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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

#221
post #157
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.…

One of the ideas of ipv6 was to reduce routing tables, those tables that backbone providers have to keep in memory and look up for incoming traffic. With ipv4's fragmented allocation scheme, these routing tables are huge. With ipv6, even huge companies like amazon only have a couple of global allocations. A "ipv4 with more octets" scheme would have kept that fragmentation around. That being said, Amazon currently has…

> Amazon currently has 2880 ipv4 allocations and 946 ipv6 allocations... not much gained I guess?

Whole IPv4 address space is 4294967296 addresses.

A single /48 is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176.

And 2804:800::/32 is 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336.

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

#222
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.

In addition to NextDNS I have been running a firewall app on my android phone (which also points to NextDNS) and shows all this. Good easy way to get started. ReThinkDNS is the app I am currently using because it integrates some block lists well but there is also a more serious Android firewall app I may switch to.

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

#223
post #199
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ipv6-only web sites are borderline nonexistant, because no one who needs to maintain a profit dares to cut off a revenue stream from legacy ip only users (yet). the most exhaustive list thus far is https://sites.ip-update.net/ afaik

I'm not asking for ipv6-only, but ipv4-only. Those are the ones blocking adoption for me, as an end user.

derp yes

https://whynoipv6.com/

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

#224
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…

I got a brand new router recently, IPv6 was still disabled by default! I honestly can't understand the reasoning, I don't even buy the internet visibility argument because the default incoming connection rules for IPv6 after I enabled it were deny-all. We really have a long way to go still in getting equipment everywhere enabled on it.

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

#225
post #169
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has no useful information.

Put this in your /etc/hosts file and it should work (I don't know if it does as I don't have ipv6) 2a06:98c1:3120::5 news.ycombinator.com

Which is not useful information in this discussion.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. Clearly ipv6 is very flawed and by now the community should consider it a failure and work on a viable replacement. We need an internet protocol that is backwards compatible with ipv4 and does not require deploying and maintaining entirely parallel networks, interfaces, firewalls, routing, etc. If ipv6 actually was viable, the internet would have cut over. Instead we’re on a path to support ipv4…

There is no “backwards compatible with IPv4”. If you have to modify the existing packet headers, you no longer have backward compatibility. If you change anything involving how a flow is identified (like the source/address destinations and ports) then you have broken backward compatibility. Firewalls need to understand new address formats, routers need to understand new address formats, end systems need to understand…

> It’s just that transition is expensive

It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.

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

#227

I have not seen a practical way to go IPv6-Only. If I made my DNS, Web, Chat, Time and other servers IPv6-Only I would only be able to access them from a few mobile networks, most VPS providers and a handful of ISP's. One might be tricked into thinking adoption is high, but the VPS and mobile providers really throw off the statistics. Mobile providers due to sheer numbers of clients and being late to the allocation g…

> I could see doing IPv6+IPv4 in a corporation and terminate everything on load balancers, allowing anything behind the LB to be any combination of IPv4/IPv6. But IPv6 only? I don't see any big companies doing that in my lifetime.

facebook started migrating to ipv6-only datacenters in 2014 or so. i think all of them are converted at this point. they only support legacy ip at their network edge, & use siit (iirc) to facilitate access.

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

#228
Every couple of months, I enable dual-stack on my home network, to see if it works. And inevitably I get a terrible experience. Some sites fail to load, others load after a huge delay (presumably because we're waiting for an ip6 timeout of some sort) and some things just don't work right. I'm always too lazy to figure out why these things don't work, but I turn off dual stack and everything works fine again.

I'm a network engineer and I can't make ip6 work seamlessly in my house -- what chance do regular consumers have?

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

#229

We are IPv6-only on our institute-internal CPU compute cluster based on slurm. Only the head node has an IPv4 address, so that it can be reached from IPv4 only clients (sadly, there are still quite a lot). All nodes inside the cluster talk over IPv6. And all other computers with IPv6 access use that to communicate to the head node. We are transitioning to IPv6-only for internal services and try to avoid using IPv4 ad…

> Sadly, our local ISP is still IPv4-only, meaning we cannot even access our IPv6 hosts while at home, so we need to fall-back to IPv4 quite a lot. Have you perhaps looked into using tunnels to fix this? he.net can add IPv6 support to any routable IPv4 address that can respond to ICMP. If you need to stick to your internal ULA, something like NPTv6 can translate the /48 subnet HE provides to your own /48 subnet trans…

Yes, I did this on my personal network. I'm in Linz (Austria), the nearest tunnel to a german speaking country that's listed on tunnelbroker.net was Berlin (if I remember right). Everything worked rather well, but I then decided against it, because of the GeoIP implications (with one IP being in Austria and one in Germany) and the added latency. It's noticable when SSHing somewhere whether I'm Linz-Linz or Linz-Berlin-Linz, especially when a small lag spike happens, which is rather frequent with the cable-based network our ISP is offering. It wasn't worth it to half-slowdown our network just to not rely on jumping through some dual-stack node in the university.

If anybody from Liwest (our local ISP) reads this - IPv6 would be really nice! :)

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

#230

I propose a real simple solution: Major providers pledge to take this seriously. They toss a rule in their routers that just drops all ipv4, for 1 minute, starting at noon UTC. At 12:01 UTC, revert the change and ipv4 works again. Do this every day. The following week, up it to 2 minutes. The incentive will happen.

Or as a friend of mine suggested, more than ten years ago and only half in jest, I think: just block all porn sites on IPv4 (but not on IPv6). The demand for IPv6 will soon be overwhelming.
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