Recently, there was a Mastodon post from [nixCraft] challenging people to drop their NAT routers for the month of November and use only IPv6. What would it be like to experience “No NAT November?” [Alex Haydock] decided to find out.
What did he learn? You’d imagine he’d either wholeheartedly embrace IPv6 or stagger back in and warn everyone not to mess with their configuration. Instead, he recommends you go IPv6 mostly. He notes he is only talking about a home network, not necessarily networks for a big company or an Internet carrier. That’s a different topic.
IPv6 has been around since 1998, but it has been slow to catch on. However, OS support seems universal at this point. [Alex] was able to easily switch on IPv6 only using Windows, macOS, and several Linux flavors. He didn’t use any Android devices, but they should be OK. His iOS phones were fine.
Where he did have problems was with embedded devices like the Nintendo Switch and a Steam Deck — surprising, since the Steam Deck uses Linux. Actually, the Steam device does support IPV6, it just thinks that if it doesn’t have an IPv4 network, the network must be down.
Some home networking gear also required IPv4 addresses to use their management interfaces. That’s especially funny since the devices clearly know about IPv6. They just don’t serve web pages over their IPv6 address.
Unfortunately, there are many websites that do not have IPV6 servers. That’s not as rare as you might think and [Alex] points out offenders like GitHub, Reddit, Discord, and Steam. No IPv4, no access to those and many other sites.
So despite being No NAT November, it was necessary to set up a NAT64 gateway to read IPv4-only websites. However, unlike normal IPv4 NAT (NAT44), you can use a NAT64 gateway anywhere on the network. [Alex’s] ISP hosts a NAT64 and DNS64 instance and that solved his problem.
The post goes on about other specific cases — if you’ve ever even thought about IPv6, it is worth a read. Switching over? Probably not yet, but as [Alex] points out, with a little work and perseverance, it is possible.
In addition to our earlier coverage of why IPv6 isn’t more popular, we’ve also made the arguments about why it should be.
“IPv6 has been around since 1998, but it has been slow to catch on. However, OS support seems universal at this point.”
DOS, including FreeDOS is still on TCP/IP v4.
Links, Lynx/DOSLynx, Dillo, Arachne, MicroWeb v2 – they rely on TCP/IP v4.
I have not used a mouse since 1996 when I got my first laptop. It’s the touchpad all the way!
Some of these stories are so dumb.
Lets have a no flash drive Feb, or lets have a no mouse March..
Network engineer here, and even I think this is ‘tarded beyond belief.
Tell me you’re bored without telling me you’re bored.
Famously, mice and flash drives are running out of address space
I thought IPV6 was so we could put our fridges and toasters on the Internet.
Correct. IPV6 was invented to eliminate network administrators. All your devices are pawned by someone else. It’s the equivalent to giving all the prisoners a full set of keys to the prison because, using logic, the locks are all super secure so everyone is guaranteed safety. You don’t need firewalls in the corporate world because everyone has a secure key to the unfettered internet. Nirvana.
“No mouse March” is a fantastic idea.
Flush out the apps that can’t be fully used without a mouse. Pretty much anything other than CAD or image manipulation should have enough hotkeys and tabstops to access every feature.
At least once a week I accidentally create a bookmark on my work-issued Mac (because that’s the hotkey that puts the cursor in the address bar on my personal machines) and then Chrome won’t let me dismiss the confirmation dialog without taking a hand off the keyboard. The really annoying thing is that until a few months ago it was possible to dismiss that dialog with a tab or two and a spacebar.
And No Touchscreen Tuesday. Find devices that can only be controlled with a touchscreen that need physical controls.
Recently got a new car and made sure I can control everything without the touchscreen. Even the infotainment system and the “must-be-in-park” configuration setup stuff has buttons.
Its like TOS, buttons, knobs, switches.
Consider that one of the largest problems affecting ipv6 rollout is likely complacency – namely, people are used to working around ipv4’s deficiencies, and that they’re not likely going to change how they do things, given that what they currently do is working, despite it being hacks layered on top of hacks…
This gets those people to step outside their comfort zone to try something new.
That doesn’t sound ‘tarded to me.
