I’m in both camps on IPv6, although much more to the hate than love side of things.
Pros: More addresses for everyone. Should solve IP exhaustion for a lot of folks, even those of us that live off the LAN most of the time. A lot of the globe uses it these days, so in some ways, it’s always a good time to migrate.
Cons: It is NOT a drop-in replacement for IPv4. ICMPv6 is necessary for this to really tick. You cannot simply turn it off since it’s way more than ping packets this time around. It brings with it a beefy attack surface, and you must be able to handle a range of message types correctly. Hardening requires use of SEND and other tech, making it a more expensive proposition over all.
Also, it’s really easy to just put your entire home LAN on the /56 or whatever range your ISP gives you. This might be a mistake, as an error in your firewall config could just put everything on the open internet. Meanwhile, the humble IPv4 NAT, that ships standard in every ISP router/switch they give you, fails closed by default - stock and bad configurations hide everything from the internet instead.
Really, all anyone wanted was IPv4 with a bigger address space. This could have been an extension header for IPv4, ICMP, ARP, some clever address management on the part of ICANN, and we would have called it a day.
Then there are all the ones that fail “open” in that they allow their admin interface to be reached from the wan side. In practice, not using IPv6 has very little impact on the over all infiltration rate of consumer network devices.
I’m in both camps on IPv6, although much more to the hate than love side of things.
Pros: More addresses for everyone. Should solve IP exhaustion for a lot of folks, even those of us that live off the LAN most of the time. A lot of the globe uses it these days, so in some ways, it’s always a good time to migrate.
Cons: It is NOT a drop-in replacement for IPv4. ICMPv6 is necessary for this to really tick. You cannot simply turn it off since it’s way more than ping packets this time around. It brings with it a beefy attack surface, and you must be able to handle a range of message types correctly. Hardening requires use of SEND and other tech, making it a more expensive proposition over all.
Rant:
Also, it’s really easy to just put your entire home LAN on the /56 or whatever range your ISP gives you. This might be a mistake, as an error in your firewall config could just put everything on the open internet. Meanwhile, the humble IPv4 NAT, that ships standard in every ISP router/switch they give you, fails closed by default - stock and bad configurations hide everything from the internet instead.
Really, all anyone wanted was IPv4 with a bigger address space. This could have been an extension header for IPv4, ICMP, ARP, some clever address management on the part of ICANN, and we would have called it a day.
Then there are all the ones that fail “open” in that they allow their admin interface to be reached from the wan side. In practice, not using IPv6 has very little impact on the over all infiltration rate of consumer network devices.
Maybe not other people’s devices, but it would have a big effect on my devices