> Do you know enough to assign addresses in a way that you, not your router, wants?
If I want to manually assign addresses it's still pretty simple, but in the end I normally just don't care. I don't want to know what IP my printer is, I just want to reach it. Which isn't a challenge at all. Even for things at my home that are IPv4 only they're practically all DHCP. Because there's little reason to ever really care about something's address.
> Can you ssh/other forms of remote into any machine that accepts ssh on your local network using only ipv6?
I have no problems reaching any host on any of my networks even if they're running only IPv6. It's nice too because I can trivially reach any port I want globally as well with a basic firewall change. Even better I can have one host have many IP addresses with different services bound to each address if I want.
> Can you redirect ports to specific local machines using only ipv6 (that implies they keep constant addresses)?
Why do any port redirection at all? Just set the firewall rule and things can hit it. And yeah, they can keep constant addresses. They can have dozens, hundreds of static host addresses if I want.
> Can you easily switch between two internet connections going through different routers that are plugged into the same switch for any machine on your local network using only ipv6?
If that's something you're really wanting, Network Prefix Translation can be done pretty easily. But the vast majority of home users aren't using dual WAN anyways.
> This is all easily doable with ipv4 in like two afternoons
Sounds like your setup with IPv4 took more work than mine with IPv6, as mine only took me an hour or so while yours took multiple days.
> as mine only took me an hour or so while yours took multiple days.
Yeah, because the first time I had no idea what I was doing, except vague feelings about ipv4 works. Did you factor in your pre existing ipv6 knowledge when you counted just an hour?
> Network Prefix Translation can be done pretty easily.
What's "easily"? How many services do I need to setup? Some other helpful HNer tried to explain to me once and the list was like 2 or 3 daemons in addition to dhcp, firewall etc.
Your standard was "It's unusable on your fucking home network."
I've set up and managed IPv6 at work before, yes. I don't know if I'd call them "complex" networks though. Either way I set it up at home several years before. And I had been running IPv6 at home before I even bothered setting it up in a way I wanted, as my ISP's box previously had a decently competent SLAAC and IPv6 firewall setup in their CPE router. So that took me 0 minutes of time past plugging it in.
As for this disdain of running such complicated systems like "DNS", so many things support mDNS these days and plenty of home routers will automatically update their local DNS with DHCP entries. I didn't have to manually configure a DNS entry for my printer, I just gave it the hostname "brother" when I first set it up and now when I need to add it, I just do "brother" on a new computer and boom it finds it wherever it is. If I want to check the toner level, I open a browser and go to http://brother and its there. And even though I've radically changed my networking setups over the years, all my configurations pointing to "brother" still just work.
But hey just complain about how it's just impossible and takes so much work instead of actually learning new things.
From the sibling comment:
> No, with ipv4 i can just change the default route :)
Are you suggesting you're running around and changing the default route on all the devices on your network when a gateway goes down? What a nightmare. Just have your router have multiple WAN connections and have it do the failover for you.
> I have absolutely no problem remembering the last byte of any machine on my network
If you want, you can do the same with IPv6. You could set your stuff to have your IP addresses be fd12:3456::1, then fd12:3456::2, then fd12:3456::3, then fd12:3456::4, then fd12:3456::5, etc. Remembering 123456 as your home ULA prefix isn't too challenging, is it? You can then set up an NPT rule like the one above on your router to translate this prefix fd12:3456::/64 with whatever your public prefix is from your ISP. Most wouldn't do this though, as its essentially the Fisher Price of networking designs.
> As for this disdain of running such complicated systems like "DNS"
Disdain? I run a few bind instances for my own domains. On rented servers where they belong. I'm just opposed to having one required for my local network.
"NPt makes perfect sense for SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments." Wait, they agree with me. That there are SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments. Who would have thought?
> running around and changing the default route on all the devices on your network when a gateway goes down? What a nightmare. Just have your router have multiple WAN connections and have it do the failover for you.
It used to be that but I don't think any of my internets has failed since like 2010... mostly keeping them out of inertia. So I've never felt the need to fix the manual failover. It's not all devices anyway, just the one I'm using at the moment.
> But hey just complain about how it's just impossible and takes so much work instead of actually learning new things.
