jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
Well, not really IT. I'm an Internet infrastructure person, generally tasked with making things work.
I think it's very important for us to understand both the power and the failings of IPv6. One of my favorite issues for many years has been network segmentation, such as the ability to easily create multiple network segments in your home. Perhaps one for lighting controls, one for media streamers, one for wifi clients, one for wired access to PC's, one for security cameras, etc. IPv4 has always been a crapfest here because the strategy for home users has been "shove them behind a NAT" for a quarter of a century now, with stupid design decisions made to facilitate functionality in a nasty inconsistent environment. You don't find many NAT gateways (you might incorrectly refer to them as "routers") that support multiple networks, and when you do, it's often just a single DMZ. You have to go up to something like a pfSense/Vyatta/EdgeOS/RouterOS/etc to get such functionality, and if and when you do, you discover that many devices are incapable of discovering each other when they are on different networks at the same site. We've had attempts to solve this with DNS-SD, various other broadcast or multicast strategies, etc., but IPv4 has really sucked. Most of the time you end up traversing the NAT out to some cloud based pile of poo service orchestrator.
And now we have IPv6, where you can theoretically ask for a prefix larger than /64 from your upstream provider, so, finally, theoretically, there's NATIVE support for multiple networks, and yet it's all broken there too. I have literally heard the words "why would you want multiple networks" from both service providers and app/device designers who grew up with idiot-designed IPv4 uni-networks and think THAT'S GOOD.