I don’t think I, or more other people, need a static IP. So one advantage of IPv6 as part of a global Internet-of-Things isn’t really so relevant. Having my own non-routable subnet on IPv4 is exactly what I need for a LAN, no more, no less. Philosophically, viewing the Internet as something you only access through a gateway and don’t let into your home is a Good Thing(tm)! The separation, even if only conceptual, is part of what’s necessary to make it harder for the bad guys to get into your home.
uIP wouldn’t be hard to port to DOS. But it would probably need to be linked like WatTCP is, and then you’d have a completely different API and you’d have to mess with patching all your favorite DOS apps to get them to work. It hasn’t happened because nobody running FreeDOS wanted IPv6 that badly to go to the trouble.
I think you’ve confused routing with firewalling (and this confusion is very common).
There’s a big difference between “I can connect these things but I choose not to” vs “I can’t connect these things even when I want to”.
No, I think he’s referring to how NAT creates your own IP island on the network that can only be properly routed by your NAT.
That is what they meant, but this is independent of if one has a static IP.
I can put my NAT behind a static or public IP, makes no difference to the devices behind it.
But if I want to connect to my network from the outside, it’s a big hassle with a dynamic IP. It’s doable, but it requires a 3rd party service.
It’s not about static IPs, it is about public IPs. NAT creates all kind of issues, especially if you start staging multiple of them. Normally you still get a public IP at least for land line connections like DSL or fibre, so there is no NAT router (at home) behind a NAT router (at the ISP) yet. I think the first countries have started to deviate from that, because their ISPs did not get enough IP addresses any more.
This is not how the internet was designed. NAT should be an exception. It is not fully transparent. Also it totally prevents you from running anything at home which can be connected from the outside, like your own “cloud”.
All new ISPs in the UK have been forced to use CGNAT for a few years now: the RIPE pool of IPv4 addresses is all but exhausted. The only way for me to get a public IPv4 address on my home router is to pay £8/mo for a static IP. All of the new FTTP providers are this way.
Many other ISPs in Europe use CGNAT, even established ones. At least with some, you can get a public (but dynamic) IP address for free by turning on the DDNS service they provide.
Otherwise, it’s 100.64.0.0/10 for you.
Same here. I’m in the UK. 1gig up/down fiber, CGNAT by default or additional cost for an IP, and they aren’t even static it’s just one that that’s public facing.
The worst thing is, they don’t offer IPv6 at all.
NAT is already in common use. Every cellular provider uses CGNAT. Tmobile home internet is IPv6 only.
Its interesting though, aside from using torrents, I had next to zero issues without IPv4.
Bu then I also don’t know enough to know how they get around those limitations.
The Internet may not have been designed for NAT but there is some security benefit from keeping internal networks opaque to the wider internet.
IPv6 uses link-local addresses (denoted by FE80::/10) to determine if an interface is meant for local network communication only, otherwise for the wider internet it uses global unicast addresses, which are routable across different networks.
It’s basically got the same protection and more than NAT has, baked in. If you want your devices on the LAN to be only accessed from LAN, don’t give them a public internet IPv6 address.
Yeah, no, very much not recommended.
Geolocation via IP tends to turn to absolutely shit and I get locked out of stuff.
Stuff the average user can’t control at all.
Geolocation via IP is a stupid idea anyway. People should stop trying.
I don’t like IP geolocation either, but the fact is that on IPv4 it works amazingly well.
It’s weird, but I don’t get to choose what other people do.
I live in a world where many American companies choose to do geolocation for licensing content, content that I pay for.
Personally, I actually enjoy watching streaming show, I actually don’t pirate as I make enough money to choose to contribute back to the industry such that, with a bit of hope and a prayer keep making content I enjoy.
But geolocation on IPv6 tends to not work right now, and it tends to not work in ways that I cannot do anything about.
I can’t fix the rest of the industry, I can’t fix everyone else usage of IPv6. I can setup my own network and do what I want with it, but if I have issues with services like this, there’s large swaths of users that have zero understanding of problems like this.
Maybe it would work if I were American, it I’m not; nor am I trying to bypass geofencing, I’m perfectly fine with the content for my region.
But it Does Not Work Reliably on IPv6.
