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by _eht 1262 days ago
> Personally, I'm very positive about IPv6. I find a lot to like in the protocol

Please expand on this (besides ‘wow such large numbers’…). I’ll take my answer off the air.

3 comments

The best thing is autoconfiguration, of course.

It not evident if you are an admin of localhost, but working with hundreds devices make you really appreciate it.

This is the whole config what allows the device to talk to IPv6 and provide IPv6 addresses to the clients in the vlan3003. No DHCP, no ip helpers, nothing.

    interface Vlan2999
     ipv6 address 2000:1111:1:1::2/126
    !
    interface Vlan3003
     ipv6 address 2000:1111:1:4::1/64
    !
    ip forward-protocol nd
    !
    ipv6 route ::/0 2000:1111:1:1::1
> in case anyone is wondering why IPv6 is where it’s at after a decade

But.. I'm tired to juggle this nonsense. We have /21, a couple of /24 and a bunch of /28. I recently decided to move out our services from /21 and /24 to some specific /28 and despite what all those /28 are pretty close (most of them sits in one /23) I can't have a few laconic network rules with aggregates for separating our own and customers traffic. I would need to have a whole let of rules, almost for each /28.

VMs able to assign themselves an address via SLAAC without involving DHCP is lovely
I enjoy how RA handles address assignment. I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded (almost private), like how internet v1 once did. I like it when the lightbulbs go off the first time I get a service working.

I like feeling like a member of the club.

> I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded…

^^ in case anyone is wondering why IPv6 is where it’s at after a decade…

Sigh.

I don't see anything wrong with this being a pro.

At a previous company I worked at, this was literally the impetus for going IPv6. We were in a regional business and were growing by acquiring companies in other regions. Every new company we acquired, we had the major pain of making the networks talk. Almost everyone is using 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8. IP conflicts were a given, and re-address networks was a big painful operation. NATs were an option, but came with their own permanent complications. IPv6 made it go away. If the new site already had IPv6, collisions were still a non-issue, and if they didn't, well getting them IPv6 ready was easier than re-address everything. Once they were IPv6 ready we could go ahead and establish VPNs, and with most traffic now going over IPv6 we could re-address IPv4 without causing significant outages.

IPv6 has other advantages, better multicast, better routing, flow labeling, automatic link-local addressing, but the large IP space is definitely the elephant in the room.