As long as no significant websites are IPv6-only qnd no significant user base is IPv6-only, why would anyone join IPv6? What proponents could do is make their websites IPv6-only. The IETF website, for instance, should be IPv6-only.
IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
281–290 of 643 posts
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1: it's hard to remember addresses fd::1 is perfectly valid internal IPv6 address (along with fd::2 ... fd::n)
fd::1 is somewhere in the reserved ::/8 space where various stuff like old ipv4 mapped addresses and localhost reside. What you probably mean is something like fd00::1, but that is something you shouldn't use, because 'fd00::/8' is a probabilistically unique local address (ULA) block. You are supposed to create a /48 net by appending 40 random bits to fd00::/8. Of course, if your fair dice roll lands on all zeroes, a…
In home networks, the idea of merging with someone else's network is... most certainly not worth worrying about. Maybe you marry someone or become roommates with someone who also picked fd00::/8? And you still want two separate subnets? Other than that I don't see a scenario where it matters.
Granted, if you're doing this in a corporate setting (where merging with someone else's address space is a lot more realistic), then yes definitely pick a random 40 bits. But at home? Who cares. Same as using 192.168.1.0/24 instead of a random 10.0.0.0/24 subnet... it's not worth worrying about.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporate IT networks have less IPv6 and residential/mobile networks have more IPv6, so on weekdays when people are using Internet at work = more IPv4, weekends when people are using Internet at home = more IPv6. Christmas also has a big bump for the same reason.
Awesome, thanks. No change in trend during COVID years, interesting.
There is -- you can see the weekday/weekend difference is smaller when people are working from home en masse.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6. The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that: 1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale…
IPv6 is a recursive WTF. It might _look_ like a conservative expansion of IPv4, but it's really not. A lot of operational experience and practices from IPv4 don't apply to IPv6. For example, in IPv4 each host has one local net address, and the gateway uses NAT to let it speak with the Internet. Simple and clean. In IPv6 each host has multiple global addresses. But if your global connection goes down, these addresses…
> For example, in IPv4 each host has one local net address, and the gateway uses NAT to let it speak with the Internet. Simple and clean.
No, that’s not the IPv4 design. That’s an incredibly ugly hack to cope with IPv4 address shortage. It was never meant to work this way. IPv6 fixes this to again work like the original, simpler design, without ”local” addresses or NAT.
> In IPv6 each host has multiple global addresses.
Not necessarily. You can quite easily give each host one, and only one, static IPv6 address, just like with old-style IPv4.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we'll hit a tipping point soon, just like with Python3 - for years and years it seemed almost stalled, then it became easier to start with python3 than python2 and suddenly everyone migrated.
This seems like wishful thinking. Python3 vs. Python2 seems different than IPv6 vs. IPv4.
"seems" is doing a lot of heavy-lifting in your message
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#286Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#287It has barely hit 50% and it's already plateauing. This adoption rate is ridiculous despite basically all network interfaces supporting it. I thought I would see IPv6 take over in my lifetime as the default for platforms to build on but I can see I was wrong. Enterprise and commercial companies are literally going to hold back internet progress around 60 to 75 years because it's in their best interest to ensure users…
ISPs often fail to do this because there is always someone in the hierarchy who says, "nobody is demanding it."
Nobody is demanding IPv4 either. Or Ethernet.
People buy "Wi-Fi", literally "Wi-Fi", not Internet access.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow? Like surely all the big players have updated their networking equipment by now, and surely every piece of enterprise-grade kit sold in the last 20 years has supported v6. The only arguments I've ever heard against ipv6 that made any sense are that: 1: it's hard to remember addresses, which is mayyyyybe valid for homelab enthusiast types, but for medium scale…
IPv6 is a recursive WTF. It might _look_ like a conservative expansion of IPv4, but it's really not. A lot of operational experience and practices from IPv4 don't apply to IPv6. For example, in IPv4 each host has one local net address, and the gateway uses NAT to let it speak with the Internet. Simple and clean. In IPv6 each host has multiple global addresses. But if your global connection goes down, these addresses…
> For example, in IPv4 each host has one local net address, and the gateway uses NAT to let it speak with the Internet. Simple and clean.
