In reply to a post by busterboy:

In reply to a post by tdw42:

IPv6 addresses beginning fe04: are not valid.

The BQM checker agrees with you.

I have the address beginning with fe80::
and it is throwing up stating it's not a valid IP address so will not let me create a BQM over IPv6

Well it is actually a valid IP address but it's a link local one, so equivalent to 192.168.???.???(*). So for a utility like the BQM fe80 is rejected since there is no way devices outside your LAN can ping it.

IPv6 is a funny thing though. I just checked this laptop and it currently has six global IP addresses, one is preferred, the other five are temporary and deprecated. It also has a link-local address.

(*)Or that portion of that range which is private anyway.

Edited by Andrue (Sat 05-Dec-20 09:03:59)

Oops! Corrected, thanks.

Brain was tired, and it's nearly two years since I ditched my landline and AAISP.

Typo apart, the whole point of the fe80 is that it is private on your LAN. That's what I thought I was saying.

Furthermore, even setting up a BQM to the non-temporary IPv6 address of your device is useless if the device is off. You need to find the WAN address of your router. Or if it's your phone running on mobile data rather than wifi from your router it'll be a completely different address.

IPv6 addresses are not behind NAT. They are assigned to individual devices, like ones in blocks of IPv4 can be but with without the hassle.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Well it is actually a valid IP address but it's a link local one, so equivalent to 192.168.???.???(*).

Almost. fe80:... is indeed link local, which means it's only valid on a single link, but the IPv4 equivalent is 169.254.x.x. You'll see that if you bring up a network interface on a link where the DHCP server is missing, so the devices are forced to pick their own addresses.

The equivalent to 192.168.x.x in IPv6 is Unique Local Addresses (ULA), which start fcXX: or fdXX:. You're unlikely to come across them, but if you wanted to build an entirely private IPv6 network without connecting to the Internet, that's what you'd use.

End of public service announcement

Edited by candlerb (Sat 05-Dec-20 10:27:51)

This post in your BQM topic gives one way to get at the full IPv6 address you need to run the BQM.

[IMG]http://img2.ipv6-test.com/speedtest/result/2020/12/0...[/IMG]

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

So if you run IPv6 on all you home devices how do you make contact with devices that keep changing their addresses?

DNS. If you host any services (whether over IPv4 or IPv6) you might have come across DDNS. Nobody is manually typing out IPv6 addresses because this very quickly becomes unmanageable.

If you are manually typing out addresses though it should still work as long as you pick a "stable" address instead of a "temporary" address. A stable address is guaranteed to stay the same (at least until your ISP decides it's time to rotate the IPv6 prefix assigned to you).

Yes, I realised that when it was pointed out, but it is also part of geek-land.

The normal user such as myself and I think the OP rarely sees a 169 or 127 address, and similarly a 10 one, unless something has gone badly wrong, usually in a third-party server.

On domestic networks the IPv4 address is the single WAN one, be that static or dynamic, given to their router by their ISP, and their "private" as opposed to public LAN addresses are 192.168.nnn.mmm

That WAN address being what BQM needs to know.

I was simply trying to explain at that level why he should not, could not, set up a BQM to an fe80 address! And furthermore should not set one up to a device IPv6 address. Neither a temporary one or the "permanent" one visible from ipconfig.

Furthermore, in non-geek, I disagree fundamentally.

On IPv4 a user sees their (router) WAN address when using a "What is my IP address" service. Everything on their LAN is 192.168.nnn.mmm

On IPv6 when using such a service they see a short-term WAN /128 from their assigned /56 (from most ISPs I have seen), and their LAN is entirely fe80s showing in ipconfig /all.

192.168 and fe80 are therefore equivalent to non-techies, and that's all they need to know.

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

This post in your BQM topic gives one way to get at the full IPv6 address you need to run the BQM.

Yes I read it thanks.

Edited by busterboy (Mon 07-Dec-20 23:32:23)