19 ms·

IPv6 Adoption

315 points by AndrewDucker 9y ago

ghshephard 9y ago
As much as I love and use IPv6 every day as my primary payload protocol (and have done so for 10+ years) - I find it dubious that, "The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6." - Really, 20% of people are now connecting to Google over IPv6? If so, that's awesome and presumably a side effect of Comcast giving everyone IPv6 addresses.
- simias 9y ago
  What do you find dubious exactly? Why would Google lie about that? It doesn't sound that hard to believe, all it takes is a few big ISPs starting to enable IPv6 by default.
  - renesd 9y ago
    Google isn't even accessible in the biggest country with the most people on the internet. So the HN title is misleading, in that it isn't 20% worldwide. Mods, please fix the title?
    - ko27 9y ago
      "in that it isn't 20% worldwide." You don't know that, even when you count in more Chinese people it could still not change the world average. The title is fine since it represents an extremely big sample on the most visited page on the Internet.
      - londons_explore 9y ago
        Baidu.com is the most visited page though...
        pcr0 9y ago
        Not sure where you got that from. Alexa rankings show google.com as #1 and baidu.com as #4. http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites
        earenndil 9y ago
        He probably means most visited site in china.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  > If so, that's awesome and presumably a side effect of Comcast giving everyone IPv6 addresses. As well as Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile wireless. Mobile usage is huge.
ter0 9y ago
Why does the percentage of IPv6 usage peak over weekends? Perhaps there's more people in offices on weekdays, which are less likely to use IPv6?
- longwave 9y ago
  Yes, seems likely. There is a similar spike in late December when less people are in offices due to Christmas holidays.
- Viperus 9y ago
  I came here to ask exactly the same question. I can only assume that entertainment activities (console gaming, video on demand, etc.) can bring the traffic to make such a difference.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  Netflix and YouTube have strong IPv6 support and chew through a lot of bandwidth, perhaps?
- ghshephard 9y ago
  If the high IPv6 is because people get it automatically because of Comcast, and other large providers - that would explain it.
- wtallis 9y ago
  Corporate networks with professional IT staff are where you'll find the legacy systems and equipment that get in the way of using IPv6. Home users have all been running operating systems with IPv6 on by default for years, and their routers are mostly new enough to make IPv6 work out of the box as soon as the ISP is ready.
  - technofiend 9y ago
    Considering what's at stake if you accidentally make some part of your infrastructure routable it seems pretty reasonable corporate environments want to be very careful about IPV6 adoption. Personally I think they should still do it but if HSBC is in the news tomorrow after leaking customer details because of a routing woops there would be a lot of "they should have known better!" here and in the press. It's going to a take a long time for sensitive corporate environments to decide the rewards outweigh the risks.
optimog 9y ago
As a Belgian, can anyone explain why the adoption of IPv6 in Belgium is that high (51,51%) compared to all the other countries?
- Tharkun 9y ago
  Because the dominant ISP (Telenet) has enabled IPv6 by default on all their residential gateways. And because they (possibly somewhat surprisingly) have some smart people working for them.
  - optimog 9y ago
    That's remarkable, since Telenet is part of Liberty Global, who owns so many ISP's. Eg. neighbouring country The Netherlands has Ziggo (also owned by Liberty Global). Adaptation in The Netherlands is only 9 pct. Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global or if it's just a smart move by Telenet.
    - aapjesverkoper 9y ago
      When I got a new connection from Ziggo last year I got an ipv6 adres, so they seem to have started to roll this out in the Netherlands as well.
      - speleding 9y ago
        Depending on where you are in the Netherlands Ziggo will give proper Dual Stack or DS-lite to new customers. It reflects the networks that Ziggo was cobbled together from. If you are in a former UPC area you probably want to call them and ask them to downgrade you back to IPv4 (they do this for free). Their DS-lite solution employs carrier grade NAT which blows dog chunks.
        aapjesverkoper 9y ago
        Would that DS-lite solution explain why VPN connections to my AWS vps seem really spotty on ipv6 connections?
kingosticks 9y ago
Should the title be "peaks" rather than "breaks"?
- foota 9y ago
  No, it is breaking past the limit of 20%. You generally only use peaks if you are expecting it to drop in the future or if it has since dropped.
