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Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

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Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#21
post #9

It's been a quarter of a century since IPv6 launch. There's some really good lessons learned here. IPv6 requires everyone, everywhere, needs to change their configuration to add IPv6 addresses and network connectivity to every node/endpoint. The madness of course is that all the underlying infrastructure software (routers, OS, standard libraries) all support IPv6. It would seem, at a large enough scale, that software…

anyone who thinks "ipv6mess" is still relevant in 2022, doesn't understand the problem space it describes.

part 1, interoperability failure/incompatibility: nat64+dns64 has been viable since 2008

part 2, incoherence: dual-stack was the transition plan, & was clearly communicated from the start (to anyone who listened). that turned out to not be so effective since so many ppl ignored the realities of legacy ip depletion. at this juncture ipv6-only (w/ nat64) is becoming a more preferable approach, since you only need to maintain a single protocol in the majority of your environment (as evidenced by org's like tmobile us, facebook, etc).

part 3, distractions: one could argue that rants like "ipv6mess" are the biggest distractions to ipv6 deployment.

"no one is asking for ipv6" is a lie writ large in the provider space; i've seen plenty of examples where a provider has told multiple customers "you're the first person to ask for ipv6 support!" - the problem being is that most org's don't actually keep track of such requests in a unified place, & so every customer is pushing for it alone, so far as the provider is concerned.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#22
they don't offer free private ipv4 with nat?

these are all outbound reachability issues. the bigger concern i'd have would be inbound reachability for public services.

you don't need routable ipv4 addresses on every host to hit public ipv4 internet services!

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#24
post #3

Hetzner should provide free CGNAT IPv4 Addresses (IPv4 Gateway) for IPv6-Only VMs

A whole lot of ISPs are doing CGNAT for IPv4 now, mostly in Asia. Starlink does it. It's mostly OK but has a lot of drawbacks, particularly IP-based geolocation. (Starlink does not support IPv6 although they seem to be rolling it out this month.)

My ISP (Metronet, Ohio, US) uses CGNAT. I’ve had their service for about 15 months now, and it has been pretty much uneventful. Maybe a handful of times I’ve gotten a captcha on something, but for the most part, it’s just fine. I also don’t see thousands of blocked connection attempts a day either, so there is a plus side. I just use Tailscale should I need to access anything at home while I’m away.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#25
post #18

> Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses Well actually, they were charging for IPv4 addresses for a while, but just changed pricing... to outrageous pricing. The setup fees are actually insane! And yeah IPv6-only is quite a terrible experience, I tried out a few days ago. I suggest just using nat64.net if you want to access IPv4 sites over IPv6. One quite funny thing, I…

Pricing, fyi: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/ipv4-pricing/

Around €19.00 setup per IP.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#26
post #18

> Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses Well actually, they were charging for IPv4 addresses for a while, but just changed pricing... to outrageous pricing. The setup fees are actually insane! And yeah IPv6-only is quite a terrible experience, I tried out a few days ago. I suggest just using nat64.net if you want to access IPv4 sites over IPv6. One quite funny thing, I…

> The rental costs for the current hosting is quite affordable for me. If that becomes insufficient I will look for partnerships with transit providers who are able to make a little profit from carrying parts of the traffic.

Well, that's ominous. Basically a promise that they will sell your data.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#27
post #19

Unfortunately this is true. I've been running IPv4/IPv6 dual stack since 2014 for most of my infrastructure and since 2016 for all of it. The company I work for now is a major AWS customer, and we managed to pressure them into enabling IPv6 for Global Accelerator, and have just recently launched full IPv4/IPv6 dual stack for our endpoints... in 2022. I think that the primary root cause of this is economics, if we're…

That's really cool that global accelerator got support, I was about to bash AWS. It's one of those things when trying to optimize product market fit and quick launches, that we needed global accelerator, but not IPv6 on a project I worked on.

So when major AWS / cloud services don't have the ability to just turn it on, is one part of the chicken and egg that contributes to the lack of adoption. Thanks for pressuring for that support.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#28

Having "grown up" with IPv4, I'm slow to learn everything necessary to set up an IPv6 infrastructure. The times I did look into it, IPv6 seemed so much more complicated than IPv4, but maybe that's just because I'm just not familiar with it. Are there any good resources on setting up IPv6 support from first principles? I still get confused as to the "right" way to set up internal networks for IPv6, especially when DHC…

Everything should get its IPv6 configuration via SLAAC. DHCPv6 is only useful when you plan to provide prefix delegation for extra routers or network boot information.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#29

My whole country of 80 million people with very high Internet usage is still not supporting IPv6 at all (and residential connections are behind CGNAT). I'm pretty sure there are many more. IPv6 might be a thing in US or Europe, but definitely not in the world.

IPv6 penetration:

  1. France   72.63%
  2. India    66.47%
  3. Germany  65.45%
  4. Greece   62.13%
  5. Malaysia 60.03%
  ...
  15. United Arab Emirates  48.69%
  16. United States         47.99%

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#30
i for one am also extremely frustrated with the state of ipv6

some time ago i tried to selfhost a personal website and run into all kinds of problems, most frustrating being

- my website not opening when having only AAAA record set (ended up using v4-frontend.netiter.com as a proxy)

- my linux box not handling the ipv6 prefix broadcast from my router and binding to some random address

the latter thing was main reason for frustration as i could find any information how to diagnose and all the message boards/ chat rooms just told me to install random stuff in hope it will then magically work. (i know its a misconfiguration on my linux machine as my windows 10 one can host the website no problem)

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