Your comment is painful to read.

Honestly, these days I have no idea. When I said “wouldn’t recommend” that wasn’t an assertion to avoid; just a lack of opinion. Most of my recent experience is with Cloud vendors wherein the problem domain is quite different.

I’ve had experience with most of the big vendors and they’ve all had quirks etc. that you just have to deal with. Fundamentally it’ll come down to a combination of price, support requirements, and internal competence with the kit. (Don’t undermine the last item; it’s far better if you can fix problems yourself.)

Personally I’d actually argue that most corporates could get by with a GNU/Linux VM (or two) for most of their routing and firewalling and it would absolutely be good enough; functionally you can do the same and more. That’s not to say dedicated machines for the task aren’t valuable but I’d say it’s the exception rather than rule that you need ASICs and the like.

I agree. GeoIP was never a good idea, but here we are. Any ASN could be broken up and routed wherever (and changed) but it’s still far too prevalent.

I might be misunderstanding. It’s definitely possible to have as many IPv4 aliases on an interface as you want with whatever routing preferences you want. Can you clarify?

I agree with your stance on deployment.

Given how large the address space is, it’s super easy to segregate out your networks to the nth degree and apply proper firewall rules.

There’s no reason your clients can’t have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.

Security via obfuscation isn’t security. It’s a crutch.

This article is biased to selling you more F5 equipment but is a reasonable summary:

https://www.f5.com/resources/white-papers/the-myth-of-network-address-translation-as-security

Long story short is that NAT is eggshell security and you should be relying on actual firewall rules (I wouldn’t recommend F5) instead of the implicit but not very good protections of NAT.

I can potentially see that scenario if your transit provider is giving you a dynamic prefix but I’ve never seen that in practice. The address space is so enormous there is no reason to.

Otherwise with either of RADVD or DHCPv6 the local routers should still be able to handle the traffic.

My home internal network (v6, SLAAC) with all publicly routeable addresses doesn’t break if I unplug my modem.

Hurricane Electric have a free tunnel broker that is super simple to set up if you really want to get on the bandwagon.

https://tunnelbroker.net/

Though honestly I’d say the benefits of setting it up aren’t really worth the trouble unless you’re keen.

IMO they shouldn’t have allowed ULA as part of the standard. There’s no good reason for it.

It also means you no longer need the kludge that is NAT. Full E2E connectivity is really nice – though I’ve found some network admins dislike this idea because they’re so used to thinking about it differently or (mistakenly) think it adds to their security.

Yes.

I used Netscape “back in the day”. With some interim transition attempts including the likes of Opera, I eventually switched to Chrome because it was genuinely more featureful and faster.

I was a happy Chrome user until they decided to deprecate manifest V2 and fuck up my ad blocker, at which point I switched to Firefox and haven’t looked back.

Everything in this industry is circular I guess.

Just beware of their reclamation policy:

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#compute__idleinstances

I’m curious as to thoughts regarding documenting intent which cross over with what in my opinion.

Regarding self documenting: I agree, but I also think that means potentially using 5 lines when 1 would do if it makes maintenance more straightforward. This crazy perl one liner makes perfect sense today but not in 3 years.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I appreciate the info, but I am not a patient man. :)

Where on earth are you buying HP Mini machines for so cheap? Even the older gen seem to be 5 times as expensive as your estimate.