I tried living on IPv6 for a day

When I used a small local ISP that did not support ipv6 before switching to AT&T fiber¹ I tried to set this up, but they demand an email on a non-gmail domain, and I wasn't going to pay to set that up nor was I going to use my work email. It's a bad assumption that any non-malicious user cares enough about websites to have one.

1: I'd prefer to have stayed with the local ISP despite the lack of ipv6, but they wanted $8,000 to bring fiber to my new place and that was not worth it with at&t fiber being present.

I love that Hurricane Electric provides this service but I found a few video streaming sites ended up blocking it last I tried a couple years ago.

That said, if it isn’t blocked for the services you use, I found it pretty straightforward to use.

Huh, why IPv6 only instead of dual stack? Assuming you're talking about a home or small business network

The (occasionally, on Comcast) changing dynamic prefix was a pain for me too, when accessing things externally. For internal use I additionally set up a fixed ULA prefix.

How do manage dynamic prefixes? This is the problem that’s prevented me from adopting IPv6.

It depends what you want NAT for.

If it’s for security then most of the actual security provided by NAT routing is actually just the routers firewall itself. So a good ipv6 firewall provides the same level of security.

If it’s just because you’re a bit of a control freak and like to manage the assignment of IP addresses (and I fall into that category too) then my understanding is that you can also do this with ipv6 as ISPs typically hand you a wider subnet range (unlike ipv4 where you get just 1 IP). However I’ve tried a couple of times to adopt ipv6 into my stupidly bespoke home networking stack and failed each time.

I really do want to adopt IPv6, if only because I like fiddling with tech, but, like yourself, I keep getting stuck on the “how do I integrate IPv6 into the infrastructure I already have” problem.

Edit: if anyone has any recommended guides to configuring IPv6 using ISC dhcpd and unknown addresses supplied by your ISP, then I’d be interested to read them.

> NAT is a feature for me, not a workaround

NAT can be fine, but why would it be a feature? (I guess maybe some privacy by way of sharing a public IP?)

Very little. I started using it with Spectrum after upgrading a firewall and found. Lots of weird gotchas with DNS.

If your ISP issues you a routable IPv4 address then not much. Otherwise IPv6 lets you avoid CGNAT and all of the issues that come with that.

The only thing that comes to mind for me is simpler header, but not sure if it makes much of a difference anyway.

None.

Not sure what specifically happened in your case, but FWIW... My ISP (Spectrum, previously Time Warner) has supported IPv6 at my location for a decade or more now. And I have been running with IPv6 enabled on my router, and on all my Linux boxen, and have had approximately zero problems related to IPv6 in that time. During that time I've had boxes running various Fedora versions, and PopOS and both have handled IPv6 just fine.

> I recently switched ISP to one that supports IPv6 and I have had nothing but problems.

I was previously with an ISP that support IPv6 and had zero problems.

In fact IPv6 worked "too well" at one point: I had put "facebook.com" in my /etc/hosts file pointing to 0.0.0.0 at one point to reduce tracking. I then noticed I got the little FB icons again at some point and couldn't figure out why things were 'broken' (i.e., not blocking).

Turned out that after IPv6 was enabled I had to add ::1. That blocked FB again. IPv6 made connectivity to FB work again.

I couldn't say what your issues are, but I have been on ipv6 (dual stack) on Comcast for over a decade and have had none of those problems. I've always had open source routers and plenty of Linux scattered around the house.

I find these experiences really interesting, because in Germany all major ISPs have been doing IPv6 for years and years now.

I dont think any normal person thinks about IPv6 or IPv4 here.

i have at&t fiber and their ipv6 worked perfectly fine for years, until a one day they started dropping packets like mad and it never got better

Hehe, it's kind of funny to contrast the IPv6 evangelists and the Linux desktop evangelists push hard for adoption, only for it to fall flat for ordinary users.