We don't talk about IPv5

fun fact, the RFC introducing NAT calls it a "short-term solution"

bro just add another octet to the end of ipv4. That goes from 4 billion to a trillion and will most definitely outlast modern electronics and capitalism

I think they must have thought: 'Well we thought four and a quarter billion was going to be enough. We don't want to repeat the mistake, so let's create an unimaginably large address space.'
Which, with the benefit of hindsight, now looks daft itself.
- It looks daft now with a little hindsight, but we're kind of still in the foresight stage for the overall life of IPv6.

Ipv6 is broken for those that want control over their home networks thanks to Google and terribly written RFCs.

All that was needed was an extra byte or two of address space, but no, some high and mighty evangelicals in their ivory towers built something that few people understand 30 years later. Their die hard fans are sure that this will be the year of ipv6. The Year of Linux on the Desktop will come 10 years before the year of ipv6.

Ipv6 is broken for those that want control over their home networks
I don't see how? Works great for my home network.
- I want per device firewall and DNS rules for myself, the wife and the kids. With opnsense or pfsense I don't believe this is possible with SLAAC, which is what android only supports.
  Shove all devices on a flat network with no special firewall rules and you are probably golden. But trying to control your own network, last few times I've tried, is impossible.
Broken how? What parts are not commonly understood?
- See this post below https://lemmy.fwgx.uk/comment/2126323
What did Google do? Just curious as I'm not into home networking
- They refuse to support DHCP6 and will only use SLAAC on Android devices.
And 10 years before fusion power?
is a /56 not enough address space for your home network
- My home network is millions of ants with tiny little backpacks

I hope nat burns in hell when ipv6 will become standard

Any day now brother
- It's the year of the ipv6 server
mind explaining? All 8 know about Nat is that it sometimes didn't let me play rainbow six siege
- NAT is like package delivery IRL. If you’re a server and send a package to a client without NAT, that’s like sending a delivery boy to deliver pizza, goes straight from source to destination.
  But with NAT it’s like ordering a package online. It first will be delivered to a distribution center, and then a delivery warehouse in your area, and then the courier delivers packages to all people on his route.
  It’s way more complex and you now have a whole bunch of points of failure.
- Having multiple hosts under one address for all hosts is annoying. Port forwarding is annoying. Some isps have their own nat and want you to pay additionally for public ip address

Also for home network I don’t won’t my IOT to have a real IP to the Internet. Using IPv4 NAT you can have a bit of safety by obscurity

NAT is not much different to a firewall though… just because the address space is publicly routable does not mean that the router has to provide a route to it, or a consistent route
NAT works by assigning a public port for the outgoing stream different to the internal port, and it does that by inspecting packets as they go over the wire: a private machine initiates a connection, assign an arbitrary free port, and sends that packet off to the router, who then reassigns a new port, and when packets come in on that port it looks up the IP and remapped port and substitutes them
that same process can easily be true in IPv6 but you don’t need to do any remapping: the private machine initiates a connection, and the router simply marks that IP and port combination as “routable” rather than having to do mappings as well
I don’t won’t my IOT to have a real IP to the Internet
Why not? What's the difference to them having a nat ipv4?
Its unlikely someone with guess your ipv6 of your iot.
- No, but it’s far easier to explain how to configure your home network such that 182.168.1.* is for your regular devices like laptops, etc. and 192.168.2.* is for your IoT devices. Then block all access from 192.168.2.* to the internet so your IoT devices can’t “phone home”, can’t auto-update without your knowledge, can’t end up as part of a botnet, etc.

Imagine using ipv6

I know it's a joke, but the idea that NAT has any business existing makes me angry. It's a hack that causes real headaches for network admins and protocol design. The effects are mostly hidden from end users because those two groups have twisted things in knots to make sure end users don't notice too much. The Internet is more centralized and controlled because of it.

No, it is not a security feature. That's a laughable claim that shows you shouldn't be allowed near a firewall.

Fortunately, Google reports that IPv6 adoption is close to cracking 50%.

