31 ms·

Five years of IPv6: whither the next five?

119 points by okket 9y ago

gerdesj 9y ago
Multi-link routing is the only thing that IPv6 fails to address effectively. I've just read the usual crappy "why 2^128" bollocks etc (you don't run internet routing, do you) here and the other usual whining. However, how do you effectively use multiple connections to the internet, without resorting to PI and something like BGP?
- ra1n85 9y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean by multi-link routing? Are you referring to multipathing? What is stopping you from using multiple connections to the internet?
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    Say you want multiple links to the internet - redundancy/cost/whatever. Each link will have a prefix that you are delegated and your SLAAC or DHCPv6 will give out addresses etc. Now which one will your device use? Your PC cannot know that link C is down because that is only known by your router. IPv6 does not address the same basics that IPv4 failed at - routing around crap, without a routing protocol.
    - tmiller12 9y ago
      You can purchase your own IPv6 block from an RIR and do multi homing.
      - gerdesj 9y ago
        Yes you can and it will: * add another entry to the global routing table thus nullifying a benefit of IPv6 * cost a bloody fortune (approx £5,000 per year) * is your mum able to ask for BGP peering I am personally able to pay the price for PI but not everyone is and that is my fucking point. Why should your mum not be able to ask for a internet connection that is able to tolerate a failure? There is NPT but it is simply NAT via another name. I've been running IPv6 at home for quite a long time. I passed the WAF at least two years ago. Any more ideas? Cheers Jon
        buzer 9y ago
        I haven't tried it myself, but I guess one option would be to use DHCPv6 with low lifetime timers? That way router could stop advertising the prefix from upstream that no longer works.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      > Your PC cannot know that link C is down because that is only known by your router. And your router should withdraw the prefix from RAs, so the PC stops using it.
    - ra1n85 9y ago
      That makes no sense. The kernel routing table of your PC should remove the link once the PHY has been detected to be down. That's even if your PC supports multipathing. We don't rely on layer 3 to communicate a link is down to us - we rely on layer 1.
      - izacus 9y ago
        When cable/DSL falls down, it's not going to take PHY down. You'll have active ethernet but no packets will come through. With IPv4 the router will just fix up NAT. With IPv6 you now have to deal with significantly more complexity.
        ra1n85 9y ago
        >With IPv4 the router will just fix up NAT. With IPv6 you now have to deal with significantly more complexity. How so? In a multihomed environment, you'd still be PAT'ing to unique addresses on the WAN side (unless a FHRP is in use, which would be rare) - if one of those links go down, so too does all of the flows associated with address of the link. If no dynamic routing protocol or redirects are in use, the gateway with the down link will also eat half (assuming two gateways) of all egress traffic. IPv6 should be easier as no NAT/PAT is in use, therefore you have no challenges with statefulness or routing symmetry.
        izacus 9y ago
        It SHOULD be easier. It's not on current widely available prosumer hardware. Yes, your connections will get temporary eaten. But for the typical developers workload that won't be a huge issue because most connections you do are short-lived. Configuring all your clients to properly switch vs. configuring your NAT router (with builtin functionality for exactly that) is orders of magnitude more complex.
- xfalcox 9y ago
  Yeah, I got pretty happy with my dual wan setup with Tomato (240/20MB DOCSIS & 90/30MB VDSL) but had to disable IPV6 PD from the DOCSIS provider so the balancing and failover works properly.
eth0up 9y ago
I remember the first time I looked at my ip6 address and found my MAC in the host portion. Obvious and predictable as it might be to some folks, it surprised and annoyed me. With a unique MAC in every assigned ip6 address, it's pretty easy to imagine the tracking potential, e.g., a unique ID following a user where ever an ip6 address is assigned. Apparently Apple and even Network-Manager(Linux) automatically randomize/obscure the MAC for ip6 addresses - I don't know about Windows though. Using wicd in Linux, I must either randomize the MAC manually, or configure sysctl.conf accordingly. Otherwise, it's great, I suppose, that every atom in the known universe can have its own ip.
- baq 9y ago
  windows has two ipv6 addresses on every capable interface by default* : a constant one and a temporary one. neither is based on the MAC AFAIK. [ * ] caveats apply
- mirimir 9y ago
  That was an issue for early IPv6 implementations. In most OS now, even link-local IPv6 addresses do not necessarily include MAC addresses. However, public IPv6 addresses are obviously part of provisioned ranges. And without NAT, there's no ambiguity about assignment to devices. So in practice, with IPv6 you're sharing something as unique as a MAC with all peers. One solution is using proxies with anonymously provisioned IPv6. Tor will eventually handle that. It's also possible for VPN services. FrootVPN, for example, does that already, whether you're connecting to their servers via IPv4 or IPv6.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Most OSes already support some form of using temporary random IPv6 addresses within your provisioned range, including so far as for each individual outgoing communication. Windows has supported it since Vista, IIRC, and defaulted to it since 7, I believe. It's definitely still a problem if your ISP assigns you too small of an IPv6 range, and doesn't stop people from tracking you as your range, but it does as well, if not better, than NAT at stopping people tracking your individual devices.
