Basically what the title says. Here’s the thing: address exhaustion is a solved problem. NAT already took care of this via RFC 1631. While initially presented as a temporary fix, anyone who thinks it’s going anywhere at this point is simply wrong. Something might replace IPv4 as the default at some point, but it’s not going to be IPv6.
And then there are the downsides of IPv6:
- Not all legacy equipment likes IPv6. Yes, there’s a lot of it out there.
- “Nobody” remembers an IPv6 address. I know my IPv4 address, and I’m sure many others do too. Do you know your IPv6 address, though?
- Everything already supports IPv4
- For IPv6 to fully replace IPv4, practically everything needs to move over. De facto standards don’t change very easily. There’s a reason why QWERTY keyboards, ASCII character tables, and E-mail are still around, despite alternatives technically being “better”.
- Dealing with dual network stacks in the interim is annoying.
Sure, IPv6 is nice and all. But as an addition rather than as a replacement. I’ve disabled it by default for the past 10 years, as it tends to clutter up my ifconfig overview, and I’ve had no ill effects.
Source: Network engineer.
Thank you.
I’ve said this repeatedly in many communities and it’s like I killed the golden goose - people lose their minds.
I disable IP6 everywhere - my router NATs everything as it is, why have another protocol running if I don’t use it?
We’ll see what the future brings.
I’d be somewhat lenient when it comes to IPv6 if it used 64 bit addresses instead of 128bit. It would still not be needed thanks to NAT, CIDR and DHCP, but at least a 64bit address space is more manageable.
It’s great for backbone and public address space - and maybe in enterprise, but there it’s a costly transition that won’t happen immediately. Things will change as hardware ages out and is replaced.
New infrastructure will be mostly IP6.
And when people leave the office, their machines will connect to, and transit IP4 networks, so they’ll still need to address how everything works over IP4 (say VPN connections, any hardware/software that’s still IP4 dependent in the data centers, etc).
There’s been only one real purpose of v6 that I’ve seen being the reason to switch: v4 running out of available addresses. Never seen anything else about v6 being used as any kind of reason to switch. So the only reason we’d ever go over to v6 is because we have to, not because we want to.
I’m a web developer and I’ve never once used an IPv6 address for any circumstance. My ISP doesn’t use IPv6 either in my region (Starlink).
I’ve got Starlink and IPv6 works fine. That’s the only way I can host anything since IPv4 is CGNAT. You have to use your own router for IPv6 since theirs is a piece of junk.
My cell carrier is T-mobile and it’s IPv6 only. They do have some sort of translator for accessing legacy sites though.
IPv6 should be available for you to use on starlink. You may need to set up your router to use it.
I have a decently-sized homelab, and a large home network. I also have IPv6 disabled everywhere. Compared to a normal home network, my config is very complex. (Extensive firewall and routing rules, multiple gateways, multiple subnets and VLANs, inbound traffic filtering, and plenty more.) With the exception of VLANs, IPv6 would require reconfiguring EVERYTHING. What’s the advantage?
You don’t remember a ipv4 either
172.26.0.37. That’s the IP of the frggin’ Kyocera printer that takes way too many clicks to configure for every new user. And we get new users… about bi-monthly, which you’d think isn’t that bad, but that interface is downright kafkian.
I don’t remember the router’s IP. I more often than not don’t remember the DNS servers. But that thing… that thing I remember.
