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More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

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Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#111

Post by oarsinsync »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #59
bzb3 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's scaremongering and simply false. Cgnat servers are not necessarily congested. I've been to several isps with cgnat and none of them suffered from congestion. On a more personal note, if ipv6 were so great, their fans wouldn't have to make up things to badmouth ipv4.

NAT is fundamentally a limited technology that has massive scaling problems that simply do not exist in non-nat networking situations. The larger the network behind the NAT, the more problems you get. This is also before considerations like the fact NAT breaks 2 way connectivity that is the cornerstone of the design of the internet. >if ipv6 were so great, their fans wouldn't have to make up things to badmouth ipv4.…

The IPv6 standard was ratified in the 1990s.

The Internet of the 1990s was very different to the Internet of 2020. The widespread surveillance of activity as it exists today was not a consideration back then, nor were there the same security concerns, making it a desirable property to have every device uniquely and globally addressable.

Privacy extensions were then ratified (RFC 4941) after 2007 as a workaround, and firewalls get applied on hosts and gateways to protect against bad actors on the Internet (which are significantly more prevalent today than 20+ years ago).

IPv6 is not a magic bullet. The increase in addressable space is definitely a positive. Pretty much everything else is up for debate, depending on perspective and use case.

I've been dual-stacking networks for over a decade. The easy part[0] is making the network work with both IPv4 and IPv6. The hard part is making everything else work.

[0] Easy is relative. I agree with everything listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059729 as additional sources of complexity and confusion. That's still just the mole hill at the start of the mountain.

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#112

Post by mehrdadn »

c0nsumer wrote: post #106
mehrdadn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The state table can get full. When that happens some connection needs to be evicted. This would be so much more convincing with some numbers to show it actually does happen in reality, especially at a rate that's comparable to other random connection drop-outs.

The most common symptom of this is someone mentioning that their home 'router' regularly needs reboots to keep working well. Excluding memory leaks, it's frequently the state table running out of space and connections going sideways as a result. This is hard for individuals to see, but put a fair bit of load on a home consumer 'router' and, presuming you can get enough access to it to watch resources, you'll see it r…

Makes sense if this happens, but does this actually happen to you? I've heard vague and rather dubious third-hand stories along these lines, but I've never actually encountered a router that needs rebooting to keep working well.

This actually seems bizarre to me now that I think more about it. The routers I've seen allow something like a few hundred thousand established connections over like a ~week. Say 300,000 over 3 days. To exhaust this you'd need to establish on average one new connection every single second (300000/3/24/60/60 ≈ 1), continuously for a week, while also timing out on every single one of them silently. Surely a normal person wouldn't exhaust such a table?

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#113

Post by throw0101a »

jl6 wrote: post #66
wtallis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just 4G. It's consumer networking in general, which isn't held back by legacy enterprise networking equipment. When your residential ISP turns on IPv6 for their network, they also tend to turn on IPv6 for the modem+router combo devices they lease to run your LAN. Or if you're the kind of power user that buys your own router, it's almost certainly new enough to support IPv6.

Does IPv6 on an internal network offer any benefit to enterprises (not talking about ISPs here), who may view NAT as a form of defence in depth?

You don't have to futz around with /24 (or /23) subnets anymore, especially for wireless if you want seamless roaming.

The default /64 prefix length can fit the 2^32 public Internet addresses 2^32 times, i.e., 4B Internets can fit in one IPv6 subnet.

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#114

Post by MayeulC »

I host some services at home, mainly targeted at friends and family.

Some are IPv6-only, because it's much easier to manage from my side. I whish I could add an A record for these that pointed to a reserved IP address that would inform clients the service is IPv6-only.

For now, I just don't put any, and browsers just display a generic error. Since some DNS don't answer with IPv6 addresses, the browser couldn't even provide a meaningful error message if it tried to.

Would that be worth an RFC? What IP address should be used?

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#115

Post by throw0101a »

talideon wrote: post #98
jl6 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does IPv6 on an internal network offer any benefit to enterprises (not talking about ISPs here), who may view NAT as a form of defence in depth?

Yes, tonnes of benefits. If you've ever been through a merger, you'll know the pain of dealing with getting the everything working when merging networks. That issue doesn't exist with IPv6 to anywhere near the degree because you don't have overlapping RFC1918 space to deal with. IPAM with IPv4 is a massive pain in the backside once you get up to a certain scale, even if you're allocating from 10/8. If you have multip…

> IPAM with IPv4 is a massive pain in the backside once you get up to a certain scale, even if you're allocating from 10/8.