nik736 9y ago
I don't think we will see IPv6 eliminating IPv4 within the next 10 years. As long as IPv6 is used in parallel there is really no advantage since IPv4 depletion is still an issue and you need to use both. Since switching and routing IPv6 is more expensive the current hardware in use won't even be able to handle all the load and until every switch and router (at home and in the datacenter) is replaced 10 years will go by in no-time. Also, most people who ask for IPv6 for their VMs or whatever don't even have any use for it. IPv6 will be a huge mess, if I only think about sending emails via IPv6, how should that even work properly?
- Aaron1011 9y ago
  > IPv6 will be a huge mess, if I only think about sending emails via IPv6, how should that even work properly? Can you clarify what you mean by that?
- rjsw 9y ago
  Routing IPv6 can be less expensive as you need to do one checksum fewer than for IPv4. Email works fine.
  - nik736 9y ago
    Email works fine technically for sure. But what about handling things like spam? How are projects like spamhaus supposed to work with nearly infinite IPv6 addresses? This is extremely hard with IPv4 already, it will be a huge mess with IPv6.
    - flyinghamster 9y ago
      IPv6 blacklists seem to be based on /64 prefixes rather than individual addresses. That hit me when I was enabling an IPv6 MX on a VPS; I had to get my own /64 prefix rather than use the standard default single address, since the default lied within a spammer-contaminated /64 block. I know it seems rather excessive to use an entire /64 and only populate a few addresses, but I'd rather have too many addresses available than too few.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hannob 9y ago
I'm not super familiar with the development in the low level network space, but I really wonder what the plan for IPv6 is. IPv6 has been the future of IP networking for decades. Yet here we are and I still often surf the Internet without v6 connectivity. It suffers from a fundamental problem: As long as IPv6 is not universally available nobody has a real advantage from supporting it. But as long as it provides no advantage many ISPs and web server operators won't bother supporting it. I think this is a design flaw. IPv6 was built without a plausible transition plan. The plan "over time more and more people will switch to v6 and at some point everyone will have it" clearly doesn't work and will never work.
- cm2187 9y ago
  I guess we will get there. But possibly in 10y. My home broadband in the UK is BT and they just switched on IPv6. Right now it is very unstable. Sometimes I am IPv6 enabled, sometimes not. IPv6 connectivity usually lags behind IPv4 (ie assignment of an IPv6 address is delayed by a few minutes). So it's all hacky and unreliable but it is making some slow progress.
- manacit 9y ago
  There was a time when running out of IPv4 addresses meant that ISPs and other providers _had_ to switch to IPv6, or they would run out of addresses (or spend too much acquiring them). With NAT and stuff, that risk has seemed to decrease significantly. Google statistics show that nearly 20% of their traffic is over v6, which is honestly not bad. The USA itself is 35%, with no latency hit.
  - hannob 9y ago
    > Google statistics show that nearly 20% of their traffic is over v6, which is honestly not bad. The USA itself is 35%, with no latency hit. This is totally bad. We need close to a 100% for v6 to make any sense. 20% IPv6 is pretty pointless.
    - josteink 9y ago
      > This is totally bad. We need close to a 100% for v6 to make any sense. Considering how it was 2% not many years ago, this is a huge improvement. What's going to drive this further is that the cost of supporting IPv4 will increase more and more as IP-space is exhausted and ISPs will have to apply new hacks like CGN. At that point getting people to IPv6 and IPv6-only will be a purely be about economics.
luckydude 9y ago
We'll be having the same post 20 years from now. NAT, for all its problems, has more or less solved the IP address problem. As a geek, one who has put the networking stack into the ETA-10 (yeah, I know, nobody knows that machine, CDC spinoff super computer) and SCO's unix (yeah, I know, it sucked), so as a geek who gets the stack pretty well, I've never warmed up to IPv6. To me, it seems like it went too far. 64 bits not enough? Really? Unless I'm doing the math wrong 64 bits is enough for 2635249153 addresses for every human on the planet. slovax ~/p bc 2^64 18446744073709551616 ./(7*1000^3) 2635249153.38707880228571428571 So 128 bits is needed why? I get that people used to say that 16 bits would be enough and they were wrong and the 32 bit people were wrong. I just don't see how we run out of 64 bits in the next $BIG_PILE of years. I don't get it. Seems over engineered. IPv4 works pretty well, seems like a slight improvement would have been enough.
- colanderman 9y ago
  "IPv6 addresses have 64 bits too many in them" is not a very strong argument, especially not in 2017.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    Its amazing people still wanna bike-shed what is essentially a 20+ year old protocol at this point. Its time to give up on the nitpicking guys, ipv6 is the future regardless of if you like it or not.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      Ha ha. Like javascript! The thought alone depresses me (javascript, not IPv6).
      - nine_k 9y ago
