All consumer and enterprise equipment made in the last 10+ years natively support IPv6.
I object to this statement. You can buy name brand routers today that don’t implement it properly. Sure, they route packets, but they have broken stateless auto configuration or don’t respect DHCPv6 options correctly, and the situation is made worse because you don’t know how your ISP implements IPv6 until you try it.
God help you if you need a firewall where you can open ports on v6. Three years ago I bought one that doesn’t even properly firewall IPv6.
I tested a top-of-the-line Netgear router to find that it doesn’t support opening ports and once again doesn’t correctly support forwarded IP DHCPv6, which even if that works correctly, your Android clients can’t use it 🫠 Decades later there’s no consensus on how it should function on every device. This is a severe problem when you are a standard.
The state of IPv6 on consumer hardware is absolute garbage. You have to guess how your ISP implements it if at all, and even then you’re at the mercy of your limited implementation. If you’re lucky it just works with your ISP router. If you’re not, it’s a PITA.
EDITs: spell corrections and clarification.
Omg…I thought I was doing it wrong. I was trying to map ports on my router and it just wouldn’t do it properly.
Networking is not my strong suit so I assumed I was being an idiot and reverted back to IPv4.
IPv6 does not do NAT - you allow the ports for a device instead in the firewall.
The problem is mainly that IPv4 port forwarding is network address translation, but on IPv6 it’s instead IP forwarding with a firewall rule.
The latter is conceptually simpler, but it’s a different mechanism and one that most home routers don’t bother to implement. This is quite ironic because IPv6 was intended to restore end to end connectivity principles.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m quite happy with the standard. They are very few good implementations of that standard, and given the momentum of its predecessor, implementers just don’t care.
I absolutely hate how dependent we’ve gotten to IPv4. To the point that Amazon is charging almost $4 a month per IP. It used to be free. These assholes are buying IPv4 addresses so fast that they are literally driving up the price.
Is there a resource that you can recommend on learning IPv6 based on my knowledge on IPv4? A lot of resources I’ve seen are way over engineered for my feeble brain.
Like I know what IP addresses are and what port numbers are. I don’t understand the difference between how IPv6 addresses are assigned (both locally and generally speaking) and what makes it different from IPv4.
I know it’s not DHCP.
Edit: This post provides a link to a great summary for those who know IPv4 but need to learn IPv6.