[neurostimulant]

Is there any tips on how to make IPv6 easier to use for typical day-to-day network administration? One advantage of using IPv4 is addresses are easier to memorize, so when you're building a network, you can keep track of everything in your head. I think this might be a major reason people dread setting up an IPv6 network, at least for me.

[MayeulC]

Usually your ISP delegates a /56 or more to you.

From what I've seen, it looks like /64 are thought of as a vlan, within which clients can perform SLAAC.

For static IPs, I usually concatenate /56 + :id: + :suffix:.

Like: home computers on /56 + ::1 + SLAAC. Most OSes will dynamically change their IPs for privacy reasons.

My servers are on /56 + ::0 + :100,101,102, etc. I generally pick these suffixes to match with the IPv4 addresses, but you can allocate one per service, and get rid of reverse proxies (easier migration, you can just move the service to a new machine).

So, to take a specific example, 2a01:cb14:d6e:2000/56 is my ISP prefix, which can be thought of as the external IP, and 2a01:cb14:d6e:2000::11 is my server. 2a01:cb14:d6e:2001::/64 could be computers. I don't always follow the above scheme, IPv6 is big enough to get away with a lot of things, but it helps having something to default to.

My point is: you don't have to remember the prefix anyway, since every computer in the network will share it. Now, if you need static, easy to remember IPs instead of SLAAC, use static IPs or DHCPv6, or even better, mDNS to resolve .local addresses to IPs.

Looking at the above, this assumes a certain level of trust on the local network, which is fine at home or within a network dedicated to servers, but might not be at a company? mDNS can lie, someone else might advertise the same IP. These problems are not exclusive to IPv6, but they are a product of the era. Nowadays, I wish we just used crypto key routing (like yggdrasil does, and maybe TOR) on a planetwide mesh network, but we'll need IPv6 in the meantime :)

[BlueTemplar]

:: shortcuts or domain names. Also, AFAIK you're not supposed to be using fixed IPv6 suffixes, for security reasons.

(Some people even advocate that consumer router IPv6 firewalls should be opt-in – which millions of them still are – and as you can guess with how opt-in works with consumers, the overwhelming majority of them therefore use IPv6 without a firewall.)

[wjdp]

Run a DNS server linked to your DHCP. I have a Pi-Hole set up which maps every device on the network to <hostname>.mydomain.uk.

If I don't like the hostname (some IoT devices don't allow changing it) I can map a different name to that MAC address.

(I still use v4 and have no need to remember more than 2 IPs. Should make migration to v6 much easier.)

[growse]

I find v6 addresses no more difficult to remember that v4. It's a question of what you're used to and what you practice, both of which take time and exposure.

I can tell you the prefixes on my home ADSL connection, but not necessarily the ipv4 subnet, just because I work with the V6 addresses so much more often.

[mnd999]

Make them memorable then - Facebook do:

host -6 www.facebook.com www.facebook.com is an alias for star-mini.c10r.facebook.com. star-mini.c10r.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:f158:82:face:b00c:0:25de