        JS is certainly not going to disappear. But with WebAssembly, you'll not be locked into it, or into transpilers that produce it. Chances are, we'll see other reasonable languages being compiled to WebAssembly and getting mass adoption. (WebAssembly is a stack machine with a bytecode interpreter, running in the browser, with code downloaded from the net. Java tried to be basically the same thing, only 25 years too early.)
ryandvm 9y ago
After watching Windows, Python3, and IPv6 all go through decade long upgrade cycles, I'm hoping we've all learned some valuable lessons about the hidden costs of backward compatibility.
- gtirloni 9y ago
  For IPv4, wouldn't that be forward compatibility? If they had designed the protocol to support different addressing schemes from the beginning, then we could have transitioned in place. Additionally, Windows seems to be doing pretty well in backward compatibility. IMHO, its major source of issues.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  I don't get it. Those long upgrade cycles happened specifically because the new version was not backwards compatible with the old. That's not a cost of backwards compatibility, it's a benefit.
- phicoh 9y ago
  Alternatively, the computer industry forgot about backward compatibility and now has to relearn it. Color TV was designed to be compatible with black&white. Stereo FM radio compatible with mono, stereo vinyl records with mono. Electricity changes very, very slowly. When computers become such an essential part of every day life, you cannot make radical changes any more every couple of years. If your design becomes successful, you may be stuck with it for a couple of decades. The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road. It is only in the last couple of years, that issues (related to the IPv4 address shortage) pop up that basically cannot be solved anymore and make IPv6 an attractive alternative.
  - MrRadar 9y ago
    > The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road. Another big part of it is that all of the features of IPv6 except the address length change were back-ported to IPv4 (e.g. address auto-assignment and IPsec) removing the carrots and leaving only the "stick" of the IPv4 address shortage (which barely registered at all until a few years ago) to push people to v6.
bhhaskin 9y ago
I have switched to IPv6 at home for a few years now. I love it. I wish my work supported IPv6. The ability to have multiple VMs be able to have incoming connections is great. No more having to do wired ports for NATing reasons although an IPv6 firewall is a must.
Qantourisc 9y ago
Been 5 years already ?; still not a word from my ISP :/
- jerf 9y ago
  Have a poke around on the internal interfaces you can find. I don't think I ever got a loud announcement from Comcast that they were going to support IPv6; from my perspective as a customer and not someone who reads HN, it just sort of happened one day.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Every so often I ask RCN if they're going to support IPv6 this century, and they reply back saying they have no plans for anything customer facing.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  My ISP supports IPv6... if you configure a second, PPPoEv6 connection on your router. Which as far as I can tell none of the top routers on the market here support. Heck even OS X doesn't seem to support it.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > PPPoEv6 There is no such thing, it's still PPPoE and PPP, just that there is IPV6CP and IPv6 on top of PPP. And that, in principle, can run through the same PPP session as IPCP and IPv4, though a weird ISP might not support that, obviously.
autokad 9y ago
boy world war 2 really put a dent in clothes washer adoption. That aside, it feels like the adoption sort of resembles 64 bit windows adoptions. took a while but it happened bit by bit
- vacri 9y ago
  but interestingly, fridge adoption kept powering on.
2bluesc 9y ago
I've had IPv6 natively for 4+ years in San Francisco[0] on my residential cable connection. This appears to be one of the few things Comcast does right. Without any extra effort the following sites (small sample from Alexa top 500) use IPv6: * google.com * youtube.com * gmail.com * facebook.com * wikipedia.org * netflix.com Without IPv6 (no AAAA DNS records): * reddit.com * amazon.com * twitter.com * news.ycombinator.com * imgur.com * bing.com * ebay.com It's happening, slowly. ISPs who care are supporting it. A significant portion of my every day web traffic is over IPv6 and nobody has noticed. People on my local network are using it on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and they don't even know what IPv6 is. Google is clearly leading the IPv6 charge and has a statistics page[1] for those interested. [0] https://blog.kylemanna.com/ipv6/comcast-automatically-enabling-ipv6-in-san-francisco/ https://blog.kylemanna.com/ipv6/comcast-automatically-enabli... [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- bhhaskin 9y ago
  Another major source of IPv6 traffic that most people are unaware of it the cell networks. Most cellphone providers use IPv6.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    Is that in the US? In my Eastern European country, IPv6 has not become directly available to mobile customers. One of our major ISPs began offering IPv6 addresses for fiber customers over half a decade ago; all the customer needs to do is set up PPPoE on the router and the connection automatically gets both IPv4 and a couple of IPv6 addresses. But if you add mobile internet to your contract with that ISP, that mobile connection still only provides an IPv4 address that I assume is NATed to hell. The same is true of internet connections through a large pan-European mobile provider here.
    - mgbmtl 9y ago
