Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#31

Post by arcade79 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

I was thinking about ipv6 the other day. I concluded in my head that adoption was just around 5-10%. Luckily I went to verify that with statistics.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

While price of ipv4 addresses are increasing, the world has slowly been adopting ipv6. From the graph above, I'd say we cross over 50% in about 2-3 years time. At some point the "dash" to adopt ipv6 starts, and brave folks will drop support for ipv4. Then it'll probably evaporate between 2030-2035.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#32

Post by redox99 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades.

And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself.

If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.

Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4).

Not having two sets of firewall rules and two sets of everything. I always disable IPv6 because it can bite you so hard when you don't realize that you are wide open to IPv6 connections because of different firewalls.

Edit: To make everything a bit clearer, the idea with this "ipv4+" is that you don't need the complexity of running both ipv4 and ipv6 as you do now.

And regarding compatibility, with ipv4+ if you have a 0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x ip address you would be able to talk to both ipv4+ aware and legacy ipv4 devices natively without any tunneling (because you also own the legacy, non quad 0 ip address). If you don't have such "quad 0 ip" (you are 1.1.1.1.x.x.x.x), only ipv4+ aware devices would be able to to connect to you, and for you to connect to non ipv4+ aware devices you would need either tunneling, or having a secondary, cgnat, "quad 0 ip".

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#33

Post by xmddmx » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

Many small business routers and firewalls still don't have reasonable IPv6 support, for example https://forum.peplink.com/t/ipv6-support/3675/54 (from 2015) says they are working on it. People are asking "what's the status" now in 2022.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#34

Post by bombcar » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Setting a website to be available over IPv6 is relatively easy, yet we see:

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;news.ycombinator.com.  IN AAAA

Why? Because it's not quite as simple as making Apache respond over IPv6; any website of any size has various protections in place to prevent DDoS, spam, etc, and those tools are almost universally basic and at the root is the "ban by IPv4 address". Without that tooling supporting IPv6, it remains a side note not worth supporting.

Solutions? You can make an IPv6 version available that is read-only; or requires you to login via an IPv4-only gateway first (and protect that) and then ban by username as necessary.

And outbound? You have to IPv4 NAT which maybe Hetzner offers? If not there are things like https://nat64.net

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#35

Post by mort96 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #17

xlmnxp wrote: post #3

Hetzner should provide free CGNAT IPv4 Addresses (IPv4 Gateway) for IPv6-Only VMs

A whole lot of ISPs are doing CGNAT for IPv4 now, mostly in Asia. Starlink does it. It's mostly OK but has a lot of drawbacks, particularly IP-based geolocation. (Starlink does not support IPv6 although they seem to be rolling it out this month.)

Being behind CGNAT has downsides yes, for example being unable to ever host anything; you become relegated to a consumer who's dependent on the big hosting companies to ever have an Internet presence. But geolocation? I don't want everyone to be able to get my location! Breaking IP-based geolocation is a benefit of CGNAT, not a drawback.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#36

Post by miyuru » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

cadence- wrote: post #20

I’m still waiting for Amazon to start supporting Elastic IPv6 in their AWS.

You can remove the address(/128) from old instance and assign it in the new instance and it will works just as EIP.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#37

Post by UI_at_80x24 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

And this is where government regulation would have helped. It's a shame nobody listened to me back in the 90's: (it's a joke. I'm a nobody, there is nobody listening.)

All cell-phones should have been ipv6 from the get-go.

Now if we could just go back in time and warn everybody about IPv4 address space being exhausted. And maybe the climate too while we are at it.

Seriously though, cell-phone adoption would make that a game changer. Hey Apple, sell it as an exclusive feature!

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#38

Post by mort96 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

api wrote: post #4

The biggest problem remains cloud and CDN companies with poor to nonexistent IPv6 support. Most ISPs, especially on mobile, have it now or are adding it very soon. I've wondered whether some might be dragging their feet because they see an advantage in IP address scarcity to sell cloud gateways, CDNs, and other middle box type services. But the most likely explanation remains that not enough customers are asking for…

I've never been on a non-mobile connection with IPv6. It's not a thing in Norway.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#39

Post by fleventynine » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

redox99 wrote: post #32

IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades. And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself. If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade. Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.…

How is a host with a 32-bit address supposed to communicate with a host with a 128-bit address when it can only send packets with a 32-bit address?

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#40

Post by bombcar » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

arcade79 wrote: post #31

I was thinking about ipv6 the other day. I concluded in my head that adoption was just around 5-10%. Luckily I went to verify that with statistics. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html While price of ipv4 addresses are increasing, the world has slowly been adopting ipv6. From the graph above, I'd say we cross over 50% in about 2-3 years time. At some point the "dash" to adopt ipv6 starts, and brave fol…

I'd love for some way to measure how much of my network's traffic outbound and inbound is IPv6. I assume there's some way to "count" it on the router, but Mikrotik doesn't seem to expose it directly.