  - kingosticks 9y ago
    Fair enough, peaks isn't right,'reaches' maybe. Breaks just read wrong for me at first glance, I thought it was saying the usage of ipv6 was broken for 20% of users worldwide. That was obviously just a huge brain fail on my part.
- richardwhiuk 9y ago
  A peak broke 20% - so I think it's a reasonable title.
- yelnatz 9y ago
  I see your point, the title was a little bit ambiguous when I first read it. I thought 20% of IPv6 went down or something.
TekMol 9y ago
I just googled some IPv6 test tools and they all say "IPv6 not supported". Is there a way to find out why? If it's my settings, machine, my router, my provider...?
- the8472 9y ago
  modern operating systems have ipv6 support out of the box. so it likely is your ISP or the router. Even if the ISP supports ipv6 they might only roll it out to new customers. Beware though, some ISPs may switch to CGNAT via DS-Lite for IPv4 when they change you to a IPv6 setup.
- ac29 9y ago
  Try running 'ip addr' in Linux or 'ipconfig' in Windows. Do you even have a IPv6 address assigned to any interface? If not, it is your router or ISP, most likely.
  - TekMol 9y ago
    I'm on Linux. Yes, looks like my machine has ipv6. It shows an ipv6 address in the output of "ip addr".
    - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
      If it's just a link-local address that doesn't tell you anything at all.
    - scott_karana 9y ago
      Your router's LAN switch might support IPv6, but it might not support it on its WAN/NAT side, or you might not have any public IPv6 addresses assigned by your ISP, or no tunneling configured, etc.
Arnt 9y ago
So growth really is slowing down. It used to double every ten to twelve months, the last two doublings took fifteen (IIRC) and nineteen months. 40% around October 2019, then?
- cm2187 9y ago
  Some countries seem to have not even started getting into IPv6: Spain, Italy, Russia. So I think it could accelerate again the day the ISP in those countries make the switch (if that ever happens).
  - mrkrabo 9y ago
    Spaniard here. The only major ISP that has tried to enable IPv6 is Orange. They did so by putting people in a DS-Lite connection. This is, CG-NAT for IPv4 and real IPv6 connectivity. Result: now everybody thinks "IPv6 sucks because it means I won't have an external IPv4 address". So they stopped the IPv6 programme. The other two major ISPs also are ready. They just have to flip the switch. That said... I bet most of the CPEs that are currently deployed have no IPv6 capability. The only ones that work with IPv6 are usually the fibre CPEs, which are more modern, by definition. IPv6 is simply a failure, especially if you, as an ISP, can afford to buy all the IPv4 addresses you need. And that's what happens in Spain for the three major ISPs: they have all the IP addresses they need, so there is no need at all for them to switch to IPv6. In fact, they are using this as a weapon against the new ISPs: one of the three major ISPs mocked a smaller one for having their clients behind a CG-NAT, which is something they had to do that because they simply have no IPv4 addresses. Our government forces the biggest ISP to share its last mile infrastructure with every ISP that wants to use it, so my question is, why doesn't the government force the big ISPs to share their IPv4 address pools?
    - mino 9y ago
      This. Italian market is the same.
    - ornitorrincos 9y ago
      yeah, Euskaltel(northern spain cable isp) had(and maybe still has) a huge amount of ips. Years ago they used to put a modem instead of a router in every home, the modem had three ports with each of them being assigned a public ip address.
squeed 9y ago
And yet, three of the four most valuable companies in the world are cloud providers, and none of them have more than rudimentary support for IPv6. This is a disaster. Half the world is not yet online. If we're going to change that, then we need to move to ipv6, and soon.
- cronjobber 9y ago
  "We" don't have to move to ipv6, even if "they" have to. The internet can plausibly support both protocols forever.
  - libeclipse 9y ago
    I disagree, but even still suppose you're right. Why? ipv6 is so much better than ipv4 it's insane that we're even discussing this.
