IPv6 benefits?

IPv6 runs in parallel with IPv4 and for the most part they do not meet or interfere with each other. This is called "dual stack" operation. IPv6 does not support NAT - each device gets one or more Unicast Global IPv6 addresses assigned to it, and that address is directly addressable to and from the whole IPv6 Internet. So you have to make sure that you have IPv6 firewall rules that prevent any incoming connections from being made to your internal IPv6 addresses. With IPv4, the operation of NAT does this automatically. The rules involved are straightforward, but few routers I have met install them by default, so you need to make sure that they are in place before connecting your router to IPv6.

Some benefits of enabling IPv6:

- Access to the (very few) IPv6 only sites in the world.

- Ability to connect to devices on the local subnet without having any IP address assigned, using the automatically assigned link-local fe80:: addresses. I have found this surprisingly useful at times, for accessing things that are new to my network or have had to be factory reset. But it only works with IPv6 enabled devices.

- You are ready for when IPv6 starts to replace IPv4.

- The ability to set up IPv6 on a network is a useful skill to an employer.

- The ability to make any device on your network an IPv6 server for the Internet. So you can run multiple web servers for different purposes, for example.

Problems with setting up IPv6 on a home network:

- This depends very much on how complex your home network is and if it has IPv6 capable routers.

- If you fail to set up IPv6 correctly, you can cause some sites to work badly or not at all. This is normally caused by MTU problems, as IPv6 does not support packet fragmentation the way IPv4 does and can not send packets bigger than the MTU of a link. But some links (especially PPPoE connections as your ISP connection often is) do not properly support MTU discovery, and IPv6 does not get told the correct MTU to send. Since IPv6 connections are always preferred over IPv4, if they are available, if your network has problems with IPv6 connecting to a site it will not fall back to using IPv4 even if the IPv6 connection is not working properly. The site that will likely be the most obvious one to fail with IPv6 MTU problems is Facebook.

- If your ISP does not support IPv6 natively, then you need to use a tunnelled connection to an IPv6 provider such as Huricane Electric. I ran my network like that for a while and it works fine, once you have the correct MTU settings in place. The IPv6 tunnel and router does not need to be on your main router if it does not support that - most Linux boxes can do this tunnel and router function for you. Tunnelled connections have a smaller MTU as the tunnel overhead reduces the size of the packets available to IPv6.

- Not all ISPs do customer support for IPv6 properly, even when they support it at the network level.

- Android devices do not support the full IPv6 standard, due to stupid decisions on the part of the Android developers. Android refuses to support DHCPv6, so you have to use autoconfigured IPv6 addresses for Android devices even if you use DHCPv6 for the rest of your network. Than can mean having to use a separate WiFi SSID for your Android devices, and that requires that your WiFi router supports multiple SSIDs. If you are happy with autoconfigured IPv6 addresses, then this is not a problem.

If your ISP supports IPv6 natively, then they should be able to tell you how to set up their provided routers to do it, and that part of setting things up should just work. If you are using your own router rather than a supplied one, then you need to find out how it works on that router. Not all routers provide all the options necessary to do the different IPv6 connection types used by the various ISPs.

If you want to have a go at making IPv6 work, there are a number of us here on Geekzone who have been using it for quite a while and I for one am happy to help you if you need it. The Geekzone site is IPv6 capable.

NightStalker

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