Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 649 posts

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

#41

And this is where government regulation would have helped. It's a shame nobody listened to me back in the 90's: (it's a joke. I'm a nobody, there is nobody listening.) All cell-phones should have been ipv6 from the get-go. Now if we could just go back in time and warn everybody about IPv4 address space being exhausted. And maybe the climate too while we are at it. Seriously though, cell-phone adoption would make that…

Cellphones are the main driver of IPv6 adoption as it is; many countries you're behind CGNAT if you hit an IPv4 endpoint, but you go direct if they support IPv6.

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

#42
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…

Yep, there are unfortunately some other AWS services that still don't support IPv6, but at least with Global Accelerator and ALB support, we can hide that from end-customers that require IPv6 endpoints.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

ALB/ELB/NLB support for IPv6 is fairly recent as well, November 2021: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/applicati...

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

#43
post #34

Setting a website to be available over IPv6 is relatively easy, yet we see: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;news.ycombinator.com. IN AAAA Why? Because it's not quite as simple as making Apache respond over IPv6; any website of any size has various protections in place to prevent DDoS, spam, etc, and those tools are almost universally basic and at the root is the "ban by IPv4 address". Without that tooling supporting IPv6, it r…

Actually HN is available via IPv6 over Cloudflare. You have to add a CF IPv6 it to the hosts file.

In fact I am posting this comment over IPv6.

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

#44
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.)

47.57% of observed requests coming out of as14593 is ipv6, as of two days ago: https://twitter.com/noIPv6/status/1600527249282895879

& to be clear, that is CRAZY growth!

edit: that's traffic to monitoring resources, not in general, sorry /facepalm

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

#45

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.

So how do you do DNS then?

Not sure if this is a good source but it had some history to recap, and it doesn't look pretty... https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/ajb2ec/comment/...

[...] To be honest because of this hot mess if you want to reliably support any possible client you'll need to do both DHCPv6 and RDNSS for DNS information. [...]

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

#46

And this is where government regulation would have helped. It's a shame nobody listened to me back in the 90's: (it's a joke. I'm a nobody, there is nobody listening.) All cell-phones should have been ipv6 from the get-go. Now if we could just go back in time and warn everybody about IPv4 address space being exhausted. And maybe the climate too while we are at it. Seriously though, cell-phone adoption would make that…

It’s not that ipv4 space is exhausted, there’s plenty of it available. It’s that early on it was mismanaged to the point that people / companies were able to buy entire /8’s for basically nothing and hold them forever.

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

#47

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.

is "not supporting IPv6 at all" a data-backed statement?

https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/ fwiw

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

#48

I think IPv6 internal-only is viable with some kind of NAT64 setup, maybe not at scale though. What is everyone using for NAT64?

afaik jool is the currently-recommended foss nat64 (since tayga is apparently unmaintained)

alot of commercial vendors have mature nat64 implementations tho

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

#49
post #32

IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades. And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself. If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade. Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.…

> (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4).

Which would need translation support at the edges between devices speaking only old-IPv4 and the superset-IPv4. Just as is done with IPv6.

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

#50
post #32

IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades. And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself. If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade. Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.…

> If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.

I don't really think so: it woulds still be completely backward incompatible and still require replacing a lot of costly network equipment. I think that's the main reason why large ISPs and enterprises have been postponing the upgrade since forever but operating systems, smartphones and other new devices didn't really have a problem with it.

Post reply on HN