    - cronjobber 9y ago
      It sucks at being compatible with ipv4. The "billion dollar mistake" :-) It also sucks at having software/hardware stacks nearly as well debugged as those for ipv4, which means running ipv6 at all is a security risk. Nobody would switch for sundry technical advantages. The main driver for conversion is that ipv4 addresses are scarce. As soon as "we" seriously "move to ipv6", however, the scarcity driven pressure to convert is relieved. We're bound to reach an equilibrium that will include ipv4 for a long time, possibly forever.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        > It sucks at being compatible with ipv4. The "billion dollar mistake" :-) You cannot make it compatible. The whole point is address extension, and a legacy IPv4 endpoint cannot possibly talk to a new, extended-address endpoint. > It also sucks at having software/hardware stacks nearly as well debugged as those for ipv4, which means running ipv6 at all is a security risk. There is no "stack". The software above the IP layer is still UDP, TCP, HTTP, SMTP, ... > Nobody would switch for sundry technical advantages. Yeah, actually, lots of competent people do, because NAT and duplicate addresses just cause so many pointless problems. > As soon as "we" seriously "move to ipv6", however, the scarcity driven pressure to convert is relieved. Yep, the pressure to convert will be relieved because people simply won't bother setting up IPv4 in the first place at some point because it adds so much unnecessary complexity, so no need to convert. And once that happens, even the last holdouts will enable IPv6, at which point IPv4 will be a largely useless legacy protocol that just causes maintenance costs for nothing.
Symbiote 9y ago
$ host -t aaaa news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net has no AAAA record But there's an option to turn it on, documented here: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168746-How-do-I-turn-the-Cloudflare-IPv6-gateway-on-or-off- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168746-H...
- mrkrabo 9y ago
  Probably the software requires an update to support IPv6 addresses and they simply know it's not worth the hassle.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Can you explain to me what will happen if I don't turn on the AAAA record? Like in theory of course I want to support IPv6, but in practice I've got a huge TODO list, and if there are present work-arounds that are doing good enough for now, I'd like to prioritise it correctly.
  - andruby 9y ago
    This is why IPv6 adoption is slow. There are always more pressing issues.
  - ancarda 9y ago
    The two biggest arguments are Carrier Grade NAT and dodgy transitional stacks. 1) ISPs are increasingly deploying Carrier Grade NAT, which puts several people behind a single IP. This completely breaks end-to-end as you can't port forward but if you're running a website, the worst issue is if you ban an IP address, you could be cutting off several legitimate users to get rid of 1 person. It's like banning a whole country because of a few people which Wikipedia has done in the past by mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97.69 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97.69 see https://techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar/ This problem will only get worse as time goes on. The Internet is starting to feel broken when an entire country shares a single IP address. 2) In some cases, ISPs might address the shortage slightly differently, by serving up an IPv6 address that proxies back to your website over IPv4. To you it looks like Carrier Grade NAT, but you can actually do this yourself if you have an IPv6 enabled server (Linode, DigitalOcean work) and use nginx to reverse proxy. That way you can at-least set an X-Forwarded-For header that will give you better analytics and more precise blocking. Either you do it or the ISP will do it for you but give absolutely no data.
z3t4 9y ago
Can anyone recommend a guides on IPv6 for developers and sysops ?
- tajen 9y ago
  I once ticked "IPv6" when ordering a Debian VPS. It was super-slow and I didn't know IPv6 was the cause. Basically the system always tries IPv6 first, times out at 30s, then tries IPv4. I never completed an `apt-get update` and I assumed my provider had sold me crap. Years later, I discovered that disabling IPv6 did the trick. So, my noob advice: If you ask for a guide about IPv6, it's not for you yet.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Actually, your provider did sell you crap. IPv6 will only be tried if your host has configured IPv6 connectivity and the destination host has IPv6 DNS entries. Debian mirrors generally support IPv6, so apt-get hanging probably means that the IPv6 connectivity of your provider was broken.
    - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
      That was my thought too. IPv6 shouldn't cause hangs if it is configured correctly.
