Remember guys, using GIFs of Racoon's in a discussion is ok, as long as you keep them below 1mb.

Holy shit, year of the IPv6??

(I know this was 2025)

Doesn't IPv6 offer less privacy?

Edit: thanks for the answers! Guess it's a misconception.

Although ipv4 addresses still are easier to remember...

No.

Only if you disable the pseudo address generation that is enabled by default on modern OSs.

Anyone got that racoon gif?

Oh boy I can’t wait to tell my parents to go to fff8::ab298:42cab3:187daq::1 to get to their router.

I hate IPv6 so fucking much.

I had to write an address validator and sanitizer once. Never again what the fuck were they thinking with the short forms?

I do like having a lot more addresses, that’s great. The short forms, embedded ipv4, bridges, etc are confusing as hell. Oh, also, you have to add that all to your email validator script, enjoy!

Actually, it's probably at http://[fd00::1]/

we can thank the cell phone industrys use of IPv6 in the cell network for saving IPv4 for everyone else

Unless it’s not and then we get alphanumeric soup

It'll have a QR code printed on it.
That won't take you to the router's web server.
It'll take you to the play store to download the app. Which requires Play Services and access to your exact location, contacts, storage, call history and messages, just to set up your router.

No.

There are short forms in ipv4 as well, also you don't actually need it. 😝

Well you could accept the default generated one, or set it to fe80::1 manually. Don't most good routers now have a DNS server in? So you could make it router.local or something?

I think some even by default make a DNS entry call router.local or similar pointing to themselves. This isn't a real problem and if IPv6 were adopted fully, then all routers would likely come with something like this setup anyway.

true, sometimes I use 127.1 instead of 127.0.0.1 and I have some coworkers that don't know the 0 is optional and are wtf.

Does anyone have some kind of beginner's guide to transition a home network from v4 to v6? Everything I found is way too technical.

Asking here but feel free to direct me to a more appropriate sub

IPv6. No. Badly configured IPv6 routers, yes. But that's something that would fix itself if it became the only protocol in use. And most routers now are pretty good at it from what I've seen. But it used to be the case it was easy to find bad routers.

The myth seems to be that NAT provides security. But a good default configuration for consumer routers would give the same security as NAT while providing the advantages and extra security IPv6 provides.

IPv6 usually has privacy extensions enabled. Which means it will generate throwaway IP addresses that rotate regularly for your outgoing connections, these IPs do not accept incoming connections. So someone cannot nmap you to find open ports based on the IP you connected to their server with.

Not to mention that most ISPs give each user more IPs than the whole IPv4 internet has. So, port scanning an entire /64 is not going to be fun.

Oh, you have opinions on HRT? I'm taking away your IPv4 privileges.

The thing is. Any year can be the year of IPv6. Google is on ipv6, youtube is on ipv6, facebook is on ipv6. Pretty much every datacentre I've used (OK limited to Europe) give you IPv6 for free by default. Deploying a web site to be IPv4 and IPv6 is trivial and people that use automation should be able to quite easily apply ipv6 to those scripts.

It's really just the ISPs (more so in the US as I understand it), lazy IT people and the FUD myths holding us back at this point.

Is this for real

In one word: no. In more words: some addressing methods can lead to privacy and security issues, but those aren't widely used anymore.

IPv6 addresses can be assigned to interfaces by several systems. One of those is SLAAC, or stateless address auto-configuration (comparable to APIPA and the 169.254.0.0/16 address space for IPv4). One method by which it generates globally unique routable addresses is by inserting the interface's MAC address into the IPv6 address. Since IPv6 generally doesn't use network address translation (and thus no masquerading), this would advertise your computer's MAC address to the whole internet. More recently, SLAAC uses pseudorandom temporary (or "privacy") addresses for interfaces, together with a unique network prefix assigned to the customer (analogous to the single public IPv4 address).

It's also possible to assign IPv6 addresses statically or by using DHCPv6.

MFW I first got my current router and went to set it up and couldn't find the factory ID and password on it anywhere. Then realized it was on a damn app now. Which was bad enough, but after jumping through all the hoops, I discovered that (to no surprise really) what you can set up is very limited.

Sure I should buy my own router or flash an older one... but then again the last bad storm that fried the router this one replaced, the ISP replaced it at no charge. So... I live with it, I guess.

IPv6
2026

Well, at least the last digit fits. Better now than in 10 Years 😉

It is real. The missing spots are filled with zeros so it works out the same.

In theory, no.

In practice, yes.

DNS never has problems and always works. /s

I have quite a lot of opinions on HRT (Hormone replacement Therapy)

I'm here to listen. Talk all about HRT.

But then they can have like a bajillion devices connected to their router without any collisions!

Wouldn't it be more sensible to invest in some surge protection, if that's an issue where you are?

I'm here for the notification. I also want to know.

Now if only my ISP (Quantum Fiber/Century Link/AT&T) would offer native IPv6.

Email verification is the validator! Just send that sucker.

Yes. Now try 0177.0x1.

I'm pretty sure that IPv4 address formats are more complicated than IPv6 forms, if you are actually doing RFC-compliant validation.

Meh, it doesn't really offer anything for a home network.

And this is why it really hasn't be adopted even by business - there's already a network in place that works. Migrating to 6 doesn't offer any meaningful benefit to balance the effort and risk of the change.

Now if you're an SMB with 3 servers and a handful of computers, would you spend what little IT money you have making this change?

And if you're an enterprise with a thousand servers and tens of thousands of users, are you making this change?

Imagine the cost of reconfiguring routers, and the outages you'd experience doing this.

There's just no pressing urgency to change, and LOTS of cost and risk to do so.

it would still the ISP router be the one that connects to the network outside the building, so chances are that if it comes again over tge network cable, it will still only fry the ISP router

mDNS (.local) is a fairly new thing, and not everything supports it well unfortunately.

shouldn't fe80::1 always just work if IPv6 is enabled?

Good points, the difference being NAT crossing requires something on the inside to enable it, while IP6 security requires the consumer router to be properly configured.

And I disagree with the assumption that badly configured routers won't exist if IP6 were the default. Bad design doesn't magically go away.

The bottom line is small LANs don't benefit from IP6 today. Large LANS don't benefit because they already have extensive IP4 configuration in place, and attempting to migrate is costly, risky, and without a clear benefit to offset those costs and risks.

Most likely enterprises may use 6 on new networks, but even that is questionable when so many extant products still rely on 4 - you don't want to create a problem for those systems.

Well... Let's say Linus goes on with his idea of removing IPv4 support. And let's say I have just a handful of devices that support IPv6. And a long eastern weekend to do the switch. And I'm no SMB nor do I answer to shareholders...?

And if you're in a larger company, you're the guy or team that gets blamed for every. goddamn. network. problem. that happens after the transition.

Fuck that.

Love me some IPv6. With mDNS and link local addresses, can get two hosts talking either directly connected or with just an unmanaged switch.

I'm gonna stick with DNS

If you set the ip of the router to fe80::1 then anything directly connected should be fine to connect using that address.

I'll admit that I still use v4, but only because I didn't have a compelling reason to switch. That said, this feels like the kinda reaction I would have had were I in his shoes. 😂

No idea if it was this one, but I find it amusing

https://tenor.com/view/hyrax-tomato-funny-chew-teeth-gif-11208825867329472649

Does github support ipv6 yet?

And neither does DHCP.

Silly racoon, that's not how you abacus.