We need to start talking about IPv6 as something that is here and now, not some far off future.
IMHO, the biggest issue is setup for SOHO users. Routers for that market have gotten the IPv4 setup wizard process down pretty good. With IPv6, there’s like three different ways your ISP might have set it up, and you need to tell your router which way to go. It’s complicated enough that even people with a solid understanding of IPv4 can be confused trying to figure out what works.
The first time I tried to setup IPv6 on OPNsense, Android phones thought they couldn’t connect to the Internet after getting on WiFi. Something about the endpoint they check for Internet access wasn’t going through. I backed out some settings, and something fixed it, but I’m still not sure what.
I mean, if there’s only three ways, couldn’t routers be set up to just try all three to see which works? Or if they each need specific parameters that aren’t discoverable, have a form that takes all of them but says “just enter what your ISP gives you, the others are optional”. Or set it up such that the client can just get whatever information it needs from the server to communicate with other nodes beyond the server. IPv4 has DHCP. Is there something in the way of applying a similar solution to IPv6?
IPv4 has DHCP. Is there something in the way of applying a similar solution to IPv6?
That in itself is implemented a few different ways, and each one is more useful dependent on your use-case, but these also have very little to do with how your ISP hands out the IP to your modem. When you get an IP handed out to your modem by your ISP, it’s often not being handed out by DHCP but an entirely different technology purpose built for whatever medium (cable/DSL/fiber) is actually going into your modem, so knowing their implementation is still important. Things work a little differently at enterprise-level. Although you’re not wrong that eventually there could be routers with auto-configuration based on which type of IPv6 network the router detects, there just currently aren’t any that I know of.
But if you’re interested in the modern equivalents of DHCP you should look into SLAAC vs. DHCPv6 which are similar but oh so very different.
That’s disappointing that they have different methods for each physical layer. That should be handled on the link layer using common methods once the physical layer is able to send bits back and forth.
Getting an IP address shouldn’t be affected by whether it will be transmitted using fibre, dsl, cable, a 56k line, a quantum teleporter, signal fires, or carrier pigeons.
The good news is that the amount of traffic hitting Google that’s connecting over IPv6 is just about at the 50% mark:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
We need to start talking about IPv6 as something that is here and now, not some far off future.
IMHO, the biggest issue is setup for SOHO users. Routers for that market have gotten the IPv4 setup wizard process down pretty good. With IPv6, there’s like three different ways your ISP might have set it up, and you need to tell your router which way to go. It’s complicated enough that even people with a solid understanding of IPv4 can be confused trying to figure out what works.
Further, there’s often not clear documentation from your ISP which of the ways they have it set up!
Definitely.
The first time I tried to setup IPv6 on OPNsense, Android phones thought they couldn’t connect to the Internet after getting on WiFi. Something about the endpoint they check for Internet access wasn’t going through. I backed out some settings, and something fixed it, but I’m still not sure what.
I mean, if there’s only three ways, couldn’t routers be set up to just try all three to see which works? Or if they each need specific parameters that aren’t discoverable, have a form that takes all of them but says “just enter what your ISP gives you, the others are optional”. Or set it up such that the client can just get whatever information it needs from the server to communicate with other nodes beyond the server. IPv4 has DHCP. Is there something in the way of applying a similar solution to IPv6?
That in itself is implemented a few different ways, and each one is more useful dependent on your use-case, but these also have very little to do with how your ISP hands out the IP to your modem. When you get an IP handed out to your modem by your ISP, it’s often not being handed out by DHCP but an entirely different technology purpose built for whatever medium (cable/DSL/fiber) is actually going into your modem, so knowing their implementation is still important. Things work a little differently at enterprise-level. Although you’re not wrong that eventually there could be routers with auto-configuration based on which type of IPv6 network the router detects, there just currently aren’t any that I know of.
But if you’re interested in the modern equivalents of DHCP you should look into SLAAC vs. DHCPv6 which are similar but oh so very different.
That’s disappointing that they have different methods for each physical layer. That should be handled on the link layer using common methods once the physical layer is able to send bits back and forth.
Getting an IP address shouldn’t be affected by whether it will be transmitted using fibre, dsl, cable, a 56k line, a quantum teleporter, signal fires, or carrier pigeons.