      - deathanatos 9y ago
        I just want to emphasize this a bit: IPv6 won't cause hangs even if the connection is IPv4 only if things are configured correctly. (That said, I've seen incorrect configurations: Comcast, at one point, assigned me an IPv6 address (automatically) and led the system to believe that their was a valid IPv6 route, but proceeded to drop all IPv6 packets. This same scenario can happen on IPv4, too, and the resolution is the same: worm your way through the bowels of support until you reach someone competent.)
sliken 9y ago
Google reports over 35% of their traffic is IPv6 for the USA. Source (click on per country tab) https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption
avian 9y ago
In my experience IPv6 support in home Wi-Fi routers is still hit or miss. I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices refused to get a IPv6 address due to failing duplicate address detection (it was some kind of multicast issue as far as I could see) The router in question got several firmware updates where changelog mentioned an unspecified "IPv6 fix", but none fixed the issue for me. Finally I just gave up and bought a new one from a different vendor. https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_problems_on_tp_link_archer_c20/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_pro...
- y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
  > I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices refused to get a IPv6 address What's the advantage of having an ipv6 home lan? I think for a home network the 192.168.0.0 subnet should be more than enough. Or am I missing something?
  - Filligree 9y ago
    Publicly exposed ports. Running nginx on more than one of your machines, for example.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Maybe someone wants to have non-NATed devices on the LAN and actually use their /48?
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Each device gets a globally routeable address. You could, for example, configure the firewall to give access to your IoT fridge, camera, baby monitor and toaster's web interfaces, all on port 80. With IPv4 NAT, you'd need to remember a port number for all but one of these services. You can more easily accept an incoming connection, whether that's for gaming, video chat, P2P file sharing, etc. The computer knows its own address. If the ISP is so short of IPv4 addresses that even the router only gets a private address (so, two layers of NAT), then without IPv6 there's no way to set up any type of server. The IPv6 firewall user interface (my router calls it "pinholes") is simpler than the IPv4 port forwarding interface.
nepotism2018 9y ago
Whats with the dip in Jan 2017 lol
rohan1024 9y ago
Reliance jio has contributed a lot for the ipv6 adoption in India.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
SwellJoe 9y ago
We added support for IPv6 to Virtualmin projects about a decade ago. Even today, only a tiny percentage of our users ever enable it (this mostly includes our own sites, embarrassingly enough, even though some of our servers in colo do have IPv6 subnets available to them). I should work on making that a thing that happens more by default. There's a lot of cool things you can do when you don't have to worry about running out of IP addresses. A lot of complex stuff people are doing with cloud meshnets and overlay networks and bridged private networks with port forwarding and such becomes mostly moot if every VM and container can have as many dedicated real IPs as it needs to do its job. It's also funny/weird to think about how much development effort has gone into stretching IPv4. NAT, port forwarding, SNI (and some hacky other SSL tricks before that to fit multiple SSL sites on one IP), masquerading, tunneling, VPNs, etc. The list is incredibly long and the hours spent on development unfathomable.
- otabdeveloper1 9y ago
  > NAT, port forwarding, SNI, masquerading, tunneling, VPNs, etc. All that stuff is mostly done for security purposes, not because we ran out of IP addresses. (And before you reply: yes, it really works and is a valid security tool.)
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Please explain the security purpose of four of those six.
    - otabdeveloper1 9y ago
      Not being to address a corporate or home network computer from the outside is a feature, not a bug. Doubly so for the datacenter. Corporate IT doesn't want random internet hackers accessing sensitive information on the local corporate network. Yes, you can theoretically migrate everyone to IPv6 and implement some sort of firewall system to block outside access, but now you're effectively duplicating NAT in IPv6. Worse, due to second-system effect you're bound to end up with something even stupider and nastier than the existing stupid and nasty NAT solutions.
nikon 9y ago
Does Google Cloud even offer IPv6?
- mikelward 9y ago
  Externally (load balancer VIPs, AppEngine, Cloud SQL), yes. Internally (GCE instances), not yet. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/ipv6 https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/ipv6 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine-and-ipv6-round-2.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine-and-... https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instances-now-come-with-free-ipiv6-address.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instan... https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-compute-engine/suggestions/8518246-support-ipv6 https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-comp...
toast42 9y ago
The Google Fiber router doesn't support IPv6 port forwarding. That was a frustrating afternoon and a bit of a surprise to learn.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  What would you possibly want to use IPv6 port forwarding for?