Too many new things to be exact. Most of them needless. However either people have figured out by now how to work around the ipv6 commitee to simplify things, or they were always there but whoever tried to explain ipv6 to me before had a fetish for enterprise solutions. I distinctly remember being told I need to set up at least 2-3 extra services for my dual wan setup.
Your answers are almost devoid of acronyms and "helper" services that i need to set up and learn because it sounds professional. You almost only included firewall rules :)
This was not my opinion of ipv6 before. Maybe I'll give it a chance in the future. My current setup still works "just fine" though so I need to be very bored to fuck it up.
> "NPt makes perfect sense for SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments." Wait, they agree with me.
Well yeah, without implementing BGP and controlling your public prefixes its the only way to have multi-WAN deployments, and chances are home users aren't messing with BGP. Most users will get by fine just adopting their WAN-issued prefixes.
> I don't think any of my internets has failed since like 2010... mostly keeping them out of inertia.
So next time you do some big network maintenance just drop your redundant WAN connection, sounds like you haven't really needed it in 14 years (imagine the thousands of dollars you'll save not keeping it another decade and a half!). Just adopt whatever public prefix you have, and life will be simple.
> Your answers are almost devoid of acronyms and "helper" services
Largely because there aren't really many "helper" services needed if you're willing to adopt some pretty basic network designs. Add DNS/mDNS, and suddenly you don't need to care about the specific numbers of things. Just accept SLAAC, which comes with any Linux/BSD distro/MacOS/Windows/whatever IPv6 embedded stack you've got comes out of the box for the last decade+, and suddenly you'll get publicly routable IP addresses. If you want to access SSH on a box, add a firewall rule for its IP and register its IP in a public DNS, and suddenly its accessible anywhere. You can make any host in your network accessible if you want to. Its nice.
> This was not my opinion of ipv6 before. Maybe I'll give it a chance in the future.
I get there's a lot of new acronyms with it digging deep in docs. I get it sounds like there's a million ways to deploy it. There's a lot to know, if you want to get deep in it. Honestly, if you just kind of loosen your reins a little bit, accept the things that are already shipping on the things you've been running for a decade will just work with the newer dynamic stuff, and adopt DNS, it'll probably be perfectly fine. You probably don't need to install/configure dozens of additional things.
> imagine the thousands of dollars you'll save not keeping it another decade and a half!
Uh well, i'm in eastern europe and the fiber i would give up on is in a package with the cell phones and the tv channels, so i think i wouldn't even notice it missing from the bill. And it's all iptv so I don't think I can have tv without the fiber.
The other pipe is business ish (symmetrical, no restrictions on servers) so I'm not giving up on it, I'm using it to give stuff to customers etc.
> I get there's a lot of new acronyms with it digging deep in docs. I get it sounds like there's a million ways to deploy it.
As i said, last time I asked on some forum (maybe hn, maybe ars technica) i got drowned in acronyms. Most of them for extra daemons to handle ... some config for a larger network, i guess.
And believe it or not, I didn't know until today that you can ignore your ISPs prefix and do address translation with ipv6 :) I thought you use what you get and that's all. Because that was the promise of ipv6 wasn't it? No more NAT.
If I want to manually assign addresses it's still pretty simple, but in the end I normally just don't care. I don't want to know what IP my printer is, I just want to reach it. Which isn't a challenge at all. Even for things at my home that are IPv4 only they're practically all DHCP. Because there's little reason to ever really care about something's address.
> Can you ssh/other forms of remote into any machine that accepts ssh on your local network using only ipv6?
I have no problems reaching any host on any of my networks even if they're running only IPv6. It's nice too because I can trivially reach any port I want globally as well with a basic firewall change. Even better I can have one host have many IP addresses with different services bound to each address if I want.
> Can you redirect ports to specific local machines using only ipv6 (that implies they keep constant addresses)?
Why do any port redirection at all? Just set the firewall rule and things can hit it. And yeah, they can keep constant addresses. They can have dozens, hundreds of static host addresses if I want.
> Can you easily switch between two internet connections going through different routers that are plugged into the same switch for any machine on your local network using only ipv6?
If that's something you're really wanting, Network Prefix Translation can be done pretty easily. But the vast majority of home users aren't using dual WAN anyways.
> This is all easily doable with ipv4 in like two afternoons
Sounds like your setup with IPv4 took more work than mine with IPv6, as mine only took me an hour or so while yours took multiple days.