Is anybody using only IPv6 in their home lab? I keep running into weird problems where some services use only IPv6 and are “invisible” to everyone (I’m looking at you, Java!) I end up disabling IPv6 to force everything to the same protocol, but I started wondering, “why not disable IPv4 instead?” I’d have half as many firewall rules, routes and configurations. What are the risks?
Lets say you have a bunch of self hosted servers. How are you tracking their ips on ipv6? Are you able to type the ip off the top of your head? I feel like its very simple with ipv4.
How are you tracking their ips on ipv6?
Are you able to type the ip off the top of your head?
I write them down, just as I do v4. I don’t type v4 off the top of my head any more than I do v6- but even if I did, I’d only have to really memorize the prefix because that’s all universal across my whole network. For example, look at this that I ripped from my documentation:
== PROXMOX CONTAINERS & VIRTUAL MACHINES ======================
C:TorRelay - 192.168.78.160 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::12ad
C:Gonic - 192.168.78.161 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1255
C:Wireguard - 192.168.78.162 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1666
V:ADS-B - 192.168.78.163 / NA
C:Apache - 192.168.78.164 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1337
C:Backups - 192.168.78.165 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::0107
C:PiHole - 192.168.78.166 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1811
C:NetworkFun - 192.168.78.167 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1192
C:MovieSync - 192.168.78.168 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::2356
C:Owncast - 192.168.78.170 / 2a05:f6c7:8039::1368
Do you see the pattern? I could have made it even simpler. I could’ve made the last quartet of the v6 address the same as the last octet of the v4 address, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I’ve memorized more credit cards than I have IP addresses in total, which you will surely agree are more complex, so I’m not worried about when the time comes to drop v4 and its time to memorize v6. It will come naturally with use, as the credit cards have
In practice, I’ve found, that it is simply not a problem. If I don’t know the last quartet off the top of my head, I won’t know the last octet either so I have to look it up anyway. All my network documentation is available with a simple curl command. If I do know the last quartet but not the prefix, I could type ‘ip a’ and find the prefix right there.