  - ianburrell 9y ago
    IPv6 port forwarding likely just means allowing incoming connections in IPv6 firewall. Exposing internal machines with IPv4 uses NAT and is called "port forwarding". IPv6 doesn't need NAT but people still call it "port forwarding".
- noselasd 9y ago
  does it do ipv6 nat - that is a very rare scenario ? otherwise I don't see how it can do portforwarding.
  - bleke 9y ago
    Yes ipv6 have nat and do port forwarding at least on linux, usefull scenario is when developing embedded devices and don't want make easily guess your isp how many devices have.
    - nimish 9y ago
      That's a phenomenally strange requirement. If you wanna run interference on your ISPs device count snoops, just create a bunch of fake interfaces, but why you would want to do that is beyond me.
    - noselasd 9y ago
      note that I was asking the parent specifically about the google router . While ipv6 does have nat, i have yet to see isps deploying it anywhere
jokoon 9y ago
I wonder if there are hardware or software issues with IPv6. Issues like the hardware/software being mature enough, security stuff, etc. Since it is such a low level issue and implies a lot of software and hardware, I would not be surprised to not see it progress fast enough.
vbernat 9y ago
Related, LinkedIn has more than 50% usage: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin-passes-ipv6-milestone https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin-passe....
- koffiezet 9y ago
  Mostly due to it being "mobile devices" - where every major platform has good support for IPv6, and the carriers need a massive amount of IP's - which are simply not available.
nemetroid 9y ago
I was surprised to see such a low level of adoption for Sweden, so I looked up the IPv4 assignments by country[0]. Sweden has the second highest number of IPv4 addresses per capita, at 3.3. I wonder if that is the reason why.
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  Where is your [0]?
  - jakobgm 9y ago
    [0] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Internet/IP-addresses-per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Interne...
  - nemetroid 9y ago
    Here, sorry. Too late to edit now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_ad...
sspiff 9y ago
I run IPv6 only servers on Scaleway because IPv4 addresses are €1/month extra and my node costs €2/month. That's a 50% cost increase. The biggest stumbling blocks for IPv6 are the fact that many prominent cloud services don't fully support IPv6. The biggest problems for me are Amazon S3 and Github. I end up having to pass traffic for those services through an SSH tunnel to a nearby node with both IPv4 and IPv6. On an unrelated note, I'm happy to see that apparently my home country Belgium has one of the highest adoption levels worldwide, if not the highest.
- mgbmtl 9y ago
  Same here! Google-Cloud still doesn't really support IPv6 on public-facing nodes (?), and Github ... However, this encouraged me to self-host with Gitlab and to use other hosting providers (ex: OVH). Sometimes I will NAT the outgoing IPv4 connections on VMs (if I control the host, and the host has one IPv4 address). A lot of internal services, such as logs, build systems, etc, don't need public IPv4 addresses, but giving them 10.x.x.x addresses quickly becomes a burden when dealing with multiple networks.
- rsync 9y ago
  "The biggest stumbling blocks for IPv6 are the fact that many prominent cloud services don't fully support IPv6." rsync.net has been ipv6 accessible (the storage, not the website) for 7-8 years ...
- ianburrell 9y ago
  NAT64/DNS64 is supposed to work well for allowing IPv6-only networks outgoing access to IPv4. Servers are less likely to use software like Skype that only works with IPv4. It would be nice if providers that support IPv6-only networking would provide NAT64 gateways and DNS64 DNS servers.
- btgeekboy 9y ago
  S3 is available over IPv6, but you need to use a different endpoint. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ipv6-support-for-amazon-s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ipv6-support-...
- 9y ago
JepZ 9y ago
Looks like we will see more than 50% IPv6 in about 4 years from today :-)
dingo_bat 9y ago
Looks like India has better IPv6 adoption than Japan. Yay!
heipei 9y ago
If you want to see the percentage of requests from a website that are IPv6, my service https://urlscan.io https://urlscan.io supports both IPv4 and IPv6. A lot of similar services only scan via IPv4, which I believe is an oversight.
- djhworld 9y ago
  Your website just made my day, thanks for sharing it!
- TekMol 9y ago
  Interesting service. What is the use case? What is your motivation to build it?