      US, Canada, most of Western Europe, India?
Animats 9y ago
Is he measuring IPv6 visibility in DNS, or IPv6 traffic? China went to mostly IPv6 for mobiles years ago. Where else could they get enough addresses?
- nine_k 9y ago
  With Neftlix and Youtube using IPv6, the majority of traffic of an average household may as well be on IPv6 already, where available at the last-mile level.
- ggm 9y ago
  We're measuring 'eyeballs' based on google advert placement. And, China is notoriously hard to measure because of the GFC but that said, my contacts inside China confirm that globally routable IPv6 deployment inside China is stalled at a very low level, except for in CERNet, the academic network. This may change soon, it depends.
MrRadar 9y ago
It's interesting how his chart deflects somewhere around 80%, since at the 2017 Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit that's about where T-Mobile US (who probably have the highest penetration of IPv6-capable endpoints of any ISP) noted their transition started slowing drastically.[0] The main reasons are that the remaining devices are old (e.g. 3G phones), have limited capabilities/needs (e.g. embedded IoT devices which just need to phone home once in a while), or are using odd configurations (e.g. for some reason T-Mobile doesn't currently support IPv6 for tethering). Another good talk from that conference is about how Carrier Grade NATs are (amazingly) even worse in practice than they sound in theory[1]. During the Q&A portion one of the audience members points out that as technologies like CGN become required to provide IPv4 service it will cause the cost of supporting IPv4 to rise over time and naturally push ISPs to kill IPv4 as the use of v4 drops while the costs to support it do not. I can also recommend a short talk by Cloudflare about their experience serving IPv6 traffic[2] and another on the history and future of IPv6[3]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGzR5eMfcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGzR5eMfcg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_HbX-batjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_HbX-batjs
chiph 9y ago
How to see if your connection is IPv6: http://ipv6test.google.com/ http://ipv6test.google.com/
- iso-8859-1 9y ago
  It will show a green check mark even if you don't have IPv6, just to show that you won't have problems with timeouts...
super-io 9y ago
Folks in this thread claimng to be using IPv6. Anyone using cjdns? Best use of IPv6 I have heard about so far.
jtl999 9y ago
Have we figured out good ways to gracefully handle prefix changes via DHCP6-PD. I'm kind of worried of my provider changing my prefix "from under my feet" and breaking firewall rules, or worse. Also my ISP blocks some ports incoming lst time I checked, even on IPv6, even on their business plans, without a static IP. And I assume they would do the same with v6 because they don't support static prefixes themselves. To be fair their IPv4s are very static and only change when I change my WAN MAC address or am offline for longer than a DHCP lease (power outage)
abpavel 9y ago
The #1 mistake IETF did was not making IPv6 compatible with IPv4. It's hard to comprehend for most, bug essentially we're building a whole new separate Internet. The old Internet, or the Internet Classic (v4) and the New Internet - The v6 Internet. IPv6 is a totally new protocol - new L2 interaction with Neighbor Discovery (i.e. has no concept of default gateway), new routing tables, new route-maps, nes access lists, new BFD,... Therefore new topology, new routing behavior, new resiliency and redundancy mechanisms... Just because hardware allows running v4 and v6 stacks side by side, it doesn't make them compatible, just easier to implement by not having to buy new hardware for both.
- nextweek2 9y ago
  I have to disagree with you there, making it compatible would have meant carrying legacy work flows. With a greenfield development they could engineer purely with an eye to the future. Coding for a mix of paths creates a 3 way test problem. You have to test purely legacy, the mix of legacy and new and then just the new. You suddenly have to start coding for runtime depended details.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  I completely agree. I think the whole move from v4 to v6 should be a case study in exactly how industry-wide technology migrations should not be done. The only thing that was the critical flaw in v4 was lack of address space. Yes, there are obviously a lot of other issues with v4, but instead of just fixing that one critical flaw, v6 suffered from classic scope creep, put in the kitchen sink, in a way incompatible with v4, and 2 decades later we're still 5 years away.
- deathanatos 9y ago
  > making IPv6 compatible with IPv4. This gets suggested and rehashed on every single IPv6 comment section. There is no way to make IPv6 compatible with IPv4: by the Pigeonhole principle, there is simply no way to reference 2 ^ 128 objects using only 32-bits. The next usual hack is to "add an option" or something; but all the routing hardware would need to understand that option, which entails upgrading the entire Internet, which is exactly what IPv6 is doing/has done, except that adding an option ends up with a worse design. Any suggestion needs to fulfill a. any machine should be reachable and b. you can't upgrade everything, or you may as well just go with what we've got.
zebraflask 9y ago
v6 doesn't work with a lot of VPNs.
iso-8859-1 9y ago
Android doesn't support DHCPv6 and SLAAC is not good enough. We need consensus on sufficiently sized prefixes using DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6#Implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6#Implementation This is the next big step as far as I see it.

