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What drives IPv6 deployment?

potaroo.net

61–70 of 100 posts

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#61

We're an ISP, most of our customers are businesses. Of those, around 50% opt for a pre-configured LAN (i.e. we do NAT and usually CGNAT too). For the rest we provide a static IP address, so we'll allocate a /30 (block of 4), and they get a single usable address which they will assign to their own manged router/firewall. For the majority of our customers "networking" is either handled as overflow for their in/out IT r…

I made a major push to try to get IPv6 running at a small business. In the end, despite the ISP at the business supplying IPv6, and getting some client side IPv6 going with OTHER ISPS (a pain) it fell over because. 1) Things like the VPN client software didn't get routes right when client side network was IPv6 oriented so VPN connections broke - a no go. 2) We had to continue to offer ipv4, as folks in the field were…

> push

Thanks for trying! I did the same round. Tried to get v6, and finally gave up, because everything was broken in very stupid ways.

> I don't get why they

Because it happened in the early 90s, and since then all the RFCs that got layered upon that had to try and keep things consistent.

There could have been a simpler thing, but it was scrapped. IPv5 is missing for a reason.

And the goodies cannot be opt-in, otherwise no one will opt-in.

Of course this leads to a very slow deployment, because v4 with a lot of hacks just work, and will continue to work. It's easier to encapsulate things in DTLS (TLS + UDP) and gRPC and whatever (and deal with all of that in end user software) than trying to convert the whole World to IPv6.

> DHCP vs autoconfig stuff,

There's DHCPv6, so you don't have to use SLAAC.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are basically the same reasons why I don't use v6 at home and have turned it off in my home router. Everything just works with v4. v6 is a potential source of error and/or security risk. I haven't felt the need to learn more about v6, and it is quite complex so it'll take me a day or so to learn enough to be able to configure my network and know that I haven't screwed that up. But I keep putting that off. There…

> I haven't felt the need to learn more about v6, and it is quite complex No, it isn't. > I would've gladly accepted and adopted a version that's just IPv4 plus 16 bits of extra address space That's what IPv6 is for the most part. > That would've solved the original address shortage problem, and would be a breeze to configure. So is IPv6.

You are right, but it doesn't matter. Because even if v6 is easy to configure, usually the things you can't configure are broken and they are hard to fix. For example your upstream provider is stupid. Or a client's software, or some 3rd party server somewhere you have to live with.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many customer devices don't support /31 subnets unfortunately, for example with Draytek we've seen an issue where it would accept the 255.255.255.254 subnet but we'd see a whole raft of connection issues making the connection unusable. If we provide a dedicated IP for a connection where we provide the LAN we just put a single /32 on the loopback and NAT onto this which is obviously much more economic with address…

Why this subnet thing is even needed? I don't understand it. Why not provide just a single IP address? Seems like big waste of addresses.

Because a lot of things that should be thrown into a volcano are used as routers. And routers need their interfaces configured. And the upstream interface needs to be in a network. And so that network needs a broadcast address, the router needs its own address, there needs to be a next hop address, and since you can't allocate 3, you do 4.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#64
post #35

I for one find clean slate tech approach adopted by Reliance Jio in India very inspiring. IPv6 support from start which saves it tons of money for buying IPv4 addresses , similar to their decision to adopt native 4G LTE Volte from start that helps it save tons of bandwidth on voice compared to Legacy 2G , 3G voice options.

So they run v6, that's great, but they need to run 464XLAT (or something like that) too, and that probably isn't cheap either. (Though they'd probably pay a lot for v4 CGNAT too.)

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#65
post #5
post #2

I have the joy of living in a community with FTTH and a 1Gbps symmetrical connection for I have the pain of that connection requiring an additional $10 / month just so I can get 1 (or 4, same price) static IPv4 address which is apparently “required” for me to get IPv6. After using a HE.net tunnel for a few weeks, the slowdowns induced led me back to IPv4-only world. So even in an advanced situation, you might still b…

The problem here is not that HE.net tunnels require a static IPv4 address, it's that your ISP won't connect you to the whole Internet. Tunnels are garbage. You should either switch ISPs, or complain and wait.

