[rb808]

At least Python3 brings an improvement. I still can't think of a good reason I should spend any time trying to figure out IPv6. Maybe my external router has to think about it, but that is about it.

Edit: If you down vote me please say why I should care about IPv6

[Fr0styMatt88]

The main mental stumbling block I have about IPv6 (and I know it's kind of a silly one, but it's honestly what I feel on introspection) is that I can't remember an IPv6 address off by heart. IPv4 addresses just _feel_ so much more human-consumable than IPv6 addresses. I can't imagine myself using IPv6 addresses on the command line like I do with IPv4 now.

There's also the issue that honestly, I have no idea what is using IPv6 and what's using IPv4 right now. On my internal network I only ever deal with IPv4, but I have no intuition as to what is using IPv6; I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if my ISP supports it.

[deathanatos]

> is that I can't remember an IPv6 address off by heart. IPv4 addresses just _feel_ so much more human-consumable than IPv6 addresses.

Stop remembering numbers meant for a machine, and use DNS. It will make your life so much easier. I spend ~$15/yr for my personal DNS name & hosting, and I never want to memorize an IPv4 or v6 address ever again.

> I have no idea what is using IPv6 and what's using IPv4 right now.

Any "end" machine (laptop, tablet, phone, server) is going to be dual stack, supporting both IPv4 and IPv6. If it is able to auto-configure an address, then it will use those. Otherwise, it won't. If a domain is IPv4-only, it'll use the IPv4 address. All of this is automatic.

The big issue, for home consumers, is that a lot of ISPs are dragging their feet. They don't need anything from the customers — they just need to get it deployed & turned on. Generally, typing "what is my IP address?" into Google will tell you if you have working IPv6; it will display an IPv6 address if you do.

In the cloud… some cloud vendors have been dragging their feet about rolling support out. You need to do some things, like associate an AAAA record to your domain (s.t. it resolves to an IPv6 address), and make sure things like logging can handle the new addresses, or if you implement IP blocking, that you can block those addresses/networks. If you're writing network code, you need to check that you're not assumptions about the socket type. You can also do things like HTTP proxy from an IPv6 connection to an IPv4 VLAN, e.g., I think w/ an ELB. That is,

  client <-- HTTP/IPv6 --> ELB <-- HTTP/IPv4 --> backend server

which allows a partial upgrade. None of it is terribly hard, but typical project management puts upgrading to future tech in the perpetual backlog.

[gjulianm]

> Stop remembering numbers meant for a machine, and use DNS

This is not a good solution. A lot of times people use IPs because DNS is not available or is more complex to set up. Say you are:

- Setting up and configuring a network. - Setting up the firewall. - Inspecting traffic and seeing where it goes. - Verifying that the DNS resolutions are being done correctly.

Most people already use DNS, because it's more comfortable. But anything that requires working with the network is now going to be much more complicated. For example, I can remember some network prefixes and know whether they are in building A or building B. IPv6 makes that much, much more difficult.

Also, the numbers are not even that well meant for a machine. Text representation of IPv4 is easy to detect. IPv6 representation? Good luck with that.

All of that because of the decision of using 128 bits instead of 64. 2^64 address would be more than enough, representable without issues in usual data types (uint64_t is a standard C type, uint128_t is not) and the problem of ipv6 representation would be far less relevant.

[nybble41]

> A lot of times people use IPs because DNS is not available or is more complex to set up.

For the rare cases where a memorized IPv4 address was reasonable you should just assign simple IPv6 addresses ending in a short suffix like ::1. The prefix can be 64 bits or less, which isn't too much to remember, and will be the same for the entire network.

> For example, I can remember some network prefixes and know whether they are in building A or building B. IPv6 makes that much, much more difficult.

Nothing prevents you from assigning visually distinctive prefixes to different buildings. The larger address space actually makes this much easier. For example, you could use xxxx:yyyy:zzzz:a::/64 for every host in building A.

[p1mrx]

> Text representation of IPv4 is easy to detect. IPv6 representation? Good luck with that.

This regex will detect any IPv6 address:

    ([0-9A-Fa-f]*:){2}[0-9A-Fa-f:.]*

Then you can feed matches to a real address parser to filter out false positives.

[izacus]

Even if ISPs aren't dragging their feed, the home routers are lacking a giant amount of features on IPv6 stack, which are still needed even for basic users.

E.g.: - My Mikrotik will not to any kind of routing acceleration for IPv6 so throughput on GBit FTTH (which is standard offering here) will be significantly slower.

- There's no way to autoconfigure firewall (so no UPnP-like technology to enable voice calls and gaming).

- There's no way to statically assign addresses or autoconfigure firewall for automatically configured ones.

- There's no builtin way to push your own DNS to configure things like pihole.

So even a "simple" techy guy setup where you have a home NAS and a few machines that need to drill holes through the firewall is almost completely impossible on pretty much any router affordable for home use.

[pjc50]

You're correct that the ISPs are dragging their feet, despite it allegedly being for their benefit - but exactly the same breakage risks apply. The cost/benefit tradeoff doesn't look good to them.

I just bought a new router. https://www.asus.com/uk/Networking/DSLAC68U/ It doesn't support IP6.

[deathanatos]

> I just bought a new router. https://www.asus.com/uk/Networking/DSLAC68U/ It doesn't support IP6. (sic)

That's not what your link says:

> while power users will love its IPv6 support

[downerending]

It sounds like you don't need to, and honestly, after all of these years I still don't know much about it either, because I haven't needed to.

One could argue that this is actually a significant benefit of IPv6, in practice.