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IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

theregister.com

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Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#21

Post by School-Cotton »

ports543u wrote: post #9

The resistance to switch to ipv6, or the comfort with the ipv4-born address exhaustion remedies, only helps an internet of consumers, not an internet of peers that create and share. If you are behind NAT or CG-NAT, you can only consume, not create. You can't host a server, expose a port. You are at the mercy of the big fish.

99.99% of people who create and share things via the internet do so via centralized social media providers, and that would continue to be true if the whole world were magically IPv6-only.

I think it’d be nice to self-host things to, but it’s inaccurate and even a bit insulting to claim that the millions of people creating content on the internet today don’t exist.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#23

Post by throw0101b »

wpm wrote: post #11
ports543u wrote: post #9

The resistance to switch to ipv6, or the comfort with the ipv4-born address exhaustion remedies, only helps an internet of consumers, not an internet of peers that create and share. If you are behind NAT or CG-NAT, you can only consume, not create. You can't host a server, expose a port. You are at the mercy of the big fish.

My ISP is IPv4 only and I host plenty of shit and punch plenty of holes. That’s a function of my firewall not how many bits are in my IP address.

> My ISP is IPv4 only and I host plenty of shit and punch plenty of holes. That’s a function of my firewall not how many bits are in my IP address.

Not wrong, but if you want multiple servers of the same service, you're now doing custom ports (myhost:port1, myhost:port2, etc) which isn't the end of the world, but is kind of sucky.

And if we're not talking just about servers running services, but clients that want to do peer-to-peer stuff, you also have to use things like STUN/TURN/ICE which is more infrastructure that is needed (as opposed to 'just' hole punching since your system already knows its IP(v6) address).

Given the prevalence of these technologies (kludges?) they've kind of been normalized so we think they're "fine".

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#24

Post by oldandboring »

Lots of consumer router/gateways out there are old and don't have IPv6 turned on. If you turn off IPv4 for your services, those folks just won't be able to connect and they won't know why, they'll just move on. Any who want to complain won't even know who to complain to, and they won't be able to fix it themselves. That's bad. And yes, you could put a CDN in front of everything, but won't that wipe out some/all of the savings (assuming you're with a cloud provider that's charging for IPv4)? This basically explains why I put the brakes on our IPv6 migrations. From our clients' perspective it would have been an unforced error.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#25

Post by vetinari »

ReK_ wrote: post #19
wpm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ISP is IPv4 only and I host plenty of shit and punch plenty of holes. That’s a function of my firewall not how many bits are in my IP address.

That's only true if you aren't behind CG-NAT. If you are, your firewall can port forward all it wants but it won't matter, the ISP would have to also port forward to you.

Even in this situation, your ISP can port forward to you.

While not universal, some ISPs support PCP, where you can ask for a port mapping to your CGNAT-ed IP and port. They might or might not honor the external port (if it is taken, they obviously cannot), but you will get some hole punched.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#26

Post by vetinari »

fooqux wrote: post #22
vetinari wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, if your ISP cooperates, using PCP.

Frankly, you lost me at "if your ISP cooperates".

It is a function of the CGNAT at the ISP side. They need to have that enabled. Some do.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#27

Post by NAHWheatCracker »

wjholden wrote: post #5

I actually made the unusual decision, last year, to go IPv6-only on a small website I operate. The reason why is that AWS changed their billing policy for public IPv4 addresses. This is a tiny website that people only access on their cell phones, so I can accept an occasional inconvenience for the marginal cost savings. I haven't heard of anyone else doing this, but I doubt I'm completely alone in trying to minimize…

I did this as well for 3 domains that use the same EC2. There were random connectivity problems from my phone for a couple months, but it works perfectly for the past 6 months. I have no idea why the issues went away.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#28

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

vetinari wrote: post #14
ports543u wrote: post #9

The resistance to switch to ipv6, or the comfort with the ipv4-born address exhaustion remedies, only helps an internet of consumers, not an internet of peers that create and share. If you are behind NAT or CG-NAT, you can only consume, not create. You can't host a server, expose a port. You are at the mercy of the big fish.

It is the ISPs, that pretty much killed the IPv6 with their mishandled transition. Where I'm, I can choose 1 out of 1 broadband provider available in the area. With this provider, I can either have a public IPv4 address (or several) with their CPE in bridge mode, or DS-Lite, with IPv4 CGNAT without PCP and /64 for the IPv6 addresses (i.e. no address space for subnets, no prefix distribution) AND having to use their r…

Are you sure about this? It’s in the rfc from like 1998 that ISPs should allow customers to sla for larger prefixes. I don’t know a single US isp that doesn’t allow at least a 56.

IPv6 is pointless and still a security risk but I’m guessing you’re misconfiguring something.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#29

Post by vetinari »

fooqux wrote: post #20
wpm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ISP is IPv4 only and I host plenty of shit and punch plenty of holes. That’s a function of my firewall not how many bits are in my IP address.

Did you miss the part about CG-NAT? Once your ISP runs out of their IP4 addresses and puts you behind a CG-NAT, you can punch all the holes you like; nothing is going to get to you. At least not without doing fancy stuff like using an externally-hosted VPN to shuttle connections to you.

People seem to have misconceptions about CGNAT.

Of course you can punch holes there. CGNATs can be asked for port forwarding using PCP, unless your ISP disabled that.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#30

Post by throw0101b »

School-Cotton wrote: post #21
ports543u wrote: post #9

The resistance to switch to ipv6, or the comfort with the ipv4-born address exhaustion remedies, only helps an internet of consumers, not an internet of peers that create and share. If you are behind NAT or CG-NAT, you can only consume, not create. You can't host a server, expose a port. You are at the mercy of the big fish.

99.99% of people who create and share things via the internet do so via centralized social media providers, and that would continue to be true if the whole world were magically IPv6-only. I think it’d be nice to self-host things to, but it’s inaccurate and even a bit insulting to claim that the millions of people creating content on the internet today don’t exist.

> I think it’d be nice to self-host things to, but it’s inaccurate and even a bit insulting to claim that the millions of people creating content on the internet today don’t exist.

It's not just about self-hosting, but peer-to-peer clients as well.

When Skype originally came out it was P2P, but because of NAT they created (ran?) "super-nodes" that could do things like STUN/TURN/ICE. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to (e.g.) communicate with folks without a central authoritative server that could be warranted by various regimes?

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