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The IPv6 Transition

potaroo.net

361–370 of 433 posts

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#361

I'll admit that while I run dual-stack for the public internet, I still haven't figured out a good way to manage my LAN with ipv6. For ipv4, I have a DHCP server on the same machine as my DNSH server, which lets me configure my network in a single place. With IPv6 I'm still not sure exactly how to configure this. It seems like if I use SLAAC for a ULA, at least some hosts will still apply RFC 4941 (or maybe 8981; I'm…

Most hosts will generate both a stable and a temporary address when using SLAAC. The temporary address will be used for outbound traffic but the stable address will accept incoming traffic.

So there usually is a stable ULA or link-local that you can put in a local DNS AAAA record.

The PITA is that many services prefer GUA over ULA if available and don't gradually fall back to ULA if the WAN goes down. And you will still need dynDNS to VPN into your network because ISPs are allergic to stable IPv6 prefixes.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#362

This may be a random question, but do any of you have a working code (preferably C or Lua, without regexes but with regexes works too) for: 1) checking if a given string is a valid IPv6 address, and 2) checking if this IPv6 address is in the range? It should handle both IPv4 and IPv6. It must handle edge cases (number of chunks being 8, numbers must be less than 65535 if I am correct, then there is some stuff regardi…

You probably just shouldn't try to do string matching here and just use one of the conversion function to get them to binary, apply the mask, and see if they match

IPv4 has problems with the non-standard formats that use octal or combine octets. Like 192.168.1 is 192.168.0.1, 127.0.0.1 is 127.1.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#363
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was this downvoted? It’s exactly right. The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, or making any value judgment about IPv4 vs IPv6. People and businesses don’t spend money on technology upgrades where the benefit is not measurably better than what they already have. This is just common sense; no one wants to throw awa…

> The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds Cheaper? Hetzner and other hosts give IPv6 addresses out for free and charge extra for IPv4 addresses.

Most people don’t need a public IPv4 address and can live with CGNAT.

For the relatively small number of people who do need public addresses, renting them from a cloud provider or buying blocks at auction are still economically viable, in comparison to the capital costs of upgrading everything that needs upgrading to support IPv6-only.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun reasons why my home network is still on IPv4: IPv6 drains my girlfriend's phone battery :-) Something to do with Router Advertisement intervals being too short, though I don't get why that only affects her ~5yo android phone. And IPv6 is so complex, I haven't figured out if the RA interval is something I can or should tweak, whether that comes from the PiHole or whether I'd have to flash OpenWRT on my router, or…

I have an Android on my IPv6 network with no issues, and this is across several different router vendors with different defaults for RAs. Maybe it's not an IPv6 issue and you're barking up the wrong tree?

Probably definitely barking up the wrong tree, yes. I happened upon a forum post somewhere about Sony Xperia XA2 battery drain on networks where router advertisment intervals were every 10 seconds or something.

Who knows, maybe I dreamed it.

Nonetheless, I disabled IPv6 again and that, somehow, was the smoking gun that solved the "my phone always runs out of charge overnight when I stay connected to your wi-fi" problem.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give ipv6 some credit, there are some very useful things like flow labels. But I agree completely with the rest of your sentiment. IPv4 is "good enough", but we could do some things to extend its usage further. First, adopt service location in DNS, and being to retire it at the TCP port-number layer. Then we could run more than one website per ip address, and this would significantly increase resilience against ce…

> To give ipv6 some credit, there are some very useful things like flow labels. They are not useful, as you can't depend on them.

Wasn't aware of this actually, whats the issue with them?

