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XorNotlast Saturday at 7:56 AM6 repliesview on HN

I mean generally I want fixed IPs on my local network for robustness.

With IPv6 I actually want it more and it becomes possible since we can just use the MAC address as an IP address.

I have IPv6 service at my ISP right now but I'm hesitant to turn it on on my local network because it does make my firewalling concerns much more critical.


Replies

9devlast Saturday at 8:05 AM

> I mean generally I want fixed IPs on my local network for robustness.

What do you mean by robustness? Isn't it really stable hostnames that you want? I don't understand how fixed IPs increase resilience (to what?).

> I'm hesitant to turn it on on my local network because it does make my firewalling concerns much more critical.

Block everything coming in from outside the network. Allow established connections. That's all there is to it.

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gucci-on-fleeklast Saturday at 8:25 AM

> I mean generally I want fixed IPs on my local network for robustness.

Same here, which is why I use DHCPv6. It's pretty easy to set up, nearly everything supports it, and it's super reliable.

The only catch is that Android refuses to support DHCPv6 for some reason, which is kinda annoying since it means that you need to keep SLAAC enabled if you have any Android devices on your network. Which means that your DHCPv6-supporting devices will end up with two addresses, but there aren't any real downsides to that.

nottorplast Saturday at 8:06 AM

> since we can just use the MAC address as an IP address

With IPv4 you need to remember ... one number per machine. The one at the end, since it's usually a /24 and everything has the same prefix.

I'm sure it's trivial to remember mac addresses from different vendors with no connection to each other too :)

> Isn't it really stable hostnames that you want?

Hostnames are another layer. Your apple tv example may advertise itself on its own. My toys don't all do that.

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silblast Saturday at 12:39 PM

> I mean generally I want fixed IPs on my local network for robustness.

With IPv6 you can assign fixed unique local addresses in addition to dynamic public addresses from your ISP.

baqlast Saturday at 8:08 AM

What firewalling? You don’t have an ipv4 firewall?

Dagger2last Saturday at 5:52 PM

Honestly, it sounds more like your network is fragile rather than robust. A robust network would be able to handle the IPs changing, rather than needing them permanently set to some specific value.