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How does this matter for the top websites? If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site

How does this matter for the top websites? If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site has configured. Am I missing something?

daenney 10y ago
Because the top websites want user traffic too. If you come from a country that doesn't have IPv4 left the usual deployment scenario is a carrier grade DNS64 with NAT64. You're basically stuck behind a huge ISP NAT which makes quite a few things unpleasant and others downright break down. By supplying v6 you ensure anyone in the world can access it regardless of which IP protocol is deployed by your carrier and how they are or aren't translating from one to the other.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. I was under the impression all the ISPs would have ipv4 and handle all the translations to ipv6 clients. Sounds like this is mostly the case, but it has some issues and any new ISP on v6 would have a hard time because a lot of the big sites would be unreachable.
  - bluecmd 10y ago
    Any form of NAT is also much much more expensive than just normal routing. For n:m NAT you need to keep track of sessions for example. This is going to hurt things like BitTorrent among a lot of things.
marcus_holmes 10y ago
According to my understanding, you are correct and it's new domains that suffer. Of course, this becomes political soon enough. As new countries see mass adoption of the interwebs and find out that they have massively smaller allocations of IP addresses than the existing countries they might feel annoyed and do something about it. Tempers flare, shoes are thrown, everyone gets sulky and unhappy. All this could be avoided if we just flipped a few switches, wrote some code, and all moved to IPv6. It's such an easy, small thing to do. Why not just do that and not irritate the living buggery out of everyone?
vacri 10y ago
Because the big hitters drive adoption. Plus they also help adoption, as they are the ones with the most resources to nail down the tricky bits. It's about being a good netizen.
yaantc 10y ago
See my comment above on the bad effect of CGNAT on latency and user experience when private IPv4 addresses are used. IPv6 solves this problem and provides the better user experience in this case.

How does this matter for the top websites? If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site has configured. Am I missing something?

daenney 10y ago

Because the top websites want user traffic too. If you come from a country that doesn't have IPv4 left the usual deployment scenario is a carrier grade DNS64 with NAT64. You're basically stuck behind a huge ISP NAT which makes quite a few things unpleasant and others downright break down. By supplying v6 you ensure anyone in the world can access it regardless of which IP protocol is deployed by your carrier and how they are or aren't translating from one to the other.

exclusiv 10y ago
Thanks for the explanation. I was under the impression all the ISPs would have ipv4 and handle all the translations to ipv6 clients. Sounds like this is mostly the case, but it has some issues and any new ISP on v6 would have a hard time because a lot of the big sites would be unreachable.
- bluecmd 10y ago
  Any form of NAT is also much much more expensive than just normal routing. For n:m NAT you need to keep track of sessions for example. This is going to hurt things like BitTorrent among a lot of things.

marcus_holmes 10y ago

According to my understanding, you are correct and it's new domains that suffer. Of course, this becomes political soon enough. As new countries see mass adoption of the interwebs and find out that they have massively smaller allocations of IP addresses than the existing countries they might feel annoyed and do something about it. Tempers flare, shoes are thrown, everyone gets sulky and unhappy. All this could be avoided if we just flipped a few switches, wrote some code, and all moved to IPv6. It's such an easy, small thing to do. Why not just do that and not irritate the living buggery out of everyone?

vacri 10y ago

Because the big hitters drive adoption. Plus they also help adoption, as they are the ones with the most resources to nail down the tricky bits. It's about being a good netizen.

yaantc 10y ago

See my comment above on the bad effect of CGNAT on latency and user experience when private IPv4 addresses are used. IPv6 solves this problem and provides the better user experience in this case.