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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

#81

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…

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.

I really think IPv6 is the future but,

Devices configuring without DHCP as a network administrator is really hard. There is no longer a single method to be given an IP6 address, and with the auto methods, there is no log either. Only some clients will do dhcpv6 which means you often have two different auto configuring services on a network.

Similarly, to see devices on a network I now have to use neighborhood discovery whice gives me a bunch of IPs, but very hard to figure out which IP is for that raspberrypi next to me. Port scans are much harder.

Public IP address are great, but now a filtering firewall is always required at the edge, since I don't want my printer being reachable on the internet. There isn't a upnp for IP6 to punch wholes automatically either. Ironically P2P over ipv6 is harder because the firewalls are so unforgiving.

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

#82
A large part of the problem with IPv6 is that most developers and SA's don't have a lot of knowledge about it. This is why everything new is still built with IPv4 in mind, instead of thinking forward to IPv6. I think we could easily blame lack of IPv6 support at cloud providers to lack of knowledge with the developers and SA's they attract.

If more developers and SA's would have access to IPv6 at home, the practical knowledge of how to work with IPv6 would build up more quickly. I would experiment with it more, and build up more knowledge.

Unfortunately, my ISP does not support IPv6. This severely limits experimentation with it, since all experimentation is locked behind my home network.

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

#84
post #78
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google definitely uses IPv6 internally (ie office WiFi is now using IPv6 only (with the router doing translations to IPv4 if the site doesn’t support IPv6) and afaik most of the servers in the datacenter/clusters are IPv6 only now as they ran out of IPv4 LAN IPs for their clusters. I just think that there’s little demand on cloud (and tons of other high prior work)

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 overlaps... even with future business partners. No need to worry about the "size" of subnets or accidentally running out of addresses in the cramped /24 subnets most people allocate.

It goes on and on.

And on.

But none of that is possible in the public cloud, because it is IPv4 first, and 99% IPv4 by default, and if there's IPv6 support, it's broken, or incomplete, or half-arsed.

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

#85
post #76
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. It offers better scalability! E.g. at my university, our institute has its own IPv4 /24. That means a maximum of ~253 or so devices. We have exhausted that number and for every new client, an old one has to go. Now with a /64 this would be no problem at all. To mitigate this the IT department is currently using VLAN-tagging for some of the devices. But it gets convoluted. And the more convoluted it gets, the hig…

In IPv4-land, it's not an 'internal network' if every device must have an externally routable address - if it is required, IPv6 has an obvious advantage.

In the requested scenario (internal Enterprise network), the proper comparison should involved IPv4's 16 million private addresses; I can't see any practical advantage to IPv6 there.

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

#86

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…

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. What are the more subtle implications of all of the above that are not necessarily mentioned?

6. Give one good reason why in the world every single one of every user's devices should be reachable from anywhere on the internet for even a single moment in time? Why exactly do you feel you should even have a reachable path to my computer, and everyone else's too? Common sense precautions would suggest this shouldn't be possible by default.

Note: I personally don't need responses to all of these. I'm just listing some examples of questions that come up for people configuring it to illustrate why the choice to use IPv6 is hardly as simple as you depict it to be.

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

#87
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…

It's natural because AWS/GCP/etc are against internet style system architectures (=natural IP addressing of your components), they are all about RFC1918 subnets, NAT gateways and L7 proxying. AWS even tells you it's bad architecture (or at least not "Well Architected") to build internet-style systems.

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

#88
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Google's own cloud servers

Coming in 2021 though.

Don't hold your breath.

Azure officially has IPv6 support, but like every other cloud vendor, they are 100% native IPv4 with IPv6 bolted on as an afterthought.

For example, it's impossible to create an IPv6-only Azure vNet.

The metadata API endpoint is IPv4-only (169.254.169.254).

So on, and so forth...

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure's IPv6 "support" saddens me. It's just painful how minimal their support is. For one, they NAT all IPv6 traffic. Let that sink in. Let it percolate. Mull over the fact that the entire purpose of IPv6 is to eliminate NAT, and that it's practically impossible to get an IPv6 NAT-ing network device. Microsoft must have had to write their own, custom network load balancers to NAT IPv6. It's madness . Oh, if that's n…

We've been experimenting with Azure's IPv6 support at work recently. The fact it uses NAT is insane - though we could tolerate that. Even worse is that the NAT is broken - it doesn't update the ICMPv6 checksum when it rewrites the source/destination address, so the machines on both ends drop all ICMPv6 traffic that passes through Azure. This is rather bad considering the importance of ICMPv6 in IPv6 (for Path MTU Dis…

Path MTU Discovery is broken in Azure's IPv4 stack as well, which is even more sad. Similarly to you, I had to report to them that their VPN tunnels only send PMTUD in one direction, so you get this wonderful experience where TCP streams with big packets work in one direction, but not the other! With most ACK packets being small, this can take a surprising amount of time to discover and troubleshoot.

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

#90

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…

Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Lots of additional overhead and work, and — again, speaking as a home user — no apparent benefits for dealing with it all.

I get all the concerns about CGNAT and so on, but that's something for the ISP to figure out. If I get a message one day saying that my connection speed is about to drop 30% because of my insistence on IPv4, I will of course react!

The question for me is not, "why would I block it?" but instead, "why would I enable it?". There needs to be a reason, and right now I'm not seeing it.

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