this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Explain Like I'm Five
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IPv6 has several changes to the specification, but since this is ELI5:
When you were a child, your friends would call your house and a parent would answer the phone. They'd ask to talk to you, and your parents would hand the phone off to you. That might have been because you were too young to have a phone, but IPv4 with NAT works the same way because there are so many "houses" and only enough phone numbers for the houses, not all the people that live in them.
For IPv6 it's like your friends can call you directly on your cell phone. And they can call your brothers and sisters, your cat, your dog, your TV, your refrigerator, and the backyard squirrels. There are so many phone numbers that everyone can have their own.
I didn't know about that part, doesn't that make it necessary for everyone to have a firewall? What's stopping someone from port scaning my Chinese smart microwave and attack it?
This is getting out of ELI5 territory, but the way it works with IPv4 is when something on the internet needs to access your devices, it sends a request to your IP address (your house) along with a port number. Your router (that runs your firewall) decides if it should forward the request to the device inside your network. By default, it usually says "no" unless you tell it otherwise.
With IPv6, you'd still have a router, most likely, but it would be "watching" all of the IP addresses for your devices, not just a single one for your entire home.
This does add a fair bit of complexity, but my guess is that if we ever do start getting blocks of IPv6 addresses as home users, most routers will probably come with default firewall blocking rules pre-configured.
I'm already on a connection where I don't get an ipv4 address, just a block of ipv6 addresses.
My ISP-supplied router comes with a firewall that I can't configure or disable.
Really? Just out of curiosity, what kind of connection are you on? I have two ISPs, one of which provides a single IPv4 address only, and the other provides one IPv4 and one IPv6 address.
It's a coaxial cable connection from Vodafone in Germany, using Dual Stack Lite.
Based on this reply, I get the distinct impression that you know a LOT more about networking than your original ELI5 post lets on, and almost certainly more about the subject than I. I work in tech, but not with networking specifically; most of my knowledge is from way too many years and dollars spent on homelabbing.
One of my internet connections is a DSL connection; by default, they provide a single IPv4 address. My DSL modem has an option to enable IPv6 tunneling through IPv4, but I was never able to get it to work, and customer support was completely clueless. I suspect this isn't something their network supports and they're just counting on their users not caring. My other connection is over satellite (Starlink), and as far as I am aware, they're only providing a single IPv6 connection, not a block of addresses.
To make things easy, I've just blocked IPv6 at my firewall, and I use policy-based routing on my PFsense box to send traffic to either connection depending on latency/bandwidth requirements (Streaming goes to satellite, VoIP goes to DSL, etc). I know that IPv6 has improvements beyond just "more addresses," but at this point I can't really justify enabling it on my network. It would only be used internally, and I just don't see any tangible benefit.
I’m on FiOS and I just had to turn on IPv6 on my router (it’s disabled by default on older Quantum Gateways). It works and they are assigning /56 blocks, I think it’s DHCPv6 but I haven’t looked in a while.