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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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be ISP adoption. Some ISPs have been more progressive in ipv6 than others.

My ISP in the Netherlands (Ziggo) provides me with native IPv6 if I use their supplied router, but forces me onto IPv4 when I use theirs in bridge mode in conjunction with my own router. Still not sure why they do that.

These ISPs are using DS-Lite, Dual-Stack Lite.

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/top... (this isn't a purely Juniper thing, but they have nice diagrams on their documentation)

It's a kind of carrier grade NAT with 4over6 baked in.

Depending on the version of this they are relying on your modem to perform encap/decap of 4to6, hence when you switch to modem mode or your own router you fall back to what the network truly is... v4.

This is what the knuckle draggers at Virgin Media are contemplating apparently.

In the UK the best option for IPv6 is https://www.aa.net.uk/ but unfortunately for me the DSL speed in my area is pretty bad due to being a few KMs from the exchange.

The alternatives to all of this is to run your own Wireguard instance elsewhere on a v6 network, and tunnel the entire home network to it.

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

#43
post #40

And yet, when I beg my google cloud rep for IPv6 addresses on instances (or on anything that isn’t the load balancer) I get told that it is not on the immediate roadmap. The cloud providers have pushed back ipv6 adoption so hard imo. At least native ipv6 access. I know they’ve thrown in some token support and you /can/ make something work; but compared to VPS providers which consistently deliver machines with IPv6 ad…

all of google's internal architecture was built with only IPv4.

Take a look at kubernetes, which is based on google's Borg. It's only now, slowly getting IPv6 support

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

#44
post #40

And yet, when I beg my google cloud rep for IPv6 addresses on instances (or on anything that isn’t the load balancer) I get told that it is not on the immediate roadmap. The cloud providers have pushed back ipv6 adoption so hard imo. At least native ipv6 access. I know they’ve thrown in some token support and you /can/ make something work; but compared to VPS providers which consistently deliver machines with IPv6 ad…

GCP will support IPv6 in 2021.

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

#45
post #8

The graph is interesting when you zoom in, much more IPv6 use over the holiday period and also recently during the period of lockdown measures. I would guess the majority of IPv6 traffic comes from devices on 4G networks. More devices are on 4G when visiting family and friends over the Christmas period and when working remotely.

It is very different week days vs weekends too. Mobile connectivity is part of the answer, especially in the US - but more over businesses tend to have crappy network connectivity which is perversely small-C conservative and that means lots of them are still doing IPv4 even when that's directly contrary to their own needs.

Corporate networks tend to have a lot of local policy, and so that's a maintenance burden that probably nobody is paying for so it's just a growing debt for the organisation. Even if every policy was excellent when it was deployed many of them probably hurt by now. At home that stuff tends to get flushed periodically but medium-large businesses have processes to preserve the status quo. The same underlying mechanism that prefers to terminate the 25 year secretary who "made fuss" about a VP putting his hand up her skirt rather than do anything about that senior executive will also prefer to buy $5000 Cisco switches and then disable everything that makes them better than a $50 Costco switch over just buying the Costco switch (let alone using the features of the expensive switch). Change is seen as bad and must be prevented.

This hurts for security a lot too. There's a very good chance that accessing work email from a work laptop in the office is meaningfully less safe than accessing GMail on your phone in a random coffee shop because of such policies.

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

#46
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 still has NAT. There's public and private IPv6 addresses, same as IPv4. Google building their infrastructure around IPv6 does not have anything with tracking IPv6 users

IPv6 doesn't have NAT, it has different addresses for global and local scopes, but your OS never translates between these addresses and it doesn't need to keep a table of translations & connections, as you'd have with IPv4 and NAT.

[deleted]

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

#47
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 still has NAT. There's public and private IPv6 addresses, same as IPv4. Google building their infrastructure around IPv6 does not have anything with tracking IPv6 users

IPv6 doesn't have NAT, it has different addresses for global and local scopes, but your OS never translates between these addresses and it doesn't need to keep a table of translations & connections, as you'd have with IPv4 and NAT.

Typically "your OS" doesn't do NAT in IPv4, unless your using a NAT router as your end user device.

And surely you can do NAT with IPv6, Google for NAT66, but your average Linux box can do it. It's just almost never needed.

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

#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 advantages that I can see. So all my devices become globally routable. And? I can already do everything I want and need to do with a single IPv4 address and NAT.

Even just working out what IPv6 devices are on my network and who they're communicating with seems very difficult given the giant address space. I'm slightly ashamed to admit this (feels very anti progress!), but I've blocked all the IPv6 traffic on my home LAN. Devices can still talk to each other, but no IPv6 packets are allowed out to the internet. Everything still works fine. My firewall blocks a few hundred MB per day of IPv6 traffic, and I have no idea what any of it is.

Very happy to be told why I shouldn't do this though.

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

#49
post #4

It's a perquisite for tagging individuals. IPv4 not having enough addresses is a good thing. With IPv6 identification (and therefore control) can be down to the person globally, but IPv4 forces NAT's. The inability to label all the things is a feature. NAT's are borders; they prevent fine grained censorship without larger consequences. $ zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -i ipv6 # CONFIG_IPV6 is not set

That's a little silly, IPv6 privacy addresses are functionally infinite and unless you have a truly huge network behind that NAT then it's not hard to reduce the list of candidates if you have any other information at all.

The V6 privacy addresses are typically only rotated daily but the space is so large that it could be done almost per connection of the stack and router could handle that. Realistic rotation limits are probably every few minutes.

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

#50
post #4

It's a perquisite for tagging individuals. IPv4 not having enough addresses is a good thing. With IPv6 identification (and therefore control) can be down to the person globally, but IPv4 forces NAT's. The inability to label all the things is a feature. NAT's are borders; they prevent fine grained censorship without larger consequences. $ zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -i ipv6 # CONFIG_IPV6 is not set

Hardly a prerequisite; a lot of people manage to track individuals using cookies (and many other browser-related things). AFAICT the companies that advertise tracking solutions don't mention IP addresses very much.
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