First day at a conference and the IPv4 WiFi was overloaded (probably ran out of IP addresses). Used my phone as a dongle over USB, but could only get an IPv6 address (phones get a real Internet-routable IPv6 address while IPv4 works via NAT). Figured out the IPv6 address for Google DNS and configured a default route and DNS server to get on the IPv6 Internet. Unfortunately the conference website wasn’t on the IPv6 Internet, but Raspberry Pi website was, so I was able to find equivalent (probably better) instructions on how to set up MicroPython on start hacking on the badge. IPv6 saved the day, but more websites need to get an IPv6 address…
Actually, the article doesn’t say “many websites don’t support IPv6”, it says almost the exact opposite. GitHub, Reddit, Discord and Steam is basically the list in it’s entirety – at least for the tools that the author uses.
The broad use of CDNs across services brings automatic support for IPv6 to vast swathes of the internet, so it’s only the small sites that are self-hosted without CDN (which have tiny audiences and so affect few people), or the huge sites that insist on doing their own CDN and not transitioning (which affect lots of people but they’re few in number and will inevitably cross over at some point).
Three of these four are backed by huge non-self hosted CDNs are are global infrastructures. After all, steam with it’s half of billion of users, 140 million active simultaneously, can’t considered “small”
With only IPv6 on your PC and home network, can you visit a web site that is only on IPv4?
Probably, if the internet provider does the translation? 🤷
My ISP only provides dualstack lite (ig that’s what’s meant by nat64) access for me. And there have been occasions when I thought oh damn an ipv4 address would have been nice to have.
But in the end you only really need that if you need a public ipv4 address, other than that it’s completely transparent. Even for hosting from home it’s fine most of the time because everything i’d access it from would be capable of ipv6 anyways.
It’s a shame that renowned sites don’t even bother implementing ipv6. But then again, what does more layer of abstraction in the cloud jungle matter?
As an IT Pro I welcomed IPv6. I would love to have it everywhere. but when I imagine to have all devices a customer buys transparent in the Internet…
That’s where I’m at too. For thing like self-hosted services it’d be incredibly useful and convenient.
However, when I think about how even with a firewall it effectively uniquely characterizes what devices are in the internal network it gets bothersome.
Once upon a time I was a CCNP, I think they tried to get too clever with IPv6, and should just have made IPv4 bigger, with legacy addresses having leading zeros maybe.
Normals will already try to stab you in the eye with a fork before you get half way through explaining a subnet mask, I think if exposed to the start of an ecplination of IPv6 their fight or flight reaction will kick in almost immediately.
Disabling ipv4 completely actually not supported by current web infrastructure in majority of Internet coverage.. DNS, NTP, PnP… Yes, your software and hardware supports ip6, you application can create ip6 tcp connection, but ip4 is a standard fallback, multiple protocols primarily are served over ipv4, converted to ip6 where it can be done
I can’t shake the thought that with IPv6 I’m hanging my asscheeks and exposed anus to the outside world and being asked to “trust the tech, bro”…
About 10 years ago, I bought a new house and got a brand new DOCSIS modem from the ISP. I had, IIRC, a 500/50mbit connection. Transferring files between computers in my house was so slow. Turns out, the DOCSIS modem from the provider (all settings locked, only thing you could do was change the wifi name and password) automatically gave out IPv6 addresses and rerouted all traffic, including traffic between computers on the local network, over the internet. I’m glad I was able to buy a router, have the ISP put it in bridge mode, and have that function as my firewall and DHCP server. Haven’t been a fan of it since.
Okay, many of the comments here mention the downfalls of IPv6.
I was unaware of those. So, I need more education about those.
Does anybody have a recommended link for me to check out in that regard?
Yes, I can DDG, but if you have a good one in your bookmarks, would you kindly post it for me?
One of the things that will keep it relegated to specialty use cases is that IPV4 has been around and workarounds to eliminate the “running out of addresses” concern are well known and work remarkably well. I began taking a Cisco CCNA course. They touched on the IPV6 and in later classes got into details. Yes, the benefits are there. But like everything else, why re-invent the wheel?
If I have to dive into IPV6 I end up checking my work because I don’t use it very often. IPV4 I can do almost everything I need to do with little need to check reference materials to fix issues. I’m in the majority of web jockeys in that case.
On security: My cheap TPLink modem/router has an IPv6 firewall defaulting to Block All, and I am very happy to be able to access my server(s) from the outside.
And from where I sit, hackaday.com only resolves to IPv4?
On security: My cheap TPLink modem/router has an IPv6 firewall defaulting to Block All, and I am very happy to be able to access my server(s) from the outside.
And from where I sit, hackaday.com only resolves to IPv4?