Comcast (an US cable ISP) starting deploying IPv6 because they have so many CPE devices that they are out of IPv4 addresses to do management on them. Story from 2010:

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/comcast-running-...

It's also why Apple mandated at some points that iOS apps had to work on IPv6-only networks: it was a requirement from mobile phone companies, as IPv4 addresses are getting scarce, and mobile telcos don't want to shell out cash, so they use IPv6 on phones and do NAT64.

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#116

Post by growse »

MayeulC wrote: post #114

I host some services at home, mainly targeted at friends and family. Some are IPv6-only, because it's much easier to manage from my side. I whish I could add an A record for these that pointed to a reserved IP address that would inform clients the service is IPv6-only. For now, I just don't put any, and browsers just display a generic error. Since some DNS don't answer with IPv6 addresses, the browser couldn't even p…

Isn't the presence of an AAAA record but the lack of an A record already a sufficient indicator that the service is IPv6 only?

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#117

Post by throw0101a »

walton_simons wrote: post #48

My ISP supports IPv6, and while I can understand why a large organisation would want to use it (especially given the increasing cost and scarcity of IPv4 blocks), I'm still yet to be persuaded of its benefits for home users. I admit that I only have a very cursory understanding of how it works, and perhaps I'm just stuck in my ways, but the scale and complexity seems so extreme compared to IPv4, with no compensating…

> I'm still yet to be persuaded of its benefits for home users.

According to Apple, IPv6 is 1.4 times faster than IPv4 (latency wise AFAICT):

* https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-tells-app-devs-to-use-ip...

This is supposedly "due to reduced NAT usage and improved routing."

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#118

Post by throw0101a »

mehrdadn wrote: post #97
dijit wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've had a few replies so I guess mine will be lost to the aether. NAT vs Direct addressing is an interesting topic, because we've gotten so used to working around the issues inherent in NAT that we take them as a sort of given. I'll lay them out here: 1) The actual NAT state table in your router is much slower than a simple bit-map firewall lookup. This will show up as a bit of latency on every new connection. 2)…

> The state table can get full. When that happens some connection needs to be evicted. This would be so much more convincing with some numbers to show it actually does happen in reality, especially at a rate that's comparable to other random connection drop-outs.

1.4 times faster, per Apple:

* https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-tells-app-devs-to-use-ip...

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#119

Post by viraptor »

mehrdadn wrote: post #86
iknowstuff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What complexity? Devices being autoconfigurable without DHCP is less complex. Having no NAT is less complex. Having a public IP is less complex. You just got used to the complexity of IPv4. Why the hell would you block IPv6. You ARE stuck in your ways. OS vendors consider it necessary on LAN for various functionality.

> What complexity? 1. What the hell is DHCP-PD and is it better on or off? 2. What are 6to4, 6in4, 6rd, etc. and should the user care? 3. When should autoconf be stateless vs. stateful? I thought the point of IPv6 was to allow things to be stateless? 4. When should DHCPv6 be enabled vs. disabled? Why the hell is this even a question on some routers if devices are supposed to be "autoconfigurable without DHCP"? 5. Wha…

These are valid questions regarding complexity, but I also think you're ignoring the complexity of v4. Here are v4 questions for home modems/routers you're just used to: What's bridged mode? What's upnp? What's dmz? What are static IP assignments, wasn't dhcp supposed to manage IP addresses? What's port forwarding? Should I enable "telephony support" and "legacy game support"? What's SIP-ALG?

In both cases for residential use: you're most likely ok with the defaults. And if you want to change something, you have to learn about the tech.

Re: More than 1/3 of all access to Google is now over IPv6

#120

Post by jiggawatts »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #102
jiggawatts wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little demand for half-baked support. There would be a lot of demand if IPv6 wasn't an "also ran", a "tack on", some checkbox to tick. Think about how much network complexity would simply vanish if everything used only public routable IPv6 ranges. No more split DNS. No more NAT gateways. No need for a separate "public IP" and "private IP". No need to carefully "carve up" the 10.x.x.x range to carefully avoid…

Looking at the number of unprotected databases (see i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957510 ) I think it's good that cloud providers push for gateways etc. in order to restrict access on network level. (They still could do IPv6 proper - no argument there)

Nobody said there wouldn't be ACLs or firewalls in an IPv6 network.

IPv4 NAT provides security as a side effect.

You don't need NAT for security.

PS: This is the #1 most common argument trotted out against IPv6, and it is blatantly false.

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