That's not my take at all. I have a /60 from my ISP, and have 5 ports on my router, each getting it's own /64.
Hosts get a stateless IPv6 address, no running out of leases, no DHCP service that's painful to make redundant, no expired leases when the DHCP server is down, etc. I consider that a win.
Also with so many IPs, each client can grab a few, and rotate them, so facebook doesn't see the same IP as twitter, etc. Nor can you assume that connecting to facebook today will be from the same IP as facebook tomorrow.
So your MAC related IP never need to be shared with the internet, but can be used to accept incoming connections, for those that know the IP, or know the DNS to look up the IP. For those that really want DHCP you can have that as well with DHCPv6.
IPv6 also removes the need for a NAT, all my /60 of IP addresses are visible to the internet, nothing gross like the various ugly hacks for connection forwarding, tunneling, and various weird unreliable technologies trying to get past consumer NATs.
IPv6 seems so much saner than IPv4. You can autoconfigure IPs and setup a firewall for any restrictions you want to make. I can share files gasp without dropbox, share photos without a photo hosting site, remotely open/close/check my garage door without depending on some few $ a month cloud service, remotely view my home security cams, etc.
Generally I think of the normal IPv4 provided single IP+NAT as a crippled consumer only connection that forces the use of someone else's service/cloud for even the most simple of things.
Right, and now your isp knows how many devices you have, what endpoints each of them connect to and at what time. This is what kills me with v6. Privacy is already a large enough issue, I have no interest in letting my ISP "see" my internal network and egress traffic flows from each device.
> Right, and now your isp knows how many devices you have
It sounds crazy today, but this is how it used to be with IPv4 back in the day.
For instance at my first job, every employee's computer (Sun SPARCstations) and every server in the building was directly on the internet with a routable IP address. No firewalls in sight, no NAT.
sendmail ran on every box, so incoming email was handled directly by your own workstation, from anywhere in the internet. So my email address was name@myhostname.company.com (we did have aliases and forwarding so name@company.com also worked).
I ran FTP server and mailing lists and (slightly later) web sites from my workstation. This was peak decentralized internet and a wonderful time.
No, they don't, sure in a given period of time they know how many unique IPv6 addresses are in use. But they can't tell how many devices that is.
I'd much rather have 2^68 IPs that I can sprinkle over as many devices as I want than a single IPv4 that makes p2p hard, makes services hard, and requires the use of either NAT or tons of port forwarding.
Some of the IPv6 changes are good, many of them are not so amazing.
I think one can say in general that if we had of stuck to only increasing the address field size, and not changed a bunch of other things between IPv4 and IPv6 we could have gotten there a lot quicker and be mostly through the transition.
Hosts get a stateless IPv6 address, no running out of leases, no DHCP service that's painful to make redundant, no expired leases when the DHCP server is down, etc. I consider that a win.
Also with so many IPs, each client can grab a few, and rotate them, so facebook doesn't see the same IP as twitter, etc. Nor can you assume that connecting to facebook today will be from the same IP as facebook tomorrow.
So your MAC related IP never need to be shared with the internet, but can be used to accept incoming connections, for those that know the IP, or know the DNS to look up the IP. For those that really want DHCP you can have that as well with DHCPv6.
IPv6 also removes the need for a NAT, all my /60 of IP addresses are visible to the internet, nothing gross like the various ugly hacks for connection forwarding, tunneling, and various weird unreliable technologies trying to get past consumer NATs.
IPv6 seems so much saner than IPv4. You can autoconfigure IPs and setup a firewall for any restrictions you want to make. I can share files gasp without dropbox, share photos without a photo hosting site, remotely open/close/check my garage door without depending on some few $ a month cloud service, remotely view my home security cams, etc.
Generally I think of the normal IPv4 provided single IP+NAT as a crippled consumer only connection that forces the use of someone else's service/cloud for even the most simple of things.