119 points by okket 9y ago

Multi-link routing is the only thing that IPv6 fails to address effectively. I've just read the usual crappy "why 2^128" bollocks etc (you don't run internet routing, do you) here and the other usual whining. However, how do you effectively use multiple connections to the internet, without resorting to PI and something like BGP?

ra1n85 9y ago
Can you clarify what you mean by multi-link routing? Are you referring to multipathing? What is stopping you from using multiple connections to the internet?
- gerdesj 9y ago
  Say you want multiple links to the internet - redundancy/cost/whatever. Each link will have a prefix that you are delegated and your SLAAC or DHCPv6 will give out addresses etc. Now which one will your device use? Your PC cannot know that link C is down because that is only known by your router. IPv6 does not address the same basics that IPv4 failed at - routing around crap, without a routing protocol.
  - tmiller12 9y ago
    You can purchase your own IPv6 block from an RIR and do multi homing.
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      Yes you can and it will: * add another entry to the global routing table thus nullifying a benefit of IPv6 * cost a bloody fortune (approx £5,000 per year) * is your mum able to ask for BGP peering I am personally able to pay the price for PI but not everyone is and that is my fucking point. Why should your mum not be able to ask for a internet connection that is able to tolerate a failure? There is NPT but it is simply NAT via another name. I've been running IPv6 at home for quite a long time. I passed the WAF at least two years ago. Any more ideas? Cheers Jon
      - buzer 9y ago
        I haven't tried it myself, but I guess one option would be to use DHCPv6 with low lifetime timers? That way router could stop advertising the prefix from upstream that no longer works.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > Your PC cannot know that link C is down because that is only known by your router. And your router should withdraw the prefix from RAs, so the PC stops using it.
  - ra1n85 9y ago
    That makes no sense. The kernel routing table of your PC should remove the link once the PHY has been detected to be down. That's even if your PC supports multipathing. We don't rely on layer 3 to communicate a link is down to us - we rely on layer 1.
    - izacus 9y ago
      When cable/DSL falls down, it's not going to take PHY down. You'll have active ethernet but no packets will come through. With IPv4 the router will just fix up NAT. With IPv6 you now have to deal with significantly more complexity.
      - ra1n85 9y ago
        >With IPv4 the router will just fix up NAT. With IPv6 you now have to deal with significantly more complexity. How so? In a multihomed environment, you'd still be PAT'ing to unique addresses on the WAN side (unless a FHRP is in use, which would be rare) - if one of those links go down, so too does all of the flows associated with address of the link. If no dynamic routing protocol or redirects are in use, the gateway with the down link will also eat half (assuming two gateways) of all egress traffic. IPv6 should be easier as no NAT/PAT is in use, therefore you have no challenges with statefulness or routing symmetry.
        izacus 9y ago
        It SHOULD be easier. It's not on current widely available prosumer hardware. Yes, your connections will get temporary eaten. But for the typical developers workload that won't be a huge issue because most connections you do are short-lived. Configuring all your clients to properly switch vs. configuring your NAT router (with builtin functionality for exactly that) is orders of magnitude more complex.
xfalcox 9y ago
Yeah, I got pretty happy with my dual wan setup with Tomato (240/20MB DOCSIS & 90/30MB VDSL) but had to disable IPV6 PD from the DOCSIS provider so the balancing and failover works properly.

eth0up 9y ago

I remember the first time I looked at my ip6 address and found my MAC in the host portion. Obvious and predictable as it might be to some folks, it surprised and annoyed me. With a unique MAC in every assigned ip6 address, it's pretty easy to imagine the tracking potential, e.g., a unique ID following a user where ever an ip6 address is assigned. Apparently Apple and even Network-Manager(Linux) automatically randomize/obscure the MAC for ip6 addresses - I don't know about Windows though. Using wicd in Linux, I must either randomize the MAC manually, or configure sysctl.conf accordingly. Otherwise, it's great, I suppose, that every atom in the known universe can have its own ip.

baq 9y ago
windows has two ipv6 addresses on every capable interface by default* : a constant one and a temporary one. neither is based on the MAC AFAIK. [ * ] caveats apply
mirimir 9y ago
That was an issue for early IPv6 implementations. In most OS now, even link-local IPv6 addresses do not necessarily include MAC addresses. However, public IPv6 addresses are obviously part of provisioned ranges. And without NAT, there's no ambiguity about assignment to devices. So in practice, with IPv6 you're sharing something as unique as a MAC with all peers. One solution is using proxies with anonymously provisioned IPv6. Tor will eventually handle that. It's also possible for VPN services. FrootVPN, for example, does that already, whether you're connecting to their servers via IPv4 or IPv6.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Most OSes already support some form of using temporary random IPv6 addresses within your provisioned range, including so far as for each individual outgoing communication. Windows has supported it since Vista, IIRC, and defaulted to it since 7, I believe. It's definitely still a problem if your ISP assigns you too small of an IPv6 range, and doesn't stop people from tracking you as your range, but it does as well, if not better, than NAT at stopping people tracking your individual devices.

nik736 9y ago

I don't think we will see IPv6 eliminating IPv4 within the next 10 years. As long as IPv6 is used in parallel there is really no advantage since IPv4 depletion is still an issue and you need to use both. Since switching and routing IPv6 is more expensive the current hardware in use won't even be able to handle all the load and until every switch and router (at home and in the datacenter) is replaced 10 years will go by in no-time. Also, most people who ask for IPv6 for their VMs or whatever don't even have any use for it. IPv6 will be a huge mess, if I only think about sending emails via IPv6, how should that even work properly?