I think NAT is one reason why the internet is so centralized. If everyone had a static IP you could do all sorts of decentralized cool stuff.
- Right, not the only reason, but it's a sticking point.
  You shouldn't need to connect to your smart thermostat by using the company's servers as an intermediary. That makes the whole thing slower, less reliable, and a point for the company to sell your personal data (that last one being the ultimate reason why it's done this way).
- Everyone having a static IP is a privacy nightmare.
  There's a reason the recommendation in the standard for ipv6 had to be amended (it whatever the mechanic was) so that generated local suffixes aren't static. Before that, we were essentially globally identifiable because just the second half of your v6 address was static.
- Which is why IPv6 was created. Everything used to get a public routable IP. Large company’s such as ATT and IBM got a whole /8 to themselves. NAT made it so we did not run out of IP’s in the 2000’s
Ipv6 took awhile for me to understand. One of the biggest hurdles was how is it secure without NAT.
- Can you share more details please?
- IPv6 is the natural Internet. Things are either allowed or forbidden to connect.
  NAT is just a kludge.
My isp and router both claim to have IPv6 but every test site has failed.
Fine, I won't invite you to our bi-annual TURN server appreciation event.
You are right, but I wish ipv6 was less shitty of a replacement.
- I worked with one of the inventors of IPv6 for a bit of time, and I think knowing Carl really gave me an insight into who IPv6 was invented for, and that's the big, big, big networks — peering groups that connect large swaths of the Internet with other nations' municipal or public infrastructure.
  These groups are pushing petabytes of data every hour, and as a result, I think it makes their strategists think VERY big picture. From what I've seen, IPv6 addresses very real logistical problems you only see with IPv4 when you're already dealing with it on a galactic scale. So, I personally have no doubt that IPv6 is necessary and that the theory is sound.
  However, this fuckin' half-in/half-out state has become the engine of a manifold of security issues, primarily bc nobody but nerds or industry specialists knows that much about it yet. That has led to rushed, busy, or just plain lazy devs and engineers to either keep IPv6 sockets listening, unguarded, or to just block them outright and redirect traffic to IPv4 anyway.
  Imo there's not much to be done besides go forward with IPv6. It's there, it's tested, it's basically ready for primetime in terms of NIC chip support... I just wish it weren't so obtuse to learn. :/
- There is something there, but mostly I think existing net admins try to map their existing IPv4 knowledge onto IPv6. That doesn't work very well. It needs to be treated as its own thing.
- Nah. You're just too stupid to understand the internet is designed to be used with DNS. The people who design these protocols and operate the networks that form the internet have no issues with DNS and don't care that you don't understand.
We use NAT all the time in industrial settings. Makes it so you can have select devices communicate with the plant level network, while keeping everything else common so that downtime is reduced when equipment inevitably fails.
- That's nothing that can't be done with a good set of firewalls on IPv6.

Every atom of the universe should have its own ip.
- For targeted location-based ads of course! Lots of revenue there

Surely we can do better. Why not IPv10? That's 4 higher than 6!

My IP goes up to 11.
not sure if you're aware thats a real thing https://www.ipv10.net/
- Forbidden
  You don't have permission to access this resource.
  Awesome.
- Guess we have to crank it up to 11, then.

The reason IPv6 was originally added to the DOCSIS specs, over 20 years ago, is because Comcast literally exhausted all RFC1918 addresses on their modem management networks.

My favourite feature of IPv6 is networks, and hosts therein, can have multiple prefixes and addresses as a core function. I use it to expose local functions on only ULA addresses, but provide locked down public access when and where needed. Access separation is handled at the IP stack, with IPv4 it’s expected to be handled by a firewall or equivalent.

My favorite feature of IPv6 is that there are so many addresses available. Every single IPv4 address right now could have its own entire IPv4 range of addresses in IPv6. It's mind-boggling huge.
- you could assign every square meter of the planet an ip and use it for location, and still have addresses left over
They kept talking it was because address exaustion, and IANA sold all the remaining blocks they had...
I tested it at the time. Ran nmap ping scan across a block all night with zero results. IANA sold the internet
- many “unused” IP addresses are unused because they’re kinda like having spare parts: if you’re planning on extending your network in the futures, your IP block kinda should reflect your end state (ie the parts you need over time to replace or “build” new hosts)
  or for blue/green deployments where it’s likely that at least half the IP range will be used in terms of process, but unused most of the time in terms of reachability
  and then there’s weird things with splitting up IP blocks into subnets with a division of 3 (the minimum needed for dealing with net splits etc) - eg across availability zones… there are always “waste” IPs because you can’t divide multiples of 8 cleaning into 3
I understand some of these words!

My favorite thing to use IPv6 for is to use the privacy extension to get around IP blocks on YouTube when using alternative front ends. Blocked by Google on my laptop? No problem, let me just get another one of my 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IP addresses.