  - heipei 9y ago
    My original motivation was: "This website is slow as shit, let me fire up Chrome Devtools to see how many requests it is making." This doesn't scale and doesn't contain additional info such as GeoIP information, so I created https://urlscan.io https://urlscan.io. By now it has become a service that is heavily used by security researchers for detecting such things as phishing websites.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Awesome service! Thanks very much for providing it.
- rkeene2 9y ago
  All I get is: "invalid csrf token Error code 403"
- p1mrx 9y ago
  I made a Chrome extension[0] that does this for all sites you visit, without consulting a third-party service. [0] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
exabrial 9y ago
All advertising companies (Google, FaceBook, Amazon) are pushing ipv6 hard for good reason: it allows them to [easily] see how many individual hosts a private network has and track them. I'm sure the NSA and other 3 letter agencies are delighted as well.
- stephen_g 9y ago
  Absolutely false. All modern IPv6 implementations support privacy extensions and randomly generate new addresses periodically, so there is no practical advantage over NAT'ed IPv4.
notheguyouthink 9y ago
Here's a question, I know next to nothing about IPv6, but I imagine a big part of the problem is migration of IPv4 (of course). So, for new projects.. I don't have this issue, right? What are my options to implement proper IPv6 support for my new apps right from the start?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  If you have to ask: Nothing, that is handled at lower layers. Except you might want to actually configure IPv6 on any backend servers you run and add IPv6 DNS records so that your client software can actually use IPv6.
- stepik777 9y ago
  Off the top of my head: * If you store IP addresses ensure that you can store IPv6 address if necessary. * Rent servers only from IPv6 capable providers. * When configuring DNS don't forget AAAA records. * If you ban users by IP you might need to ban entire IPv6 subnets.
- bluGill 9y ago
  That depends. If you write your code using a high level abstraction you don't have to do anything, it should just work. High level could be as high as an http module (python), or as low as a wrapper (boost::ASIO). Odds are very good your language has one or more. In general this is the way to go choose something that handles the details for you in a language correct way. If you write low level sockets you at least need to be aware of both when you connect the sockets. The easiest is a server as you just need to listen for connections on two sockets. When connecting you should be aware of cases where it seems like either protocol will work, but in fact one is broken (generally this means the local machine supports ipv6 but the network is not connected - it is common to ignore this, but you will get support requests because of it unless you implement a try both scheme). Either way once communication is established there is no real difference in the code. The above is the common case. If you need to do more than communicate it can get complex quickly. In general I wouldn't use raw sockets unless you actually need to do something complex enough that no existing wrapper will work for you (performance alone is reason to use raw sockets if you have profile data to prove it). However since I don't know your domain I cannot suggest how complex your code will need to be to support both.
shmerl 9y ago
Verizon and Optimum still didn't deploy IPv6 support.
johnhenry 9y ago
Just wondering about the data collection, -- why isn't it strictly monotonic over time? Edit: Answered my own question -- it looks like the data specify access daily, not what I assumed was overall adoption. This does present some interesting patterns, however. For instance, noting that there's a peak weekly on Friday and bottom out on Monday, one might be able to make a conclusion about workplace adoption versus home usage.
- mrb 9y ago
  You are absolutely right. Home networks are more IPv6-enabled than company networks!
  - syncsynchalt 9y ago
    Makes sense. I've had home IPv6 via Comcast for at least half a decade, and they're the largest ISP in the US. They are an early adopter and innovator of IPv6, partly because they had more modems in their private network than the number of all possible 10.x addresses.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      "Early adopter and innovator" because they started using a technology that was being used by other people for 10 to 15 years before that?!
      - syncsynchalt 9y ago
        Yes. As an inventor of CG transition technologies like DS-Lite (RFC 6333), Comcast has really led in building the technologies that were needed for transition in the past decade. I was on 6bone too, but there's a lot of difference between ping6'ing each other over tunnels and rolling out v6 to millions of customers without them noticing.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
Icedcool 9y ago
I work for a major university hospital in IT, and when IPv6 was enabled as a default additional component to IPv4, it caused all kinds of hell. The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a lot of applications aren't ready for. I know IPv6 is more secure, better, conditions your hair for you, but I am not excited to move IPv6 forward with our network.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a lot of applications aren't ready for. If the application doesn't explicitly request IPv6, it doesn't get IPv6.
