| > - broadcasts for address discovery have been replaced by multicast which is much harder for switches to handle correctly Multicast is sent to a broadcast address and replicated to all ports. If the switch doesn't do any IGMP snooping, multicast and broadcast are the exact same thing. > - address discovery is now mostly handled via SLAAC which is different from how it worked via DHCP and also doesn't universally allow setting name servers which then will still require DHCP to actually get a working network (if you run v6 only), so now you have two daemons running when in v4 you only needed one. SLAAC now has support (and all major operating systems support it) for sending DNS servers down as information in the router advertisement. I do not run a DHCPv6 server on my local network and all my systems get my local DNS information without issues > - hosts are multi-homed by default and rely heavily on multi-homedness which might invalidate some assumptions you had when configuring hosts. This was also the case in IPv4, nothing new here. > - for a network to be meaningfully useable, you need working name resolution because while you can remember v4 addresses and v4 address assignments, this is impossible for v6 addresses Even in IPv4 no-one tends to remember IP's, we have solutions for that like systems automatically announcing themselves on the local network using mDNS. > - and in a similar vein: Subnetting is harder because the addresses are much less memorable. If you want to subnet a 10.- v4 network, in many cases, you can do this in very memorable full-byte chunks. There is no subnetting. Just give the local network a /64. > - also subnetting: due to many ISPs still doing /64 allocations to their customers If you are a home users with a single flat network, that is all you need. If you are a power user and need multiple networks, your ISP probably has a way to do a prefix delegation request that is larger. > Worse, some ISPs only do a /128 assignment (one address) Name and shame them... the /128 should only be for the external customer gateway, and is not strictly necessary. Most ISP's allow you to ask for an IA_NA for a single address, and an IA_PD for a prefix delegation. > - v6 relies on ICMP much more heavily but this fact has not propagated to default firewall settings, so in many default "let me turn on the firewall" configs, your v6 network will break in mysterious ways. v4 also breaks in mysterious ways when you just blindly firewall ICMPv4. It's the reason we have so many dumb work-arounds for MTU issues because "ahhhhh, firewall all the things" > there's no widely-supported equivalent to UPNP or NAT-PMP UPnP and NAT-PMP were replaced with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Control_Protocol which was standardized in 2013. > So while v6 is much easier to handle on a global scale, it's at the same time much harder to handle at your local site I completely disagree. IPv6 is as simple to deploy as IPv4, and in fact because everything now has a globally unique IP address is makes routing so much simpler. |