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#366

I'll admit that while I run dual-stack for the public internet, I still haven't figured out a good way to manage my LAN with ipv6. For ipv4, I have a DHCP server on the same machine as my DNSH server, which lets me configure my network in a single place. With IPv6 I'm still not sure exactly how to configure this. It seems like if I use SLAAC for a ULA, at least some hosts will still apply RFC 4941 (or maybe 8981; I'm…

[deleted]

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so for anyone that "just browses the web" (which is overwhelming majority) there is virtually no difference/benefit? Our current patterns of internet behaviour are limited by IPv4, so almost by construction nobody does things that need IPv6. Few people made international journeys before deep water navigation; watched live streams before Twitch; or had pizza delivered at 4am before dominos.

Could you give examples? One, the most obvious, is actually having distributed net and serving content from your own machine and in the ancient times like 15 years ago Opera tried that by bundling sort of local http-server (?!, can't even remember the name of the project…) but it floped... I'm not sure that ipv4 was the issue or rather the fact that people don't usually have or want their machine work 24/7... for cal…

I’m hesitant to suggest specific use cases because general purpose technologies are hard to predict in their applications. I doubt whether anyone accurately forecasted the impact of JS in the browser, for example.

However, I’d love to be able to interact with my car, CCTV cameras and other IoT devices at long distance with fewer middlemen involved.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#368
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6. A couple of other practically useful things: - You never get address collisions when connecting to someone else's VPN, or connecting to your home network via VPN from someone else's private network (if you've set that up) - If t…

so for anyone that "just browses the web" (which is overwhelming majority) there is virtually no difference/benefit? I don't play online games, don't use VPN, have a couple of services on my local RPi that has port forwarded on router and that's it... ipv6 could be handy when testing some service on my laptop and trying with external services but this happens so rarely that it's not an issue... on the flipside, whene…

It's likely the web itself has been shaped by the technology underpinning it. The article would seem to suggest something similar. Look at email. Now we all connect to the central email servers at Google and they handle most of everything else. Perhaps on the IPv6 internet, you would be able to buy a USB stick that handles all your emails for you. No more centralised mail, you just have a small server in your house that does it for you. The same of social media, etc. It would be feasible to offer an entire plug-and-play P2P internet in the form-factor and cost of a small HDD.

Would people want to own such a server? I don't know, but as it stands currently, only the centralised players in the internet sphere can afford to serve content. Perhaps our relationship to these companies would be different if there was no barrier to entry for competition. Perhaps our entire conception of the internet would be different without that fundamental limitation. Or perhaps nothing would change. The central model has its advantages, but I'd also like to be able to own my own website.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#369
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT is mostly okay, but carrier grade NAT where you can't forward a port causes real problems. IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.

If it was a real problem, market pricing would reflect the increasing severity of that problem. The truth is that people who care about port forwarding are such a small minority -- especially now that P2P file sharing has lost its hype -- that they don't make a visible dent in the rate of IPv4 exhaustion.

This isn't necessarily true. The scarcity of IPv4 addresses could very well induce a lack of demand and decrease the price. You wouldn't dream of developing a technology that requires people to have an individual IP address, so you don't. This massively reduces the demand for v4 addresses. It's not as if there are users out there who will demand the features you can't implement, and it's not as if you could fund the entire IPv6 network by yourself to bring about those features. Then ISPs have no reason to support v6 because no customers demand it. Instead of increased price, the cost is paid through decreased service. Think of a congested road network. It could be well worth it to build some more roads and ease congestion, but if there is no one in the system willing to pay for it, everyone will suffer.

Re: The IPv6 Transition

#370
post #20

China's IPv6 transition is 74% complete.[1] Conversion to IPv6 was specifically called out in China's 14th Five Year Plan, which gives the goal high visibility within the government and the Party. Conversion is quite far along. The current goal is everything IPv6 enabled by 2025, IPv4 turns off in 2030. 99% of the top 100 mobile applications in China are on IPv6. China Mobile's backbone is now IPv6 only. [1] https://…

Collective action by people willing to listen to experts is needed to achieve positive infrastructure results. Infrastructure being a precept to growth, I would not be surprised if our inability to do this leads to the West's current global position becoming greatly diminished.
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