I get an IPv6 address from my ISP (a /56 I believe), but I wish there was some good information on how to update my OpenWRT VLAN configuration, routing, and firewall rules to be able to support native IPv6 on my devices. Would love to be able to have direct IPv6 connections to the internet from my devices, but I want to make sure I can do it safely.
IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
521–530 of 643 posts
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#522It's only a matter of time before laptops get 5G. Macbooks have been rumoured for a while to get cellular modems. [1] This will probably help adoption. On the one hand it will generate more IPv6 traffic. On the other hand it will expose more developers to IPv6; which will expose them to any lack of support for IPv6 within their own products. [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/14/apples-first-mac-with-5g-cell...
Dell, HP and Lenovo have had laptops with cellular modems for maybe 15 years at this point.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dell, HP and Lenovo have had laptops with cellular modems for maybe 15 years at this point.
*A few select models got celluar modems. I have owned several Dell, HP and Lenovo Laptops in the past 15 years and I have never had a cellular modem. When Apple makes a change like that it impacts a lot of customers because they have way fewer skews.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#524Is most of that due to mobile? The real migration challenges are in the server side/consumer home internet space which I'm not sure if there are clear stats around the adoption there. I think IPV6 is a great example of over engineering, trying to do too much in one iteration. In an ideal scenario this could work, but in the context of large scale change with no single responsible party, it usually doesn't work well.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#525Is most of that due to mobile? The real migration challenges are in the server side/consumer home internet space which I'm not sure if there are clear stats around the adoption there. I think IPV6 is a great example of over engineering, trying to do too much in one iteration. In an ideal scenario this could work, but in the context of large scale change with no single responsible party, it usually doesn't work well.
The problem has nothing to do with over engineering, or really anything to do with the actual contents of the IPv6 standard. It is just devilishly hard to make any backwards-incompatible change to layer 3, and address expansion is always going to be backwards incompatible.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 address…
Hyrum's law. That's how IPv4 is being used in practice. > You can quite easily give each host one, and only one, static IPv6 address, just like with old-style IPv4. You literally CAN NOT. On Android there's no way to put in a static IPv6 or even use stateful DHCPv6.
It's still very ugly to mess with the ports that way.
The only clean NAT is 1:1 IP NAT.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#527Earlier 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…
This is a troll right? NAT is a lot of things, but "simple and clean" is definitely not one of them. It causes complications at every step of the process.
Pure IPv6 is so much cleaner.
I will say that DHCP6 is probably misnamed. It does not fill the same niche has IPv4 DHCP, and this causes a lot of confusion with people who are new to IPv6. It should probably be called DPDP (Dynamic Prefix Distribution Protocol) or something like that. It's for routers not hosts.
In theory you should be using anycast DNS to find local hostnames, but in practice the tooling around this is somewhat underbaked.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#528Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hetzner makes you pay 1 € per IPv4, while IPv6 is free. I'd gladly get rid of all IPv4's given that I have many servers.
I don't even know why clouds offer public IP addresses. In my opinion all clouds should only have a gateway that routes via host header for millions of customers. IPv4 should be a special priv for special situations at a higher price. Then these clouds could own maybe 20 IPs total instead of millions.
Not all workloads are HTTP.
> gateway .. for millions of customers
That's basically what an AWS ALB is. It's not provisioning bespoke infrastructure when you create it.. it's just a routing rule in their shared infra.
If Amazon wanted, they could easily have shared IP's but the cost of an IPv4 isn't so great that this approach has been warranted yet, clearly.
Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comcast, one of the largest residential ISPs in the USA, has almost full IPv6 deployment by default. The majority Verizon Wireless is IPv6 by default. Residential customers in the USA have great access if they just enable the stack. There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents ISPs from filtering ports for all customers. They almost all actively filter at least port 25, 139 and 445 regardless of the actual transport. So…
A UN priority!? They have real issues they should be dealing with like the life and death of millions of people