Is moving to IPv6 worth it?

Sandbag@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 118 points –

The question above for the most part, been reading up on it. Also want to it for learning purposes.

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How does that work, having the same IP internally and externally?

A good ISP that supports IPv6 will give you a /64 range. That's a huge number of IPs, 2^64. Easily enough for every device on your network to have a lot of public IPs. If you use Docker or VMs, you could give each one a public IPv6 address.

When every device on your network can have a public IP, there's no longer a reason to have private IPs. Instead, you'd use firewall rules for internal-only stuff (ie allow access only if the source IP is in your IPv6 range).

This is how the internet used to work in the old days - universities would have a large IP range, and every computer on campus would have a public IP.

Of course, you'd still have a firewall on your router (and probably on your computers too) that blocks incoming connections for things you don't want to expose publicly.

A good isp would give you something bigger than a /64 - /56 or /48. something that you can subnet.

wouldn't /64 still leave you with 64 bits for you to do whatever? Ipv6 has a 128 bit address. If you can do subnets with a small usable portion of 32 bits, then you certainly can with a full 64 bits

The smallest recommended IPv6 subnet is /64. The biggest issue you will encounter is that SLAAC will refuse to work on anything smaller, and it just so happens that Android still doesn't support DHCPv6 and will be left without a valid address.

Android still doesn’t support DHCPv6 and will be left without a valid address.

RFC 7934 explains their reasoning, though it's not exactly an ironclad argument.

Good point - I should have said "at least a /64 range".