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Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

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

#51
post #21
post #9

It's been a quarter of a century since IPv6 launch. There's some really good lessons learned here. IPv6 requires everyone, everywhere, needs to change their configuration to add IPv6 addresses and network connectivity to every node/endpoint. The madness of course is that all the underlying infrastructure software (routers, OS, standard libraries) all support IPv6. It would seem, at a large enough scale, that software…

anyone who thinks "ipv6mess" is still relevant in 2022, doesn't understand the problem space it describes. part 1, interoperability failure/incompatibility: nat64+dns64 has been viable since 2008 part 2, incoherence: dual-stack was the transition plan, & was clearly communicated from the start (to anyone who listened). that turned out to not be so effective since so many ppl ignored the realities of legacy ip depleti…

> anyone who thinks "ipv6mess" is still relevant in 2022, doesn't understand the problem space it describes.

It was relevant then -and it is relevant now- because there are good lessons in how to migrate from thing A to thing B, even if some of the then-missing necessary bits are in place now.

Still, it's almost certainly the case that DJB's rant had no real effect, and that the necessary steps were bound to be taken as the cost of sticking with IPv4 rose. Also, a significant period of time was always going to be necessary for software and tooling to catch up -- perhaps there wasn't much to be done about improving the transition 20 years ago. Yet DJB's rant isn't wrong or devoid of value -- it's mostly right and entertaining (still!), even if there just wasn't enough IETF and dev oomph to do better at the time.

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

#52
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?

That's a solved problem whose solution is called ipv4 over ipv6 tunneling.

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

#53
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?

If it's not "Ipv4+" aware, it wouldn't be able. Otherwise it would understand new packet formats.

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

#54
post #43
post #34

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 r…

Actually HN is available via IPv6 over Cloudflare. You have to add a CF IPv6 it to the hosts file. In fact I am posting this comment over IPv6.

> hosts file

1986 wants a word.

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

#55
post #8

> The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via IPv6 This is quite strange given the period around 2010 where there were government edicts that IPv6 must be supported. Perhaps GitHub wasn't mission critical back then.

There are a number of companies (not naming names) that do NOT support IPv6 for commoners but if you are on a government account/contract you have different government endpoints that ... work over IPv6.

Infuriating, but perhaps understandable; they're willing to support the government over IPv6 because it's required and they pay more. But I wish there was a "I know what I'm doing and understand you'll make fun of me if I ask for support on this" option.

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

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's not "Ipv4+" aware, it wouldn't be able. Otherwise it would understand new packet formats.

[deleted]

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

#58
post #40

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.

iirc mikrotik supports netflow. that's how i account for proto balance. FWIW, owing to the nature of residential traffic, I've typically seen high (60-70% of traffic) as v6.

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

#59
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.…

I generally agree, but I'm pretty sure ::1.2.3.4 is a valid IPv6 address because it does have the idea of v4 compatibility built in.

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

#60
20 years ago it was the lack of IPv6 support on the CPE holding IPv6 on the server side back, nowadays it's a lack of IPv6 at major SaaS providers causing issues. In most of the scenarios I was involved in we made sure that the CDN in front of the product was able to terminate IPv6 and left everything behind it v4 only. About 1/3 to 1/2 of the traffic received was sent via IPv6 on those setups. Maybe time to turn that around and use the CDN to make the product also available via v4? Leaves you with maintaining a NAT gateway for your own infrastructure.

BTW also only one of the office networks I had to deal with in the past 20 years hat experimental IPv6 support, and that was at a small local hosting company. Everything bigger than that also sticks to IPv4 only for now. :(

Strange how things change but still stay the same.

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