, and there's still stuff like GitHub not handling IPv6. So, much as we need to migrate, we still have to support IPv4 connectivity for the foreseeable future.

Shoutout to Hacker News for having IPv6 support!

> and there's still stuff like GitHub not handling IPv6.

And virtually everything inside of AWS still requires IPv4 so even if you have zero need to reach out to WAN, if you need any number of private AWS endpoints, you're going to be allocating some ipv4 blocks to your VPC :(.

I've worked at four tech companies and never saw a hint of IPv6 (except for some tests that verified that third-party networking code accepted that address family).

Instead I played with IPv6 at home to make sure I understood it well enough should it ever come up at work. We'll see!

Whenever an ISP offers me IPv6 service that works, I will move to it.

Its so much easier to remember`192.168.0.34` than some weird ipv6 numbering.

For someone just getting started with networking and learning things, this seems rhe best way to go forward.

Because it's never once inconvenienced the average network admin, probably. I still don't get what problem it's supposed to solve for me.

There absolutely are annoyences IPv6 get rid of, that are much embedded in IT culture we only see them if we look.

Port forwarding, external/internal address split, split horizon DNS, SNI proxies, NAT, hairpin routing - some of the hacks made mostly because of shortage in IP space.

The internal/external address split problem only goes away if you have a provider independent prefix, thats not in reach for many due to cost

Using both GUA/ULA together solves enough to get by, but its not ideal

That's kind of my point. In 20 years of managing networks and infra, none of those things have ever been painful or cost me more than a few minutes a year. That's just not enough to convince me I have any reason to switch over.

No. We can't. We encouraging it because it works.

Presumably the idea is that if you go ipv6-only you can avoid this cost and just use a firewall?

In theory.. but what happens when you want to change ISPs or your ISP doesnt assign static ipv6 blocks? Its recomnended but ISPs have no incentive to give a shit about you. Now all internal infra is not routable.

An IPv6 allocation being static or dynamic has no bearing on its routability.

Don’t even need firewall. Aws has egress only ipv6 gateway.

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