Aaron1011 9y ago
> IPv6 will be a huge mess, if I only think about sending emails via IPv6, how should that even work properly? Can you clarify what you mean by that?
rjsw 9y ago
Routing IPv6 can be less expensive as you need to do one checksum fewer than for IPv4. Email works fine.
- nik736 9y ago
  Email works fine technically for sure. But what about handling things like spam? How are projects like spamhaus supposed to work with nearly infinite IPv6 addresses? This is extremely hard with IPv4 already, it will be a huge mess with IPv6.
  - flyinghamster 9y ago
    IPv6 blacklists seem to be based on /64 prefixes rather than individual addresses. That hit me when I was enabling an IPv6 MX on a VPS; I had to get my own /64 prefix rather than use the standard default single address, since the default lied within a spammer-contaminated /64 block. I know it seems rather excessive to use an entire /64 and only populate a few addresses, but I'd rather have too many addresses available than too few.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hannob 9y ago

I'm not super familiar with the development in the low level network space, but I really wonder what the plan for IPv6 is. IPv6 has been the future of IP networking for decades. Yet here we are and I still often surf the Internet without v6 connectivity. It suffers from a fundamental problem: As long as IPv6 is not universally available nobody has a real advantage from supporting it. But as long as it provides no advantage many ISPs and web server operators won't bother supporting it. I think this is a design flaw. IPv6 was built without a plausible transition plan. The plan "over time more and more people will switch to v6 and at some point everyone will have it" clearly doesn't work and will never work.

cm2187 9y ago
I guess we will get there. But possibly in 10y. My home broadband in the UK is BT and they just switched on IPv6. Right now it is very unstable. Sometimes I am IPv6 enabled, sometimes not. IPv6 connectivity usually lags behind IPv4 (ie assignment of an IPv6 address is delayed by a few minutes). So it's all hacky and unreliable but it is making some slow progress.
manacit 9y ago
There was a time when running out of IPv4 addresses meant that ISPs and other providers _had_ to switch to IPv6, or they would run out of addresses (or spend too much acquiring them). With NAT and stuff, that risk has seemed to decrease significantly. Google statistics show that nearly 20% of their traffic is over v6, which is honestly not bad. The USA itself is 35%, with no latency hit.
- hannob 9y ago
  > Google statistics show that nearly 20% of their traffic is over v6, which is honestly not bad. The USA itself is 35%, with no latency hit. This is totally bad. We need close to a 100% for v6 to make any sense. 20% IPv6 is pretty pointless.
  - josteink 9y ago
    > This is totally bad. We need close to a 100% for v6 to make any sense. Considering how it was 2% not many years ago, this is a huge improvement. What's going to drive this further is that the cost of supporting IPv4 will increase more and more as IP-space is exhausted and ISPs will have to apply new hacks like CGN. At that point getting people to IPv6 and IPv6-only will be a purely be about economics.

luckydude 9y ago

We'll be having the same post 20 years from now. NAT, for all its problems, has more or less solved the IP address problem. As a geek, one who has put the networking stack into the ETA-10 (yeah, I know, nobody knows that machine, CDC spinoff super computer) and SCO's unix (yeah, I know, it sucked), so as a geek who gets the stack pretty well, I've never warmed up to IPv6. To me, it seems like it went too far. 64 bits not enough? Really? Unless I'm doing the math wrong 64 bits is enough for 2635249153 addresses for every human on the planet. slovax ~/p bc 2^64 18446744073709551616 ./(7*1000^3) 2635249153.38707880228571428571 So 128 bits is needed why? I get that people used to say that 16 bits would be enough and they were wrong and the 32 bit people were wrong. I just don't see how we run out of 64 bits in the next $BIG_PILE of years. I don't get it. Seems over engineered. IPv4 works pretty well, seems like a slight improvement would have been enough.

colanderman 9y ago
"IPv6 addresses have 64 bits too many in them" is not a very strong argument, especially not in 2017.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Its amazing people still wanna bike-shed what is essentially a 20+ year old protocol at this point. Its time to give up on the nitpicking guys, ipv6 is the future regardless of if you like it or not.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Ha ha. Like javascript! The thought alone depresses me (javascript, not IPv6).
    - nine_k 9y ago
      JS is certainly not going to disappear. But with WebAssembly, you'll not be locked into it, or into transpilers that produce it. Chances are, we'll see other reasonable languages being compiled to WebAssembly and getting mass adoption. (WebAssembly is a stack machine with a bytecode interpreter, running in the browser, with code downloaded from the net. Java tried to be basically the same thing, only 25 years too early.)