> You should either switch ISPs

Hahahah, you silly Europeans and your options. In the US we have the options of bad or slow!

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#66
What drives IPv6 adoption for me is that I have to pay monthly fees for even small IPv4 allocations, whereas my DC gave me a IPv6 /48 allocation for free without even batting an eye. My residential ISP's DHCPv6 server will happily furnish requests for a /56. Having loads of publicly routable address space is just awesome in the era of containers & VMs.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#67
post #12
post #10

I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits. This thing of having a per-device IP address looks like the wet dream of marketers and those newspapers that won't let you look at more than X articles a month. No thanks.

Yes, I've never been comfortable with the device specificity of IPv6. Sure, temporary non-local addresses are now the norm. And they're usually not MAC-based. But still, I'd rather have IPv4 with NAT. Also, there's the issue that many VPN services don't yet route IPv6, and so IPv6 connections can bypass the VPN connection.

> Yes, I've never been comfortable with the device specificity of IPv6

these days it's really not much different from IPv4: During the lifetime of a connection, the prefix stays the same, so that's equivalent to the IPv4 address before that.

The actual machine address rotates very often, so there's no real value in using this for identifying unique devices.

If you want to profile specific devices, you're much better off using the same attributes you were using with IPv4 (user agent, TTL, other protocol specific fingerprint techniques)

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#68
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that sounds like a failing of the VPN services. At the least, they should push a null default route to users that connect (assuming we're talking about the kind of VPN services that advertise as "protect your privacy with a VPN!").

Yes, good ones handle that. Also firewall rules. But crappy ones don't. And some people end up using crappy ones, because they don't know any better :(

Crappy ones also sometimes leak UDP packets. Or all DNS queries or whatever. If you use crappy VPNs it's your fault if you then don't get the protection you want, no matter the transport protocol.

Or rather: Using IPv4 doesn't guarantee non-crapyness of a VPN provider.

But: Working IPv6 support guarantees at least some level of proficiency by the VPN provider, so they might be more reliable candidates to begin with.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#69

In the US, Verizon is one of the worst offenders. They should be ashamed, touting FIOS as a premium service while it's been close to a decade since they put up their pathetic "IPv6 is coming soon..." announcement[1]. Their largest competitors, Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable) and Comcast have supported IPv6 for years already. [1] - https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting...

Spectrum doesnt’t really support ipv6 either. I have turned it on at times, run for weeks without issue, and then something breaks. When i pushed support, they always tell me its not really supported.

I think their support is a bit divorced from whatever the engineering reality is. I asked their support / sales staff about IPv6 and they said it was "only available w/ their business class service." I ended up buying my own modem and IPv6 has worked flawlessly ever since. The Motorola SB6580 they provided nominally supported IPv6, but they hadn't updated the firmware on it in years. Makes me wonder what exactly I was paying for w/ my "modem rental" fee.

Out of curiosity are you in one of the areas Spectrum took over, or are you legitimately on Charter's network? I am in one of the TimeWarner Cable areas they acquired, the IPv6 support was already in place well before the buyout.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#70
post #46
post #36

> These days it's a client server network. Clients do not need persistent network-wide identity, and only need addresses as and when they communicate with servers. Servers do not need persistent identity either these days, as the identity of a server is a name-based distinguisher rather than an address-based identifier. This is not the internet I've been sold in my youth, and this statement makes me sad and angry.

Why does it make you sad and angry? It sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm especially happy that we went for human readable names rather than wierd letter/number combinations. Also nobody seems to know when to use these [] brackets around the addresses, and they are even hard to type for people who don't use the US keyboard layout. Last but not least NAT is not just a IP-range splitter but also a security feature. I l…

Perhaps you don't remember the days when every computer on the internet was an equal peer. To be honest, I don't quite remember it either; I only caught the very tail end. But time was you could run a website off your home computer, or your own email server. Now you have to go pay money and hand over trust to one of the huge hosting providers, and the internet is a sort-of-bipartite graph with two classes of citizens: The home clients, and the corporate servers.
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