That's only true for smalltime home networks. Try to merge 2 company IPv4 networks with overlapping RFC1918 ranges like 10.0.0.0/8. We'll talk again in 10 years when you are done sorting out that mess ;)
> In IPv6 each host has multiple global addresses. But if your global connection goes down, these addresses are supposed to be withdrawn. So your hosts can end up with _no_ addresses.
Only a problem for home users with frequently changing dialup networks from a stupid ISP. And even then: Your host can still have ULA and link-local addresses (fe80::).
> ULA was invented to solve this, but the source selection rules are STILL being debated: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-6man-rfc6724-upda...
RFC6724 is still valid, they are only debating a slight update that doesn't affect a lot.
> Then there's DHCP.
DHCPv6 is an abomination. But not for the reasons you are enumerating.
> With IPv4 the almost-universal DHCP serves as an easy way to do network inspection.
IPv4 DHCP isn't a sensible means to do network inspection. Any rougue client can steal any IP and MAC address combination by sniffing a little ARP broadcast traffic. Any rogue client can issue themselves any IPv4 address, and even well-behaved clients will sometimes use 169.254.0.0/16 (APIPA) if they somehow didn't see a DHCP answer. If you want something sensible, you need 802.1x with some strong cryptographic identity for host authentication.
> Stateful DHCPv6 is not supported on Android (because its engineers are hell-bent on preventing IPv6).
Yes, that is grade-A-stupid stubborness. On the other hand, see below for the privacy hostname thingy in IPv4 and the randomized privacy mac addresses that mobile devices use nowadays. So even if Android implemented stateful IPv6, you will never be reliably able to track mobile devices on your network. Because all those identifiers in there will be randomized, and any "state" will only last for a short time. If you want reliable state, you need secure authentication like 802.1x on Ethernet or WPA-Enterprise on Wifi, and then bind that identity to the addresses assigned/observed on that port.
> With IPv6 there's literally _nothing_ similar.
Of course there is. DHCPv6 can do everything that IPv4 DHCP can do (by now, took some time until they e.g. included MAC addresses as an option field). But in case of clients like Android that don't do DHCPv6 properly, you still have better odds in IPv6: IPv6 nodes are required to implement multicast (unlike in IPv4 where multicast was optional). So you can just find all your nodes in some network scope by just issuing an all-nodes link-local multicast ping on an interface, like:
> ping6 ff02::1%eth0
There are also other scopes like site-local: > ping6 ff05::1%eth0 https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-multicast-addresses/ip...
(The interface ID (like eth0, eno1, "Wired Network", ...) is necessary here because your machine usually has multiple interfaces and all of those will support those multicast ranges, so the kernel cannot automatically choose for you.)
> And even when it's supported, the protocol doesn't require clients to identify themselves with a human-readable hostname.
DHCP option 12 ("hostname") is an option in IPv4. Clients can leave it out if they like. There is also such a thing as "privacy hostname" which is a thing mobile devices do to get around networks that really want option 12 to be set, but don't want to be trackable. So the hostname field will be something like "mobile-".
What you skipped are the really stupid problems with DHCPv6 which make it practically useless in many situations: DHCPv6 by default doesn't include the MAC address in requests. DHCPv6 forwarders may add that option, but in lots of equipment this is a very recent addition still (though the RFC is 10 years old by now). So if you unbox some new hardware, it will identify by some nonsensical hostname (useless), an interface identifier (IAID, useless, because it may be derived from the MAC address, but it may also be totally random for each request) and a host identifier (DUID, useless, because it may be derived from the mac address, but it may also be totally random for each request). Whats even more stupid, the interface identifier (IAID) can be derived from a MAC address that belongs to another interface than the one that the request is issued on. So in the big-company usecase of unboxing 282938 new laptops with a MAC address sticker, you've got no chance whatsoever to find out which is which, because neither IAID nor DUID are in any way predictable. You'll have to boot the installer, grab the laptop's serial number somewhere in DMI and correlate with that sticker, so tons of extra hassle and fragility because the DHCPv6 people thought that nobody should use MAC addresses anymore...
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve worked for a company that was barely using its /16. I know several individuals, including myself, with personal /24s.
None of which are any help when connecting to someone who doesn't have those.
I know, I'm just agreeing there's a ton of IP waste in the US. Early adopters were perhaps unjustly rewarded. InterNIC (before ARIN) would just about hand out IPs to anyone who could send an email.