bert64

Since starlink supports v6, starlink users can p2p communicate with other v6 users. Both starlink and local carriers don't provide proper legacy connectivity, they are encumbered by cgnat so p2p does not work. Without p2p communications, users are forced into a client-server model and it's much easier to block a small number of servers rather than millions of potential peers.

You can get a large block, split it up and announce it from different places but that doesn't stop someone blocking your larger allocation.

Getting multiple blocks is harder - the RIRs will want justification for this, and would rather give you a single large block than lots of fragmented ones.

Only legacy address space is frequently bought and sold, so it moves between AS#s a lot and is also heavily fragmented.

With v6 this is not the case, a given AS# will typically have a single large allocation and can make it larger if they need to, it won't be sold and moved and an entity can't trade it in to get a different allocation.

Likely very old/outdated hardware. China is heavily pushing v6 and their "great firewall" has no problem with it.

Another issue they may have however is v6 enabling internal p2p communications directly between users whereas legacy addressing with cgnat does not, although they could block this pretty easily if they wanted.

No, but there is a third party FPGA core available which is called 68080, it's used in a modern line of Amiga accelerators and clones.

Any junk that adds itself to auto start without giving users the choice is cancer... It's why Apple added a feature to macOS fairly recently which alerts you whenever something new is added.

This is generally caused by ignorance. Don't understand IPv6 so turn it off without investigating what the actual problem is. Usually it's caused by a broken IPv6 configuration - eg a route being announced but no actual connectivity.

Here IPv6 works perfectly and doesn't cause any problems. Many sites are much faster over v6 than legacy IP. Google stats show 45% of users access google over IPv6 so clearly it's working for all those millions of users too.

If IPv6 is not working you need to fix it, not turn it off.

They are fully compliant, SLAAC is part of the standard whereas DHCPv6 is an optional extra.

DHCPv6 also does not work without RA. DHCPv6 just assigns an address, a routable prefix, dns servers etc, it does not assign a subnet or any routes, you need route advertisements for that.

The point is until everyone moves to IPv6, the rest of us are stuck having to support dual stack - which is expensive (see the recent story about an ISP supporting a tribal reservation who had to spend an extra $300k and wait 11 months to support legacy IP) and introduces complexity/risk.

For a small network it makes no difference, everything is auto configured, mdns is used to lookup names, you can makes your hosts ::1 ::2 etc if you want to. Many ISPs around the world provide IPv6 by default, and users are using it without even realising, so it is being adopted just not fast enough. Global usage is around 42% based on published stats, and is well over 50% in many countries, as high as 80% in some.

IPv6 does provide benefits to end users, it reduces cost for the ISP and makes end to end connectivity viable which opens up a whole new set of opportunities. End to end is immensely beneficial for gaming, voip etc. Having everything centralised because users are encumbered by NAT is a big problem - increased latency, high costs (recouped from the users somehow - eg selling their data), single point of failure, applications which become useless once the central servers are shut down etc.

Newspapers still work.. Why are you here at all instead of writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper with good old pen and paper?

New technology has benefits, if you don't know what they are then you need to learn about them properly. Sticking with old technology because you fear the new is not a good plan.

The way you see legacy IP addresses is also an abstraction layer, their actual form is as a 32bit integer.

The link-local address is generated when you first enable the interface (ie when you load the drivers for your NIC), it won't change unless you manually force it to.

Linux will use EUI-64 if left to its own devices, or privacy extensions if you're using something like networkmanager. This makes sense because a desktop oriented distro will typically use networkmanager while a server oriented distro will not, and having a predictable eui-64 address is usually beneficial for a server.

You're thinking small..

In an organisation of any significant size, remembering legacy IP is much worse than v6.

Chances are you will have lots of disparate legacy blocks, some starting 1.x, some starting 80.x etc. Then you have all the RFC1918 space, and the possibility of overlapping address space in different areas of the business. Then you have to keep track of translations, so an internal address 10.1.1.1 could have an external address of 80.1.1.1 but only on port 25, if you're talking over port 443 then actually the traffic is forwarded to 192.168.1.1 instead.

IPv6 is simpler. You have a single prefix for your company, eg 2001:db8:: Then you split it out in a sensible hierarchical way, for instance 2001:db8:1:: is your facility in the US, 2001:db8:2:: is your facility in Canada etc. Beyond that you go down to VLANs and hosts as needed.

So 2001:db8:2:25::1 is a device in your toronto data center... 80.1.1.1 is where?!?!? 192.168.1.1 is where?!? and which one did you mean?!?!

Then there's no NAT, no address overlap, much simpler. 2001:db8:2:25::1 is the same device wether you're talking to it on port 1 or port 65535. Your firewall rules are simpler and more secure as a result.

Microsoft had a presentation about this, and they are a bigger organisation than most.

If you're only small then you don't care, technologies like SLAAC and MDNS exist for exactly this reason.