Basically what the title says. Here’s the thing: address exhaustion is a solved problem. NAT already took care of this via RFC 1631. While initially presented as a temporary fix, anyone who thinks it’s going anywhere at this point is simply wrong. Something might replace IPv4 as the default at some point, but it’s not going to be IPv6.
And then there are the downsides of IPv6:
- Not all legacy equipment likes IPv6. Yes, there’s a lot of it out there.
- “Nobody” remembers an IPv6 address. I know my IPv4 address, and I’m sure many others do too. Do you know your IPv6 address, though?
- Everything already supports IPv4
- For IPv6 to fully replace IPv4, practically everything needs to move over. De facto standards don’t change very easily. There’s a reason why QWERTY keyboards, ASCII character tables, and E-mail are still around, despite alternatives technically being “better”.
- Dealing with dual network stacks in the interim is annoying.
Sure, IPv6 is nice and all. But as an addition rather than as a replacement. I’ve disabled it by default for the past 10 years, as it tends to clutter up my ifconfig overview, and I’ve had no ill effects.
Source: Network engineer.
I’d read a lot if people saying how good and easy IPv6 was and I thought I’d use it as an opportunity to learn about it.
But turns out the only thing it does is give everything a public IP because the creators were so obsessed about getting rid of NAT. Nothing else seems to have been thought through.
There are IETF mailing list threads where no one has a clue as to why it’s not being adopted, including one where they discover their own RFC is inconsistent with itself and that’s the reason why IPv4 is given higher priority than fd00::/8. You can tell how half baked it is when you look at the number of revisions, additional protocols that have been added decades after it was initially proposed.
Their hatred of NAT seems to drive everything, but for most home and business users NAT is a great feature that drives so much simplicity by keeping you private networks private and independent of the rest of the internet.
Yeah, NAT is great for home users. Unless your ISP is also using (carrier grade) NAT. Then you’re fucked by double NAT and have to call your ISP every time you want to forward a port.
Obviously with IPv6 there’s be no need for CGNAT. But NAT within each household or business is useful.