by ssl-3 | 2026-01-03 06:52:37+00:00
> - I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.

Remember, mate, with a /64 you can host your own ISP. You can finally have real Internet access! (Oh, wait -- it's not actually your /64 and your local ISP[s] wouldn't route it to you if it were, so you really can't.)

> - Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.

Oh, come on. Just look around. Almost everyone here agrees: NAT isn't a security function. Furthermore: NAT is literally the devil and has been for all of the decades you've been using it. Just think of all the stuff it breaks! Like FTP! (Remember how broken FTP was with NAT back in 1995? Or, *shudder*, h.323?)

Besides, with a /64, you can have even every computer on your network changing addresses for every IP connection! Doesn't that kind of obscurity sound nice? (Except... No, that doesn't sound nice at all. That just sounds bizarre and weird -- like dancing about architecture, or maybe some analogy about babies and bathwater.)

> - Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.

Have you ever considered the concept of giving each machine two different IPv6 addresses? One for you to control, and one for your ISP to be in charge of. That'd be quite lovely, wouldn't it? (Except: Now you have two problems.)

> - It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful.

Yeah, well. Uh. Have you tried looking into using ULA addresses like fe80::? (It's awesome! It's got all the hypothetical network convergence problems that an RFC 1918 10/8 has with which to bite you in the mysterious future, except it's also hexadecimal! And unlike the grossly prevalent DHCP system that your 10/8 LAN uses today, nobody can agree on how to centrally assign these addresses to devices!)

> - What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.

Look, man. Let me just move these goalposts for you. The real problem here is that people, like you, need to adopt IPv6. So adopt it already. Your router's implicitly always-on stateful firewall will just take care of it, just like it has almost certainly both incidentally and irrevocably done for your entire history of using NAT with IPv4. And the advantage to you is... you have that big, beautiful /64 to play with however you want (except: it isn't yours, so you don't), free of the chains of that ugly hack of NAT.

(See? That wasn't so hard! The goalposts are heavy, but they can still be moved easily-enough. These new chains are better than the old chains, anyway. The chains of IPv4 NAT were getting a little bit old and dusty, and learning which /64 your ISP will decide to number your LAN with this week is like opening a surprise box! Unless your ISP provides a /56 or something instead! Don't you like surprises? Hey, did I mention ULA? It's always important to mention ULA at least thrice because maybe you want at least two sets of LAN addresses for everything!

(All snark aside: ULA+DHCP+local NAT doesn't sound so bad at all. fe00::3 instead of 10.0.0.3? Gateway at fe00::1 instead of 10.0.0.1? Singular static LAN addresses if we feel like it -- without them being world-known, and regardless of which residential ISP we're using at the moment? People can get used to that. And it would at least present a familiar set of problems that would respond to a familiar set of solutions -- plus, with bonus nachos consisting of a whole dynamic /64 to play with if we ever feel like using that for some reason.

But AFAICT nobody does it that way because NAT is in and of itself some kind of evil thing even when it is under our direct control, so we're just stuffed. Thus, instead of local NAT, we get some combination of prefix bingo, global per-device identifiers or bizarro randomness, and/or overlayed logical networks with local ULA+public Internet addresses for the same friggin' doorbell.

And that shit is simply weird.

As a response to the weirdness, we get the resultant and inevitable pushback that all weird shit deserves.))