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IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

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Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#561

Post by Avamander »

reddalo wrote: post #54
keeperofdakeys wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all ISPs these days are deploying IPv6 for their mobile networks and core service networks, especially in less developed markets^1. The reason is simple, a cost justification. What doesn't exist is a cost justification for Enterprises to deploy IPv6, and for ISPs to deploy Residential / Corporate Internet IPv6. IMO with the right market conditions, IPv6 could spread really fast within 6-24 months. For example,…

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.

OVH does the same, but only gives you a /128. Which is ridiculously shitty of them.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#562

Post by Dagger2 »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #498
Dagger2 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying and pasting was just my attempt to demonstrate how simple a v6 rDNS record is to add. If you were interested in hiring me to write a solution for your ISP, that's fine, but you can't seriously expect random people to do it for you for free in a HN comment. It should be pretty obvious that a script can generate these records from the forward records or from any other source of IPs/hosts, with no per-address ef…

Again, absolutely blind to the management of these things at scale. Yeah, I don't rightly care about "how easy it is" to generate them. You can't even comprehend or convey the massive number of records and zones that are involved in managing a network of devices that all require dynamic updates to reverse-DNS and add/update/remove device addresses on a regular basis. DNS is a distributed database system, and so the c…

So... how many records and zones? I'm pretty sure I could convey it if I could work out what you were talking about.

You went from "you can't even comprehend or convey the massive number of records and zones that are involved" to one v4 /24, managed "at scale" but by an ordinary consumer, who you expect to be capable of programming. This is a bit all over the place.

It's not any harder to deal with v6 reverse DNS than it is v4. In fact, making every reverse label 4 bits instead of 8, combined with v6 being much bigger than v4, makes rDNS much easier to deal with in v6 because you can generally delegate reverse zones on exactly the same boundaries that you delegate the corresponding IP blocks. In v4, you often need to delegate on boundaries that aren't /8, /16 and /24 and it suddenly gets more annoying.

Scaling up for rDNS is no different to scaling up for forward DNS. It's a well-understood problem.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#563

Post by eqvinox »

keybits wrote: post #129

Tailscale have a great FAQ about IPv4 vs IPv6: https://tailscale.com/docs/reference/faq/ipv6 If you're not an expert in this area it's worth a read - I certainly learned a few things!

> IPv6 doesn't make it easy to allocate subnets to every device on a LAN; instead, subnets might be delegated to your local router, and then only individual addresses allocated to each device. If one of those devices then wants to route traffic on behalf of other devices (for example, to a sub-subnet behind a router, where the upstream router doesn't cooperate), it will need to use NAT. For example, this is how Tailscale exit nodes work, even with IPv6.

This is quite wrong, there'd DHCPv6-PD (prefix delegation) specifically designed to do this. Even more interestingly, it has recently been made part of IETF CPE requirements (RFC 9818 update to RFC 7084, July 2025).

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#564

Post by traderj0e »

zokier wrote: post #27

This google metric measures adoption in access networks, but at this point I feel more interesting metric is adoption in services. One such stat is here: > adoption ranging from 71% among the top 100 to 32% in the long tail https://commoncrawl.org/blog/ipv6-adoption-across-the-top-10... Getting full coverage on AWS (/GCP/Azure) and few other key services (GitHub...) would be significant here imho.

Yeah, a large portion of those ipv6 Google searches are afterwards connecting to an ipv4 host.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#565

Post by traderj0e »

molf wrote: post #23

It'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...

5G services all give you an ipv4 too, so devs won't be exposed to lack of v6 support.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#566

Post by Bender »

icedchai wrote: post #289
Dagger2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During the dot-com crash I had to put a /16, some /17's and a /19 on one vlan and connected a 1U Linux box running Labrea Tarpit just so those ranges would respond to ping because InterNIC used to harass us for not utilizing all the space. They threatened a few times to take them back. AFAIK nobody nags like that any more. They probably should.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#567

Post by Bender »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #222

Great, then another 20 years and we can retire IPv4.

Not the one down-voting you but I suspect IPv4 and IPv6 will run side-by-side dual-stack at least until 2050 and IPv4 would not be fully deprecated until probably 2323 star-date 0 as future quantum interstellar communications subspace will deprecate both standards. Only half kidding as nothing ever gets deprecated or decommissioned until it breaks something important.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#568

Post by mrjoe3332 »

azernik wrote: post #547
mrjoe3332 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were some choices of v6 that made it extra hard, like declaring all v4 addresses no longer valid in v6, or making slaac default

IPv4 addresses are in fact a subspace of IPv6 (that's NAT64). They were not by fiat declared invalid. The actual thing I think you're complaining about - the necessity for NAT64 at all - is unavoidable, because you need a NAT/protocol-translation layer for packets to actually move between the new address space and the old one. SLAAC-by-default is not, in my experience implementing IT automation, an actual barrier for…

NAT64 is a temp bolt on and also not the same thing. If I own 1.1.1.1 in v4, that doesn't mean I own some equivalent of 1.1.1.1 in v6. They had router nat64 and relay nat64, both with dealbreaker problems.

You don't exactly need a translation layer. If they just gave me 1.1.1.1:: in v6, anyone migrating v4 to v6 would have the same route to me as before, and other changes like DNS6 could be gradual. Then after v4 is abandoned enough, I can sell 1.1.1.1.2:: to someone or use it instead of NAT.

SLAAC is a good design as a non-default that people who know what they're doing could enable, but a lot of people don't even want public v6 addrs for hosts, they just want NAT/DHCP.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#569

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mmbleh wrote: post #474
Hikikomori wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not harder to rate limit a /64 though.

It is because the IPv6 rollout has not been consistent. Some assign /64 per machine, some assign /64 per data center. Some even go the other way and do a /56 per machine. We've had to build up a list of overrides to do some ranges by /64 and others by /128 because of how they allocate addresses. This creates extra burden on server operators and it's not surprising that some just choose not to deal with it.

This problem exists for ipv4 too: some machines have static address, others have dynamic, so you can implement overrides.

Re: IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

#570

Post by denkmoon »

10000truths wrote: post #175
denkmoon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outdated beliefs probably. When I talk about v6 support in our b2b saas, PM laughs and says nobody uses that shit. Big tech are massive laggards on this funnily enough.

Definitely not for the biggest ones. Google and Meta have so many machines in their data centers that IPv6 addressing becomes a technical necessity due to the risk of exhausting the RFC 1918 address space. Naturally, they were early adopters of IPv6.

Yeah, I can't imagine managing fleets like that with only v4. Our network config is so convoluted with gateways and NATs everywhere, paying AWS through the nose for it all, when it could all be so much simpler.
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