ryandvm 9y ago

After watching Windows, Python3, and IPv6 all go through decade long upgrade cycles, I'm hoping we've all learned some valuable lessons about the hidden costs of backward compatibility.

gtirloni 9y ago
For IPv4, wouldn't that be forward compatibility? If they had designed the protocol to support different addressing schemes from the beginning, then we could have transitioned in place. Additionally, Windows seems to be doing pretty well in backward compatibility. IMHO, its major source of issues.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
I don't get it. Those long upgrade cycles happened specifically because the new version was not backwards compatible with the old. That's not a cost of backwards compatibility, it's a benefit.
phicoh 9y ago
Alternatively, the computer industry forgot about backward compatibility and now has to relearn it. Color TV was designed to be compatible with black&white. Stereo FM radio compatible with mono, stereo vinyl records with mono. Electricity changes very, very slowly. When computers become such an essential part of every day life, you cannot make radical changes any more every couple of years. If your design becomes successful, you may be stuck with it for a couple of decades. The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road. It is only in the last couple of years, that issues (related to the IPv4 address shortage) pop up that basically cannot be solved anymore and make IPv6 an attractive alternative.
- MrRadar 9y ago
  > The failure of IPv6 is also the success of IPv4 engineering. When IPv6 was designed in the mid 90s, there were many issues that might hold back IPv4 down the road. Another big part of it is that all of the features of IPv6 except the address length change were back-ported to IPv4 (e.g. address auto-assignment and IPsec) removing the carrots and leaving only the "stick" of the IPv4 address shortage (which barely registered at all until a few years ago) to push people to v6.

bhhaskin 9y ago

I have switched to IPv6 at home for a few years now. I love it. I wish my work supported IPv6. The ability to have multiple VMs be able to have incoming connections is great. No more having to do wired ports for NATing reasons although an IPv6 firewall is a must.

Qantourisc 9y ago

Been 5 years already ?; still not a word from my ISP :/

jerf 9y ago
Have a poke around on the internal interfaces you can find. I don't think I ever got a loud announcement from Comcast that they were going to support IPv6; from my perspective as a customer and not someone who reads HN, it just sort of happened one day.
dsr_ 9y ago
Every so often I ask RCN if they're going to support IPv6 this century, and they reply back saying they have no plans for anything customer facing.
kalleboo 9y ago
My ISP supports IPv6... if you configure a second, PPPoEv6 connection on your router. Which as far as I can tell none of the top routers on the market here support. Heck even OS X doesn't seem to support it.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > PPPoEv6 There is no such thing, it's still PPPoE and PPP, just that there is IPV6CP and IPv6 on top of PPP. And that, in principle, can run through the same PPP session as IPCP and IPv4, though a weird ISP might not support that, obviously.

autokad 9y ago

boy world war 2 really put a dent in clothes washer adoption. That aside, it feels like the adoption sort of resembles 64 bit windows adoptions. took a while but it happened bit by bit

vacri 9y ago
but interestingly, fridge adoption kept powering on.

2bluesc 9y ago

I've had IPv6 natively for 4+ years in San Francisco[0] on my residential cable connection. This appears to be one of the few things Comcast does right. Without any extra effort the following sites (small sample from Alexa top 500) use IPv6: * google.com * youtube.com * gmail.com * facebook.com * wikipedia.org * netflix.com Without IPv6 (no AAAA DNS records): * reddit.com * amazon.com * twitter.com * news.ycombinator.com * imgur.com * bing.com * ebay.com It's happening, slowly. ISPs who care are supporting it. A significant portion of my every day web traffic is over IPv6 and nobody has noticed. People on my local network are using it on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and they don't even know what IPv6 is. Google is clearly leading the IPv6 charge and has a statistics page[1] for those interested. [0] https://blog.kylemanna.com/ipv6/comcast-automatically-enabling-ipv6-in-san-francisco/ https://blog.kylemanna.com/ipv6/comcast-automatically-enabli... [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

bhhaskin 9y ago
Another major source of IPv6 traffic that most people are unaware of it the cell networks. Most cellphone providers use IPv6.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  Is that in the US? In my Eastern European country, IPv6 has not become directly available to mobile customers. One of our major ISPs began offering IPv6 addresses for fiber customers over half a decade ago; all the customer needs to do is set up PPPoE on the router and the connection automatically gets both IPv4 and a couple of IPv6 addresses. But if you add mobile internet to your contract with that ISP, that mobile connection still only provides an IPv4 address that I assume is NATed to hell. The same is true of internet connections through a large pan-European mobile provider here.
  - mgbmtl 9y ago
    US, Canada, most of Western Europe, India?

