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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.
You can get on IPv6 for free with a HE tunnel https://tunnelbroker.net/
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.
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 ipv4 at a given generation site? What are you supposed to do?
90% of industrial devices are still 100 Mbit/s.
You’ll be lucky if you find ethernet on them. RJ45 serial is still pretty common nowadays
I mean that’s of the ethenet capable ones… a huge chunk are still serial
I was going to say, my friend has to maintain some fucking DOS systems because their ancient embroidery machines only want to talk to software as old as they are, over connections as old as they are.
And the rest are pure analog
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…
Oh, now that you mention it I’ve never tried to map a static DNS entry to a device without DNS. Welp, time to get thousands of raspberry pi’s to act as IP KVMs!
That would imply en existence of display/usb outputs…
We’re essentially talking a bunch of embedded devices talking to each other. You can give them all the dns entries you want, but if they (or the programming environment) don’t support DNS lookup you might as well put your dns server in excel.
The microcomputers (raspberry pi, arduino, whatever) could have a modern network interface and relay the communication to the embedded devices over oldschool serial. But yeah, straight DNS wouldn’t work. I like the idea though, gonna start posting my 10 favorite IP addresses on a piece of paper on the fridge. Who needs excel!
Slill issue
IPv6 is easy to do.
2000::/3 is the internet range
/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 - drop new connections and allow established, related, like any IPv4 firewall does.
Use DHCPv6 ad prefix delegation to get your addresses.
Hook up your printer using ipv6 link local address - that address never changes on its own.
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.
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.
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 cleanly into 3
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
Oh it’s way more than that!
After looking up some numbers, I note we could give every single square MILLIMETER on the planet its own entire IPv4 address space.
…And then every one of those IPv4 addresses could have its own entire copy of the IPv4 address space!
…And that would just be a drop in the bucket compared with IPv6! One good comparison I’ve seen is that you could assign an address to every atom on the surface of the earth (but not inside it) and have enough left over for 100+ more earths.
Rough math for the square millimeters:
The surface area of the earth is roughly 510 trillion square millimeters. Let’s round that up to a quadrillion or 1015.
The number of IPv6 addresses is 2128 or 3.4x1038. To be conservative again, let’s just round that down to 1038.
1038 / 1015 = 1023 IPv6 addresses per square mm of earth.
IPv4 address space is 232 or around 4 billion. let’s round up to 10 billion or 1010.
So then 1023 / 1010 = 1013 IPv6 addresses per IPv4 address per square mm of earth.
1013 / 1010 =
1,000 IPv6 addresses per IPv4 address per IPv4 address per square mm of earth.
And that was with the conservative estimates along the way. I think it would actually be tens of thousands.
square centimeter is the one I heard
I understand some of these words!
I have never started using ipv6 so I’m in the clear here
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.
Don’t worry Ubiquiti has ipv6 issues. You have an excuse.
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.
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.
I can use dynamic DNS, the problem is I can’t host over NAT444 without something like a VPN.
Still not been given an IPv6 address though.
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”
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.
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
If you don’t have ipv6 internally, you probably can’t access ipv6 externally. 6to4 gateways are a thing. 4to6? Not so much.
I’m pretty sure stateful gateways do exist, but it’s a massive ball of complexity that would be entirely avoided if people just used native v6.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I run dual stack without much trouble myself. I believe it is mainly difficult for people because eyeball diagnostics are impossible with 6.
My detailed explanation at my old job is that the dev team was full of idiots who hardcoded ipv4 addresses into their fucking code. Seriously. When we migrated from data center to cloud they had to go patch everything. The CTO wouldn’t do shit about it and the director was just there riding things out until retirement.
It has less eyes on it due to it being less popular. It also introduces an extra vector of attack.
It does not have less eyes on and it’s 50% of Google traffic.
Think they mean local networks.
If an IT department carefully curates IPv4 but ignores IPv6, then a rogue actor can set up a parallel IPv6 network largely without being noticed.
IPv6 can be managed, just that it is a blindside for a lot of these departments.
Just a heads up, you linked to the same article twice
Clipboards are also hard
That’s odd, but truly sorry.
Don’t see how that is anymore vulnerable then up 4.
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.
Obviously. You can only access it in IPv10.
Guess we have to crank it up to 11, then.
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?
A /8 subnet is basically everything after the first of the four segments, e.g. 127...*. marine_mustang was saying that loopback (what you think of as only 127.0.0.1) is actually an entire subnet, so any address that starts with 127 will hit the loopback interface. TIL, never thought about it much before.
not sure if you are joking, but any valid IP4 address starting with 127. does the same thing, loopback. 127.0.0.1 is just the standard most people use, you could use 127.127.127.127, or 127.1.1.1 or any random numbers 0 and 254 for the second 2, and 1 and 254 for the last and the effects will be identical.
