this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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I remember doing an IT course over a decade ago and learning about IPv6 taking over, honestly surprised it hasn't yet. I just looked it up and apparently they came up with it in 1998. How is it taking so long? Is there some technical reason it's harder or something? Does the extra address size mean a not so great trade off in traffic or something?
note: I did study a bit of networking and IT but have forgotten everything mostly and work in a different field, thus my ignorance.
Even tough IPv6 is technically superior to IPv4 for the network operator it doesn't have clear benefits for home users.
Having global addresses instead of NAT means less control over your LAN and these unique public addresses can track users more accurately.
is there any reason why we can't still use NAT with IPv6? it seems like that would solve at least some of the problems.
In principle, no. In practice I looked into it to do a quick job of enabling ipv6 on my router and the software either just doesn't do it, or fights you actively.
Generally speaking ipv6 is a PITA to administer, at least from the POV of someone who's not a professional network admin and can't be arsed to spend a month learning a gazillion new concepts when I can be just fine with ipv4.
Because you shouldn't. NAT causes so many issues, nobody sane is implementing NAT for IPv6 as an out of the box option.
It is possible, it's just not generally supported be ISP routers. Also there is a possibility of performance issues since IPv4 NAT often relies on hardware acceleration which might not work for NAT6.
You can still have internal IP addresses and things like the router firewall work pretty much like they always have. I'm not sure what you mean by less control really.
I feel like that concern is overblown. You get way more information from DNS, for way cheaper, than you get from "there were 27 devices, now there are 28!" and both takes being the ISP and observing the traffic.
It's also not like VPNs can't work in IPv6 land for people that really are conscious of hiding as much information about what they're doing from their ISP as possible.