People still working in IT, thoughts on IPv6?
People still working in IT, thoughts on IPv6?
Now currently I'm not in the workforce, but in the past from my work experience, apprenticeship and temp roles, I've always seen ipv4 and not ipv6!
Hell, my ISP seems to exclusively use ipv4 (unless behind nats they're using ipv6)
Do you think a lot of people stick with the earlier iteration because they have been so familiar with it for a long time?
When you look at a ipv6, it looks menacing with a long string of letters and numbers compared to the more simpler often.
I am aware the IP bucket has gone dry and they gotta bring in a new IP cow with a even bigger bucket, but what do you think? Do you yourself or your firm use ipv4 or 6?
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We turn it off in our office. It doesn’t benefit us.
You could also make the argument that ipv4 through NAT is better for privacy since it obfuscate what, and how many devices are connected to where.
When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I'm guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There's a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.
That was so insane - "we need a unique number, let's just use the MAC" - it was like people didn't even think through any of the implications when making ipv6 address schemes.
Similar with the address proposals that ignored the need to minimise the size of core internet routing tables.
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With modern IPv6 (say, Windows 7 or later?) IPv6 privacy extensions solve this problem. Basically, you get a whole bunch of addresses. One based on your MAC address so you can port forward/allow incoming connections in the firewall, and then a bunch of rotating random addresses used for outgoing connections. People that know your prefix and MAC address can find your listening PC, but websites won't get your MAC address.
As for fingerprinting, thanks to NAT slipstreaming you can choose between "video calling software breaks" and "every malicious ad can access any port on your device" or in some extreme cases "every malicious ad can access any device in your network". Some websites have also been caught scanning IPv4 networks to figure out where your router lives using standard Javascript, so your IPv4 network isn't any better protected. At least with IPv6 a website can't take ten seconds to scan 255 addresses and figure out how many devices are on your network!
Noobie question, wouldn't the ISP decide what your outgoing IPv6 address is? Like they do with IPv4? I mean no matter how many times I restart my router, my public IP remains the same so I always thought it was assigned by them.
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For reference, in the US, Comcast only gives up to a /60 for residential connections. It's still fine for most use cases, but it does feel a bit like doing a bit of penny pinching when you're wondering if you have enough /64's for how your network is going to be set up.
The standards bodies used to recommend /48 as a default and have scaled down to /56. Anything smaller makes sense for stuff like servers but there's no good reason to do it. I guess penny-pinching is a reason, but it's not the norm.
If all else fails, hurricane electric will hand out /48s for free, you just can't use them to watch things like Netflix.
Yeah, fortunately, for my own use cases, /60 is enough, but I can't think of a good reason for Comcast to not give out /56 since they're pretty cheap compared to IPv4.
IPv6 has privacy addresses, though. Stuff on my network generates a new random address every day and uses that address for outgoing connections, so you can't really track individual devices inside my network.
You can just look at what addresses from that range have left the network in any given 24 hour window.
If AAAA is constantly reaching our to aussie.zone one day, and the next day AAAB is reaching out to that address you can pretty easily connect the dots.
But privacy addresses aren't incremented numbers. And it doesn't really matter if you can connect the dots, every /64 is the same as a single IPv4 address anyway. Especially for something like Lemmy where the browser will maintain a QUIC connection for ages if you want to track sessions. Besides, you have the session cookies to associate the other end even if they turn off WiFi and move to mobile data.