Animats 9y ago

Is he measuring IPv6 visibility in DNS, or IPv6 traffic? China went to mostly IPv6 for mobiles years ago. Where else could they get enough addresses?

nine_k 9y ago
With Neftlix and Youtube using IPv6, the majority of traffic of an average household may as well be on IPv6 already, where available at the last-mile level.
ggm 9y ago
We're measuring 'eyeballs' based on google advert placement. And, China is notoriously hard to measure because of the GFC but that said, my contacts inside China confirm that globally routable IPv6 deployment inside China is stalled at a very low level, except for in CERNet, the academic network. This may change soon, it depends.

MrRadar 9y ago

It's interesting how his chart deflects somewhere around 80%, since at the 2017 Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit that's about where T-Mobile US (who probably have the highest penetration of IPv6-capable endpoints of any ISP) noted their transition started slowing drastically.[0] The main reasons are that the remaining devices are old (e.g. 3G phones), have limited capabilities/needs (e.g. embedded IoT devices which just need to phone home once in a while), or are using odd configurations (e.g. for some reason T-Mobile doesn't currently support IPv6 for tethering). Another good talk from that conference is about how Carrier Grade NATs are (amazingly) even worse in practice than they sound in theory[1]. During the Q&A portion one of the audience members points out that as technologies like CGN become required to provide IPv4 service it will cause the cost of supporting IPv4 to rise over time and naturally push ISPs to kill IPv4 as the use of v4 drops while the costs to support it do not. I can also recommend a short talk by Cloudflare about their experience serving IPv6 traffic[2] and another on the history and future of IPv6[3]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbk4H6EmZzI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGzR5eMfcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGzR5eMfcg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_HbX-batjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_HbX-batjs

chiph 9y ago

How to see if your connection is IPv6: http://ipv6test.google.com/ http://ipv6test.google.com/

iso-8859-1 9y ago
It will show a green check mark even if you don't have IPv6, just to show that you won't have problems with timeouts...

super-io 9y ago

Folks in this thread claimng to be using IPv6. Anyone using cjdns? Best use of IPv6 I have heard about so far.

jtl999 9y ago

Have we figured out good ways to gracefully handle prefix changes via DHCP6-PD. I'm kind of worried of my provider changing my prefix "from under my feet" and breaking firewall rules, or worse. Also my ISP blocks some ports incoming lst time I checked, even on IPv6, even on their business plans, without a static IP. And I assume they would do the same with v6 because they don't support static prefixes themselves. To be fair their IPv4s are very static and only change when I change my WAN MAC address or am offline for longer than a DHCP lease (power outage)

abpavel 9y ago

The #1 mistake IETF did was not making IPv6 compatible with IPv4. It's hard to comprehend for most, bug essentially we're building a whole new separate Internet. The old Internet, or the Internet Classic (v4) and the New Internet - The v6 Internet. IPv6 is a totally new protocol - new L2 interaction with Neighbor Discovery (i.e. has no concept of default gateway), new routing tables, new route-maps, nes access lists, new BFD,... Therefore new topology, new routing behavior, new resiliency and redundancy mechanisms... Just because hardware allows running v4 and v6 stacks side by side, it doesn't make them compatible, just easier to implement by not having to buy new hardware for both.

nextweek2 9y ago
I have to disagree with you there, making it compatible would have meant carrying legacy work flows. With a greenfield development they could engineer purely with an eye to the future. Coding for a mix of paths creates a 3 way test problem. You have to test purely legacy, the mix of legacy and new and then just the new. You suddenly have to start coding for runtime depended details.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
I completely agree. I think the whole move from v4 to v6 should be a case study in exactly how industry-wide technology migrations should not be done. The only thing that was the critical flaw in v4 was lack of address space. Yes, there are obviously a lot of other issues with v4, but instead of just fixing that one critical flaw, v6 suffered from classic scope creep, put in the kitchen sink, in a way incompatible with v4, and 2 decades later we're still 5 years away.
deathanatos 9y ago
> making IPv6 compatible with IPv4. This gets suggested and rehashed on every single IPv6 comment section. There is no way to make IPv6 compatible with IPv4: by the Pigeonhole principle, there is simply no way to reference 2 ^ 128 objects using only 32-bits. The next usual hack is to "add an option" or something; but all the routing hardware would need to understand that option, which entails upgrading the entire Internet, which is exactly what IPv6 is doing/has done, except that adding an option ends up with a worse design. Any suggestion needs to fulfill a. any machine should be reachable and b. you can't upgrade everything, or you may as well just go with what we've got.

zebraflask 9y ago

v6 doesn't work with a lot of VPNs.

iso-8859-1 9y ago

Android doesn't support DHCPv6 and SLAAC is not good enough. We need consensus on sufficiently sized prefixes using DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6#Implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCPv6#Implementation This is the next big step as far as I see it.