The question above for the most part, been reading up on it. Also want to it for learning purposes.

  • tburkhol@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Definitely dual stack if you do. The real benefit of IPv6 is that, supposedly, each of your internal devices can have its own address and be directly accessible, but I don’t think anyone actually wants all of their internal network exposed to the internet. My ISP provides IPv6, but only a single /128 address, so everything still goes through NAT.

    Setting it up was definitely a learning process - SLAAC vs DHCP; isc’s dhcpd uses all different keywords for 6 vs 4, you have to run 6 and 4 in separate processes. It’s definitely doable, but I think the main benefit is the knowledge you gain.

    • designatedhacker@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Your ISP is doing it wrong, which I guess you already know. I get a /64 net via DHCPv6 for my LAN which is pretty standard.

      +1 to dual stack. Too much of the internet is v4 only, missing AAAA, or various other issues. I’ve also had weird issues where a Google/Nest speaker device would fail 50% of the time and other streaming devices act slow/funky. Now I know that means the V6 net is busted and usually I have to manually release/renew. Happens once every few months, but not in a predictable interval.

      Security is different, but not worse IMO. It’s just a firewall and router instead of a NAT being added in. A misconfigured firewall or enabling UPnP is still a bad idea with potentially worse consequences.

      Privacy OTOH is worse. It used to be that each device included a hardware MAC as part of a statelessly generated address. They fixed that on most devices. Still, each device in your house may end up with a long lived (at least as long as your WAN lease time) unique IP that is exposed to whatever sites you visit. So instead of a unique IP per household with IPv4 and NAT, it’s per network device. Tracking sites can differentiate multiple devices in the house across sites.

      This has me thinking I need to investigate more on how often my device IPv6 (or WAN lease subnet) addresses change.

      • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        I get a fat /48 network, just in case I need one septillion, two hundred and eight sextillion, nine hundred and twenty-five quintillion, eight hundred and nineteen quadrillion, six hundred and fourteen trillion, six hundred and twenty-nine billion, one hundred and seventy-four million, seven hundred and six thousand and one hundred and seventy-six individual IPs.

        IPV6 is pretty wild, we could effectively give every service connecting to every client, in every direction, for every single individual bit its own dedicated address without getting anywhere near using that address space.

    • Katrina@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      And the biggest disadvantage of IPv6 is that each of your internal devices has its own address and can be directly accessible from outside. So you need to completely rethink how you do security.

      • thanevim@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Isn’t that what tburkhol addressed in their first paragraph? Or are you suggesting further steps than just putting those devices behind NAT? I am not at all trying to be snarky, I actually want to know more about this.

      • lemming007@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        And can be identified/tracked individually by outside entities. In IPv4, a website sees both my device and my kid’s device as the same IP. In IPv6 they’re different so this just provides more ways for them to track you.

  • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Depends on how you define “worth it”. Most selfhosting is done not for worth, but for a hobby.

  • dan@upvote.au
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    1 year ago

    There’s a bunch if 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.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        1 year ago

        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, you could give each container 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.

        • rehabdoll@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          A good isp would give you something bigger than a /64 - /56 or /48. something that you can subnet.

          • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            wouldn’t /64 still leave you with 64 bits for you to do whatever? Ipv6 has a 128 bit address. If you can do subnets with a small usable portion of 32 bits, then you certainly can with a full 64 bits

            • busturn@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The smallest recommended IPv6 subnet is /64. The biggest issue you will encounter is that SLAAC will refuse to work on anything smaller, and it just so happens that Android still doesn’t support DHCPv6 and will be left without a valid address.

  • activator90@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I tried converting my internal and external self hosted setup to IPv6 only, like it’s the trend nowadays. But halfway through it I couldn’t really see the point

  • dud3@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Dual-Stack is usually no problem, but going IPv6-only is a pain, because a suprising amount of services are v4 only. Even NAT64/DNS64 doesn’t help everywhere.

  • Oxff@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    IPv6 is the future so I’d say yes. Dual stack is the way to go. If you can get public address block from your ISP thats great. If not I’d recommend HE tunnel or something similar. Just remember to firewall as ever device is reachable in most configurations.

  • mvee@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    No, I like living in my nat cocoon so I don’t have to worry as much about all the devices on my network. Jk it’s turned on, but I don’t usually enable it on devices

  • BaldProphet@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • empireOfLove@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    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”.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Fireduck@lem.trashbrain.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m lazy and don’t want to remember more than three digits in an IP address or secure all my devices like they’re publicly routable so I’m sticking with IPv4

  • tvcvt@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There’s a pretty interesting series on the topic at Tall Paul Tech’s YouTube channel (here’s the most recent: https://youtu.be/WFso88w2SiM). He goes into quite a bit of detail over the course of a few videos about how he handled everything and highlights some of the trials and tribulations with the isp. It’s not a guide per se, but definitely stuff worth thinking through.

  • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
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        1 year ago

        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 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!

        • operator@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Thanks! That was really insightful. I guess I’ll give it a try some day, for now everything runs in ipv4 and that runs well haha!

  • preasket@lemy.lol
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    1 year ago

    There’s another question: will we ever actually run out of IPv4 addresses, so that cloud providers and ISPs no longer offer them?

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 year ago

      That’s already happened, which is why some providers use CGNAT. CGNAT is “carrier-grade NAT” which means the internet provider does NAT on their network.

      Only having CGNAT with no IPv6 is a pain since you can’t do any port forwarding. It’s double-NAT which slows things down a bit (you use NAT in your network, then your ISP uses NAT on their network).

      • preasket@lemy.lol
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        1 year ago

        Ah, I never encountered that. I see. Is it mostly in remote areas?

        I’m all for IPv6, it’s just that there’s always something extra you have to do to set it up.

        • porksandwich9113@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s really common in cellular connections as well as smaller regional ISPs. I work for a rural fiber co-op with about 50,000 members/customers and we do CGNAT for all our members by default because we only have about 36,000 IPs allocated to us. We also have full ipv6 support as well with every customer getting a /56.

          To get a big enough block for all our enterprise/business/residential customers to do 1:1 NAT for ipv4 would probably require an entire /16 which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million dollars last I checked. And even then we would eventually run out because we are constantly expanding to cover rural areas that have been ignored for decades by the big ISPs. Right now if a member needs a static or routable we just charge 10$ a month, and we have enough in reserve for all our members to operating like this likely until the entire internet abandons ipv4.

          • innercitadel@lemmy.nz
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            1 year ago

            Why do some ISPs charge a monthly fee and others a one off fee? I paid one off with my ISP several years ago for my static IPv4.

            • porksandwich9113@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Honestly I don’t have a good answer for that. The ones who charge a one time fee are honestly being pretty generous (depending on the price you paid) considering there are yearly dues to ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/etc for IP allocations depending on their aggregate block size as well as the fact that IPs are generally very valuable right now, and go up in value depending on the block size.

              If they have a legacy registration they also don’t have to pay those dues, though the downside is they don’t get the newer features like RPKI without signing a LRSA/RSA (and therefor paying those dues) and getting their routes certified. Usually doesn’t cause an issue as not many peers drop unvalidated BGP prefixes on IPv4.

              That being said, if your ISP has been in the game for decades, they probably have owned their blocks for decades and got them for pennies on the dollar when ARIN and other registries were handing out IP addresses like candy. I know the last /24 my company had to buy cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $14,000 when it was all said and done, and that was just for 256 IPs.

              Eventually IPv4 addresses will become so prohibitively expensive, that is what will eventually push mass IPv6 adoption on the ASN side of things.

              • innercitadel@lemmy.nz
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                1 year ago

                Thank you that was really informative. I paid <$50 for my IP address in 2015. My ISP has been around since 1990 so I suppose they may have been one of the lucky companies. Not sure if they do RPKI, first I’m learning of it. Maybe they’re cross subsidizing from other areas of the business. Their monthly fibre fee isn’t the most competitive but the service is reliable and haven’t had anything to complain about.

                They are a little behind in speeds though. They only offer 900mbps asymmetrical max, while you can get 2, 4 and 8gbit in my area from other providers. I don’t need that kind of speed so I’m happy for now.

        • orangeboats@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Living in the APNIC region, we are kinda notorious for being the first region to run out of IPv4 addresses.

          The top 3 mobile ISPs in my country here have been doing CGNAT since at least 2014. Cable ISPs are limiting public IPv4 according to plans since at least 2017, i.e. if the download speed of your plan is below 200Mbps , you get CGNATed.

          We are severely out of IPv4 addresses.

        • splendoruranium@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          You’ve very likely already encountered it if you have a device with a SIM card! Most any mobile provider routes via a CGNAT - it’s exceedingly rare for phones to have public IPs.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          1 year ago

          Not sure which country you’re in, but CGNAT is pretty common in some European countries. ARIN had a larger stockpile of IPv4 addresses than APNIC and RIPE, so CGNAT is less common in the USA and Canada. The US is also generally further ahead in terms of IPv6 rollout compared to other countries. One of the largest ISPs, Comcast, has been IPv6-enabled for over 10 years.