In fact, it’s so standard that there’s a bunch of shitty code out there that thinks 127.0.0.1 is the only loopback address.
I’m thinking of a networked Chinese laser cutter that we put on our 10.0.0.0/16 network in the makerspace. It seems to think that 10.0.1.1 and 10.0.2.1 are on different networks. Wouldn’t be surprised if it does a similar mistake with loopback addresses.
I see your satirical IPv6 meme and raise you the highest quality IPv6 evangelism you’ll ever see.
That was beautiful
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.
I think it’s just a few domestic US ISPs. The rest of the world has been happily using it for quite some time.
I’ve never seen functional ipv6 except at university, and I would only consider gci large in terms of coverage area and price.
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
Sure, it’s part of the IPv6 spec:
https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/privacy-extensions-for-ipv6-slaac/
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 one of the 4 quintilion available addresses.
Thanks, might have to try that sometime.
An ipv6 address turns my brains thinking center off. Short circuit at how fucking stupid it looks.
No different the 10.A4.b2.12
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%.
My isp and router both claim to have IPv6 but every test site has failed.
Ipv6 took awhile for me to understand. One of the biggest hurdles was how is it secure without NAT.
IPv6 is the natural Internet. Things are either allowed or forbidden to connect.
NAT is just a kludge.
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.
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.
I couldn’t figure it until I turned my brain off and just read the documentation. I was thinking in IPv4 logic, because everyone had told me it was just “bigger IPv4” - it’s not. It’s so much more, and better.
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Funny how I never once criticized, or even mentioned, IPv6s complexity, yet that is the aspect you chose to so valiantly defend. Quite telling, isn’t it?
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. :/
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.
Its kind of interesting to me how conservative the IT industry is with stuff like this.
The industry loves to say “move fast and break things” or “innovate and disrupt”, but that generally only applies to things that can be shat out in a two week long Python project (or shat out in 2 weeks after publicly funded universities spent years figuring out the algorithm for you). For anything foundational, like CPU architecture, operating systems, or the basic assumptions about how UI should work, they’re terrified of change.
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.
Good luck trying to find industrial stuff that supports IPv6, hell most of it is still serial.
I have legit heard that serial is security mechanism because it cannot communicate long distance like ethernet.
Of course you can do IPv6 magic that hides IPv6 from the end device, but nobody understands how that magic works.
Of course you can do IPv6 magic that hides IPv6 from the end device, but nobody understands how that magic works.
it’s not magic… it’s a firewall, and it works pretty much exactly the same as a NAT: a whitelist of IP and port combinations
The one thing you can’t do with IPv6 is yell the address across the room to the technician plugged into the switch trying to ping the node.
no instead you yell the IP address and they spend 30min trying to debug why they can’t ping it or even get ICMP packets through and then you realise you yelled the private IP address and they were on the wrong side of the NAT
This is equipment that uses all statically addressed devices. And ignoring the fact that IPv6 is simply unsupported on most of them, there are duplicate machines that share programs. Regardless of IP version you need NAT anyway if you want to be able to reach each of the duplicates from the plant network.
there are duplicate machines that share programs
yes… that’s why every machine has its own IP address… so that they can both use the same port and you don’t have to connect to crazy bullshit like https://myhomerouter.example.com:8443/
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.
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
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.
publicly addressable does not mean publicly routable… your router would still not arbitrarily connect untrusted external devices to internal hosts
NAT has the property of a firewall only as an implementation detail. replacing NAT with an IPv6 firewall in the router is an upgrade in every conceivable way
I’m aware of that, and didn’t say otherwise?
My comment wasn’t even ipv6 specific, quite the opposite. The comment I was replying to also wasn’t, and the implication that things would be better if everyone had a fixed IP(v4) was actually the specific privacy nightmare scenario I wanted to emphasize. That is the literal worst case of all.
Things can be mitigated somewhat with IPv6, but also only to a degree. Here you’d (usually) have a static prefix and not IP. You then need to use the randomized suffix generation (on a host level, or in DHCPv6 if you’re using that), and not all OS so this by default, but I think Windows does these days. Advertising data collectors, which means basically every web site, could just assume that your prefix is stable and the information they gain if they happen to be correct it’s… uncomfortable.
ah! sorry i misread/misunderstood privacy to mean security in your comment :)
IPv4 centralization creates far more privacy issues than everyone having a static IP. The solutions are still things like VPNs and onion routing.
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).
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.
