While routing at global scale is much easier, running v6 in a local network has more moving parts than v4 had:
- broadcasts for address discovery have been replaced by multicast which is much harder for switches to handle correctly
- address discovery is now mostly handled via SLAAC which is different from how it worked via DHCP and also doesn't universally allow setting name servers which then will still require DHCP to actually get a working network (if you run v6 only), so now you have two daemons running when in v4 you only needed one.
- hosts are multi-homed by default and rely heavily on multi-homedness which might invalidate some assumptions you had when configuring hosts.
- for a network to be meaningfully useable, you need working name resolution because while you can remember v4 addresses and v4 address assignments, this is impossible for v6 addresses (yes, you can of course manually assign addresses in your prefix and you can just make them low numbers and hide everything else behind a ::, but you still have to remember your prefix which still is impossibly hard and there's no cheating there even if you know somebody at your ISP because it's not entirely under their control either)
- and in a similar vein: Subnetting is harder because the addresses are much less memorable. If you want to subnet a 10.- v4 network, in many cases, you can do this in very memorable full-byte chunks.
- also subnetting: due to many ISPs still doing /64 allocations to their customers, and due to the way how SLAAC works, you often have to decide between subnetting or SLAAC (which still is the default in many OSes). Worse, some ISPs only do a /128 assignment (one address), so now you're back in NAT territory, only that's really, really murky waters because next to nobody is doing this ATM. If your ISP only gives you a single v6 address, you are practically screwed about running v6 internally. If you're given a single v4 address (which is common practice), you can do NAT/RFC1918 addressing and you're fine.
- v6 relies on ICMP much more heavily but this fact has not propagated to default firewall settings, so in many default "let me turn on the firewall" configs, your v6 network will break in mysterious ways.
- in home networks where you want devices to be reachable directly (for P2P usages like video calls or gaming), there's no widely-supported equivalent to UPNP or NAT-PMP yet to punch holes into your firewall to make clients reachable. Yes, you don't have to do NAT any more, so clients are potentially reachable, but you really don't want that, so your firewall is still blocking all incoming connections, but now there's no way for an application to still punch temporary holes through which is a solved problem in v4 (where a hole is punched and a temporary port-mapping is created)
There are more issues as your network grows bigger, but this is what I had to deal with in my small networks (<50 hosts) where I can say with certainty that v4 was much more straightforward to get up and running than v6 (though I was much older when I was learning v6 than when I was learning v4, so I might also just be getting old and slow)
Yes. These are all solvable issues, but they are huge ergonomic downsides that are now pushed on local network admins to the point that for them it's still much easier to just disable ipv6 rather than learning about all these small issues and working around them.
So while v6 is much easier to handle on a global scale, it's at the same time much harder to handle at your local site, but, the internet is as much about the global scale as it's about the local site and when the new thing is much harder to use than the old thing, inertia is even bigger than in the normal "everything is mostly the same" case (where inertia already feels like an insurmountable problem)
> how is collecting aggregate usage patterns "immoral"?
What I do alone in my own home should be known only to me.
Do I read books? It doesn't matter if I do nor what books.
Do I listen to music? It doesn't matter if I do nor what songs.
Do I watch tv? It doesn't matter if I do nor what videos.
Do I sleep? It doesn't matter if I do nor for how long.
Do I play games? It doesn't matter if I do nor which games.
Do I use a computer? It doesn't matter if I do nor what software.
What I do in my own home is private. Anyone looking at that without my explicit consent is violating my privacy. Usage patterns of what I do in my own home are immoral whether in aggregate or not.
- broadcasts for address discovery have been replaced by multicast which is much harder for switches to handle correctly
- address discovery is now mostly handled via SLAAC which is different from how it worked via DHCP and also doesn't universally allow setting name servers which then will still require DHCP to actually get a working network (if you run v6 only), so now you have two daemons running when in v4 you only needed one.
- hosts are multi-homed by default and rely heavily on multi-homedness which might invalidate some assumptions you had when configuring hosts.
- for a network to be meaningfully useable, you need working name resolution because while you can remember v4 addresses and v4 address assignments, this is impossible for v6 addresses (yes, you can of course manually assign addresses in your prefix and you can just make them low numbers and hide everything else behind a ::, but you still have to remember your prefix which still is impossibly hard and there's no cheating there even if you know somebody at your ISP because it's not entirely under their control either)
- and in a similar vein: Subnetting is harder because the addresses are much less memorable. If you want to subnet a 10.- v4 network, in many cases, you can do this in very memorable full-byte chunks.
- also subnetting: due to many ISPs still doing /64 allocations to their customers, and due to the way how SLAAC works, you often have to decide between subnetting or SLAAC (which still is the default in many OSes). Worse, some ISPs only do a /128 assignment (one address), so now you're back in NAT territory, only that's really, really murky waters because next to nobody is doing this ATM. If your ISP only gives you a single v6 address, you are practically screwed about running v6 internally. If you're given a single v4 address (which is common practice), you can do NAT/RFC1918 addressing and you're fine.
- v6 relies on ICMP much more heavily but this fact has not propagated to default firewall settings, so in many default "let me turn on the firewall" configs, your v6 network will break in mysterious ways.
- in home networks where you want devices to be reachable directly (for P2P usages like video calls or gaming), there's no widely-supported equivalent to UPNP or NAT-PMP yet to punch holes into your firewall to make clients reachable. Yes, you don't have to do NAT any more, so clients are potentially reachable, but you really don't want that, so your firewall is still blocking all incoming connections, but now there's no way for an application to still punch temporary holes through which is a solved problem in v4 (where a hole is punched and a temporary port-mapping is created)
There are more issues as your network grows bigger, but this is what I had to deal with in my small networks (<50 hosts) where I can say with certainty that v4 was much more straightforward to get up and running than v6 (though I was much older when I was learning v6 than when I was learning v4, so I might also just be getting old and slow)
Yes. These are all solvable issues, but they are huge ergonomic downsides that are now pushed on local network admins to the point that for them it's still much easier to just disable ipv6 rather than learning about all these small issues and working around them.
So while v6 is much easier to handle on a global scale, it's at the same time much harder to handle at your local site, but, the internet is as much about the global scale as it's about the local site and when the new thing is much harder to use than the old thing, inertia is even bigger than in the normal "everything is mostly the same" case (where inertia already feels like an insurmountable problem)