I have a separate subnet which is IPv6 only and rotates through IP addresses every hour or so just for Indivious, Freetube and PipePipe.

Hah, do they not just block the whole /64? That's actually really funny.
This is exactly why ipv6 was never widely adopted. There's too much power in a limited IP pool.
- Define "widely".
  According to Google 46.09% of their traffic is IPv6 and most servers support it. It's mostly large ISPs dragging their feet.
What is stoping Google from just blocking your entire IP-Block?
- Mostly, I'm not big enough to trigger anything there.
  Also, since ISPs usually only get a single humongous IPv6 block, it's actually pretty hard to know what is okay to block. Somebody might be on a /48, /56 or /64 network but they might also just have a single IPv6 address. Since you're blocking quintillions of IP addresses with each /64 net, the risk of hitting innocent IPs is high.
  Also also, I'm not sure if Google is actually prepared for such a case. Since all the requests coming from Invidious just seem like legit unauthenticated requests, it's hard to flag them on IPv6 when the IPs are fully randomized.
  Still, Google is moving towards requiring a login for everything. So I assume that method won't work for much longer.
Could you link the privacy extension in question I haven't heard of it
- it's not a browser extension, its a SLAAC thing https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/privacy-extensions-for-ipv6-slaac.
  TL;DR is that SLAAC used to use part of your device MAC to form it's IP, which would be trackable/fingerprintable. Now devices just pick the last 48-bits at complete random on the assumption that no other device is going to have that specific address out of the 4 quintilion available addresses.
  edit the RFC https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941
- Sure, it's part of the IPv6 spec:
  https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/privacy-extensions-for-ipv6-slaac/
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8981

I see your satirical IPv6 meme and raise you the highest quality IPv6 evangelism you'll ever see.

That was beautiful

Skill issue

IPv6 is easy to do.

2000::/3 is the internet range

fc00::/7 is the private network range (for non routing v6)

fe80::/64 is link local (like apipa but it never changes)

::1/128 is loopback

/64 is the smallest network allocation, and you still have 64 bits left for devices.

You don't need NAT when you can just do firewalling - default drop new connections on inbound wan and allow established, related on outbound wan like any IPv4 firewall does.

Use DHCPv6 and Prefix Delegation (DHCPv6-PD) to get your subnets and addresses (ask for a /60 on the wan to get 16 subnets).

Hook up to your printer using ipv6 link local address - that address never changes on its own, and now you don't have to play the static ip game to connect to it after changing your router or net config.

The real holdup is ISPs getting ultra cheap routers that use stupid network allocation systems (AT&T) that are incompat with the elegant simplicity of prefix delegation and dhcp.

On my home network I make sure that my PDs are the same as my VLAN IDs so that I can at least know where a device is based on its IP. If I was smart I would also line them up with the IPv4 subnets as well.

Meh, the idea of having every address be globally routable makes a lot of sense. NAT is a great bandaid but it's still a bandaid. It still limits how peer to peer and multicast applications function, especially on larger networks.

NAT444 is shit. I can't even host a web server without routing it through a VPN, and my ISP can't work out how to provide an IPv6 addresses yet. Give it to me and I will work out how to use it.
Slight update - Just looked and apparently they had a goal of rolling out IPv6 addresses to all customers by earlier this year. I'll check my router config tomorrow and who knows. Maybe I will be able to get one now? Would be pretty sweet.
- I am sorry to interrupt, my ISP gave me an ipv6 address, but I just can't access anything through it even when I specify it in the firewall, maybe they are blocking this functionality because they sell static ips.

Is this IPv5?

Fun fact: IP version 5 is actually reserved for the Internet Streaming Protocol.

In my personal life I will probably "never" intentionally use ipv6.

But it is a DAMNED good sniff test to figure out if an IT/NT team is too dumb to live BEFORE they break your entire infrastructure. If they insist that the single most important thing is to turn it off on every machine? They better have a real good reason other than "it's hard"

