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  • There's a bunch of advantages. IPv6 can be useful since your devices can have the same IP both internally and externally. No dealing with port forwarding. No split horizon DNS (where you have different DNS entries for internal vs external). No NAT. No DHCP required for client systems (can just use SLAAC to auto-generate addresses). Much simpler routing. It's a bit faster. Proper QoS.

    I used to use Comcast, who actually have very good IPv6 support. They were the first major US ISP to roll out IPv6 to everyone, around 10 years ago. Unfortunately my current ISP doesn't have IPv6, but they're aiming to roll it out this year.

    • How does that work, having the same IP internally and externally?

      • A good ISP that supports IPv6 will give you a /64 range. That's a huge number of IPs, 2^64. Easily enough for every device on your network to have a lot of public IPs. If you use Docker or VMs, you could give each one a public IPv6 address.

        When every device on your network can have a public IP, there's no longer a reason to have private IPs. Instead, you'd use firewall rules for internal-only stuff (ie allow access only if the source IP is in your IPv6 range).

        This is how the internet used to work in the old days - universities would have a large IP range, and every computer on campus would have a public IP.

        Of course, you'd still have a firewall on your router (and probably on your computers too) that blocks incoming connections for things you don't want to expose publicly.

  • For LAN, no. If you have a router NAT'ting traffic and providing DHCP service there's really no need for ipv6. Almost every ipv6 enabled service provides both 6 and 4 usually and NAT figures it out, and many still provide only 4, meaning you can't just get rid of ipv4 entirely.

    If your ISP has modernized and is actually providing an ipv6 address, I suppose there's probably a tiny benefit of being able to go ipv6>ipv6 when routing, bust most all devices nowadays can handle NAT translation from ipv4 to ipv6 and vice versa with no routing penalty. I don't know if there are any ISP's out there who can provide static ipv6 addresses without a NAT router to your entire LAN though.

    If you're buying a vps or something ipv6 is easier to get a static address for.

    That of course leaves the last good reason: why not? If you're doing homelab hosting stuff why not experiment with ipv6 and fully modernize your network. They suck to type in but it's fun to know your stuff is brand new and using the "best".

    • I have currently an issue with a WebRTC SFU not working behind a IPv6 to IPv4 translation, at least I suspect that is the cause.

  • I'll buck the trend and say "yes, for a home LAN, it is the bees' knees". I don't do it now because my country (and hence my ISP) does not do IPv6, but for most places it's worth doing.

    It depends on how your ISP does it. When I did it before, my ISP gave me a /56, which is pretty sensible and I think fairly common. If you get smaller than a /64, (a) your ISP is run by doofuses, but (b) it's going to be a pain and maybe not worth it.

    A /56 was much bigger than I needed. I actually only used 2 /64s, so a /63 would have been fine, but network configuration is fun (I think), so maybe you can get creative and think about different ways of allocating your network.

    I had 1 /64 for statically-assigned, publicly reachable servers. And then I had a separate /64 for SLAAC (dynamic) allocated personal devices (laptops, phones, etc.) which were not publicly-reachable (firewalled essentially to act like a NAT). (Sidenote, if you are going to use IPv6, I recommend turning on RFC7217 on your devices for privacy reasons. I think these days it's probably turned on by default for Windows, Android, iOS, etc., but it's worth double-checking)

    The big benefit to using IPv6 is that all of your home machines can be (if you want them to be) reachable inside your network or outside your network using exactly the same IP address, which means you can just give them a fixed AAAA and access them from anywhere in the world you like. If you're into that sort of thing, of course. It's a lot of fun.

  • Okay, so manu of these answers are just plain wrong. In short, you shouldn't care as the biggest impact will be to network admins. They are the ones who have to configure routing and handle everything else that comes with new addresses. The rest of the world simply doesn't know or notice whether they are using IPv4 or v6. Business as usual.

    If the question is whether you should play with it at home. Sure thing if you have the desire to. It's the future and only a matter of time before it becomes a reality. Said network admins and ISPs have been delaying the transition since they are the ones who have to work it out and putting your entire user base behind single IPv4 NAT is simpler than moving everything to IPv6.

    From network admin perspective, yes it's worth moving to IPv6 since network topology becomes far simpler with it. Fewer sub-networks, and routing rules to handle those. Less hardware to handle NAT and other stuff. Problem is, they made the bed for themselves and switching to IPv6 becomes harder the more you delay it. Number of users in past 10 years or so has skyrocketed. Easily quadrupled. We use to have home computers with dial-up. Easy enough, assign IP when you connect, release it on disconnect. Then broadband came and everyone is sitting online 100% of the time. Then mobile phones which are also online 100% of the time. Then smart devices, now cars and other devices start having public internet access, etc. As number of users increases, network admins keep adding complexity to their networks to handle them. If you don't have public IP, just do traceroute and see how many internal network hops you have.

  • The server I have with ovh has ipv6 setup, but only 1 of my VMS on it has an address. It's a lot harder to get your head around then it looks, no NAT. Firewall everything

  • There aren't many benefits from using IPv6 on LAN, as far as I can tell, unless you need more addresses than are available in the private address ranges.

  • yes, ill admit i didnt do it myself until recently when I didnt want to do yet-another-nat-entry and decided to join modern networking.

    should have done it years ago.

    • What were the biggest pains? What was surprisingly easier than expected?

      • worrying my head off about security because in the old days IPv6 had some issues esp with bascially putting every device on your network on the public internet with no firewall.

        learned that years ago hardware makers started defaulting to blocking all traffic from the outside when ipv6 is enabled. Once I felt comfortable just turning it on I found it pretty easy to grasp esp when the addresses stopped liking like random junk to my eyes.

        Once I knew how things worked actually exposing a specific system or port set to the internet was super easy, much easier than NAT + firewall.

        with my ISP. v6 unexpectedly brought a new level of privacy we had not had before. When you geolocate the IPs they show up in ISP datacenters all over the country. One day it looks like we are in VA, the next we are coming out of Seattle. We have yet to notice any speed or routing issues. IPv4 and IPv6 play well together though once you turn on v6 you might find yourself turning it on for more vlans than you planned because you want the features!

  • Absolutely. I use ipv6 so I can directly reach all my servers. For public facing things I put it on an ipv4 address but for my own internal stuff, ipv6.

144 comments