Today in our newest take on "older technology is better": why NAT rules!
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Yes but you’d still be performing NAT. It’s at least 1:1.
You’ll need to deal with firewall rules regardless, and drop IPs into policies. IPv6 doesn’t remove any of those chores but gets rid of having to maintain tables to deal with many-to-one NAT.
You wouldn't need NAT. The ULA is used on the internal network, and the public IP is for internet access. Neither of those need NAT.
If you use a single shared public ip then you’re using some amount of address translation.
If you’re using an external ip address that’s different than an internal ip address but both are assigned to a single host the you’re doing 1:1 NAT.
At least that’s how I understand ipv4 and I don’t think ipv6 is much different.
This is practically never the case with IPv6. Usually, each device gets its own public IP. This is how the IPv4 internet used to work in the old days (one IP = one device), and it solves so many problems. No need for NAT traversal since there's no NAT. No need for split horizon DNS since the same IP works both inside and outside your network.
There's still a firewall on the router, of course.
With IPv6, each network device can have multiple IPs. If you have an internal IP for whatever reason, it's in addition to your public IP, not instead of it.
IPs are often allocated using SLAAC (stateless address auto config). The router tells the client "I have a network you can use; its IP range is
2001:whatever/64, and the client auto-generates an IP in that range, either based on the MAC address (always the same) or random, depending on if privacy extensions are enabled - usually on for client systems and off for servers.Just like ipv4 though, you wouldn’t use external addresses internally because your external IPs might change, such as when moving between ISPs. You would NAT a hosts external address to its internal address.
This is true
This is usually not true.
If you're worried about your external IP changing (like if you're hosting a server on it), you'd solve it the same way you solve it with IPv4: Using dynamic DNS. The main difference is that you run the DDNS client on the computer rather than the router. If there's multiple systems you want to be able to access externally, you'd habe multiple DDNS hostnames.
DNS doesn’t propagate fast enough.
What translates the public ip to the internal ip? Aren’t they different?
There's no translation between them. With IPv6, one network interface can have multiple IPs. A ULA (internal IP) is only used on your local network. Any internet-connected devices will also have a public IPv6 address.
ULAs aren't too common. A lot of IPv6-enabled systems only have one IP: The private one.