It’s vulnerable af. And I mean really, it’s as bad as Netscalers or Fortigate shit. Like https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-ipv6-networking-feature-to-hijack-software-updates/ or https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-ipv6-networking-feature-to-hijack-software-updates/
Problem is, yes it’s hard to implement but it’s even a lot harder to get it properly secured. Especially because few people are using it, and not securing it is worse than disabling it.
- Just a heads up, you linked to the same article twice
- But you could do the same thing with a rogue DHCP server I IPv4... With similar methods to prevent the misbehavior on networks
- And I would consider a detailed argument on why it is more secure to disable it to be a good reason.
  Personally? I consider an IT team who don't know how to secure an ipv6 enabled network to not be competent. But that is a different conversation.
- Don't see how that is anymore vulnerable then up 4.
Realistically no organization has so many endpoints that they need IPv6 on their internal networks. There's no reason to deal with more complicated addressing schemes except on the public Internet. Only the border devices should be using IPv6.
Hopefully if an organization has remote endpoints which are connecting to the internal network over the Internet, they are doing that through a VPN and can still just be assigned IPv4 addresses on dedicated VLANs when they connect.
- you sir/maam have not seen the netflix talk on using IPv6 for their full internal stack because of inefficiencies allocating IPv4 ranges i’m guessing
- If you don't have ipv6 internally, you probably can't access ipv6 externally. 6to4 gateways are a thing. 4to6? Not so much.
  And this is why ipv6 will ultimately take another 20 years for full coverage. If it was more backwards compatible from the starting address-wise then this would all have been smoother. Should have stuck with point separators. Should have assumed zero padding for v4 style addresses rather than a prefix

I use IPv6 every day and everywhere I can. It solves so many issues in large corporate and ISP network setups. And yes 10. Wasn’t big enough, and NATing is a PitA.

Honestly we just keep pushing it off when it’s not that bad. Workaround after workaround just because people are lazy.

I agree with everything you said but it still doesn't make me hate ipv6 less.
How much slack did you have in your 10.* network? Or was it literally 16.7 million devices?
- Having the breathing room is great.
  You have two teams that independently set up private networks but now someone has to talk to them both?
  In IPv4, they likely stepped on the same private subnets. In ipv6, they pretty much certainly did not step in the same ULA prefixes. My VPN setup is a mess of a maze to deal with the fact that most things I connect to are all independently allocated 10. subnets, with the IPv6 focused customer being easiest.
  Also, if you want to embed information in your addressing, like vlan I'd or room information.
  Besides, you can have addresses like fd37:5f1a:b4c1::feed:face, and that's fun isn't it?
- IPv6 isn't just a larger IPv4. There are features inherent to it, like link-local actually functioning and being predictable, unlike APIPA in v4 which was grafted on as an afterthought and breaks more than it works.
  It also functions router-less. You can grab 30 10-port switches and just stick them together and start plugging computers in. It will work without configuration or an authority.
  I am all v6 internally, but that's not because I have a splatillion devices, but rather it's just better and easier to manage.
- 16M devices on one network would almost certainly have major scalability problems all its own. SMB chattiness alone . . . shudder.

Just my perspective as a controls (SCADA engineer):

I work for a large power company. We have close to 100 sites, each with hundreds of IP devices, and have never had a problem with ipv4. Especially when im out in the field I love being able to check IPs, calculate gateways, etc at a glance. Ipv6 is just completely freaking unreadable.

I see the value of outward-facing ipv6 devices (i.e. devices on the internet), considering we are out of ipv4s. But I don't see why we have to convert private networks to ipv6. Put more bluntly: at least industry, it just isn't gonna happen for decades (if it ever does). Unless you need more IPs it's just worse to work with. And there's a huge amount of inertia- got one singular device that doesn't talk ipv6 at a given generation site? What are you supposed to do?

i've done both ipv4 and v6, but never embedded. from my perspective, ipv6 addresses can be easier to remember and use, with a little clever arrangement of zeros and especially because they're hexadecimal. that's in addition to the way more elegant way the protocol itself handles various things. obviously not worth upgrading systems that don't even need dhcp, but that applies to a lot of things in that field
90% of industrial devices are still 100 Mbit/s.
- I mean that's of the ethenet capable ones... a huge chunk are still serial
- You'll be lucky if you find ethernet on them. RJ45 serial is still pretty common nowadays
If you set up your DNS correctly then you don't even need the IPs. Just give devices unique, human-readable names and maybe do separate sub-domains for each site or something.
- For that to work industrial devices have to support DNS in the first place…
I’m a protective relay settings engineer at a contractor for lots of power companies. I’m dipping my toes into my first substation automation project. Getting to design the device native files, IPs, and other networking parts from the drawings package of site and device manuals. It’s all SEL equipment with a gateway at the top and local powerWAN, RTAC, annunciators, and relays below. I live thousands of miles from the site, so local testing would be challenging but probably have to fly or something lol. I have been doing some research on how to emulate this is a lab setting when all you have is the RTAC and some relays. Is this something SCADA engineers have to do sometimes? Like if you need to test a scheme when you can’t build it physically first?

I love the flat earther energy in this

I'm surprised by the comments here. I use 90% IPv6. For me v4 is only present for retro compatibility. The transition was hard however.

Was?
It's still in progress..
- In progress?
  I can't even get an IPv6 address, even if I wanted to pay an obscene amount for a business tier.
- I'm fully transitioned. The first step was getting an Internet provider that featured it. I had to change providers for that. Then I had to find equipment that worked. Some of the things that have an early implementation of IPv6 don't actually work. It's like they never actually tested it. Then I had to integrate IPv6 in the way everything worked. I'm a big user of unique local adresses, which I feel isn't a really well known feature.

CGNATs suck ass though, I had to buy a vps just to access my own network outside my home.

Yeah, had the same issue with my ISP, but at least they switched me back to ipv4 after a support call. Didn't want to pay extra for the privilege of not being reachable from the outside anymore.
I've recently changed isp and am now hitting CGNAT problems. I have been running Nextcloudpi for years and now I can't access it from outside. I've trying to understand if I can fix the problem using IPv6 but from what you've said I'm now wondering if a vps is the solution?
- My ISP doesn't properly support IPV6, otherwise it should work. I use wireguard to route just my server traffic to the vps.
- I deal with cgnat on my 2 isps at home. Install tailscale on your vps and your router at home and then on your router you can share subnet devices over your tailscale network. Install a reverse proxy on your vps.
  If set up correctly you can route a human readable web address (jellyfin.example.com) to your vps static ip address and then to, for example, a docker container with local address 192.168.100.1:8096, via reverse proxy.

C’mon, IPv4 has so many problems. Sure, let’s reserve a whole /8 for a single loopback address, that’s efficient. 🙄

Well of course, how else would you trick script kiddies that figured out when they DDOSed 127.0.0.1 and learned what a loop back was, and get them again in a few weeks with "ok ok my real address is 127.34.21.2"
- Wait... I know 127.0.0.1 but what's the second one?

Hi I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to networking. I have ipv6 off on my home network because I was scared of accidentally exposing things outside of my home network. I’m using Ubiquiti. Can someone give me/link me a crash course on how to setup ipv6 without introducing any security holes into my network? Maybe also a crash course in firewalls.

i don't use ubiquiti, but the only thing you need to do with your firewall to get better-than-NAT security is allow only outgoing connections/disallow incoming connections. usually on consumer routers that's the default setting anyway or there's a checkbox to that effect.
Block new connections inbound on the router's wan. Also block ping if you don't want pings to find you. That's the most basic setup for firewalling on the udm, ipv4 and 6. Every router in 2025 should be able to block new inbound on ipv6.
Don't worry Ubiquiti has ipv6 issues. You have an excuse.
- What issues? I'm pretty much 100% ipv6 on all ubiquity equipment.

I have never started using ipv6 so I'm in the clear here

I know its a joke but man its annoying to go from something that is organized in a human readable way to one where you have to rely on the system. I am someone who hates databases though so I have always been like this. Heck way back in the aughts I used to complain that my job involved more seeing and issues and fixing it and the systems were getting to were I feel more like im counseling it.

I do like how I can easily remember IPv4 addresses while I struggle to remember a single IPv6 address
- Come on, it's e easy to remember one IPv6 address: ::1
- Its really not possible to remember an IPv6. I mean it is but its really an abandonment on human level and a solution that leverage dhcp which was common anyway. Its about as easy as a hardware address.

An ipv6 address turns my brains thinking center off. Short circuit at how fucking stupid it looks.

No different the 10.A4.b2.12

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol

In case anyone wants to know what not to talk about.

I wrote and ipv6 parser once.

Never again.

As in a regex or ..?
An ipv4 parser would also be sorta difficult.
you have to account for the fact that all the octets can be added to decimal: http://2130706433 (valid 127.0.0.1)
or the fact that octets can be in different formats: http://0x7F.0x0.0x0.0x1 (127.0.0.1)
or the fact that you can mix octet formats: http://0xC0.0250.0.1 (192.168.0.1)
- Yeah a mix of regex and heuristics to validate before parsing
  It was a long time ago now
  It also had to parse ipv4 because they can be embedded (IIRC) and the different octet formats