  - wmf 9y ago
    Almost all popular apps started requesting IPv6 before IPv6 was broadly deployed, so they weren't actually using it. Then when IPv6 was deployed, it was less reliable because stuff was untested and suddenly there was intermittent breakage everywhere. So apps had to be updated to use happy eyeballs.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      If an app needs happy eyeballs, then that is because the IPv6 connectivity is broken, so you don't get to say that the app was not ready for IPv6.
jakeNiemiec 9y ago
Thats a great graph.
stretchwithme 9y ago
Came across this useful description of how IPv6 addresses work. Is it still true that Windows does not fully support IPv6? http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know-about-ipv6-addressing/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-sho...
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  Oops, that's really old actually. From 2010.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

315 points by AndrewDucker 9y ago

As much as I love and use IPv6 every day as my primary payload protocol (and have done so for 10+ years) - I find it dubious that, "The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6." - Really, 20% of people are now connecting to Google over IPv6? If so, that's awesome and presumably a side effect of Comcast giving everyone IPv6 addresses.

simias 9y ago
What do you find dubious exactly? Why would Google lie about that? It doesn't sound that hard to believe, all it takes is a few big ISPs starting to enable IPv6 by default.
- renesd 9y ago
  Google isn't even accessible in the biggest country with the most people on the internet. So the HN title is misleading, in that it isn't 20% worldwide. Mods, please fix the title?
  - ko27 9y ago
    "in that it isn't 20% worldwide." You don't know that, even when you count in more Chinese people it could still not change the world average. The title is fine since it represents an extremely big sample on the most visited page on the Internet.
    - londons_explore 9y ago
      Baidu.com is the most visited page though...
      - pcr0 9y ago
        Not sure where you got that from. Alexa rankings show google.com as #1 and baidu.com as #4. http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites
        earenndil 9y ago
        He probably means most visited site in china.
kalleboo 9y ago
> If so, that's awesome and presumably a side effect of Comcast giving everyone IPv6 addresses. As well as Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile wireless. Mobile usage is huge.

ter0 9y ago

Why does the percentage of IPv6 usage peak over weekends? Perhaps there's more people in offices on weekdays, which are less likely to use IPv6?

longwave 9y ago
Yes, seems likely. There is a similar spike in late December when less people are in offices due to Christmas holidays.
Viperus 9y ago
I came here to ask exactly the same question. I can only assume that entertainment activities (console gaming, video on demand, etc.) can bring the traffic to make such a difference.
ajdlinux 9y ago
Netflix and YouTube have strong IPv6 support and chew through a lot of bandwidth, perhaps?
ghshephard 9y ago
If the high IPv6 is because people get it automatically because of Comcast, and other large providers - that would explain it.
wtallis 9y ago
Corporate networks with professional IT staff are where you'll find the legacy systems and equipment that get in the way of using IPv6. Home users have all been running operating systems with IPv6 on by default for years, and their routers are mostly new enough to make IPv6 work out of the box as soon as the ISP is ready.
- technofiend 9y ago
  Considering what's at stake if you accidentally make some part of your infrastructure routable it seems pretty reasonable corporate environments want to be very careful about IPV6 adoption. Personally I think they should still do it but if HSBC is in the news tomorrow after leaking customer details because of a routing woops there would be a lot of "they should have known better!" here and in the press. It's going to a take a long time for sensitive corporate environments to decide the rewards outweigh the risks.

optimog 9y ago

As a Belgian, can anyone explain why the adoption of IPv6 in Belgium is that high (51,51%) compared to all the other countries?

Tharkun 9y ago
Because the dominant ISP (Telenet) has enabled IPv6 by default on all their residential gateways. And because they (possibly somewhat surprisingly) have some smart people working for them.
- optimog 9y ago
  That's remarkable, since Telenet is part of Liberty Global, who owns so many ISP's. Eg. neighbouring country The Netherlands has Ziggo (also owned by Liberty Global). Adaptation in The Netherlands is only 9 pct. Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global or if it's just a smart move by Telenet.
  - aapjesverkoper 9y ago
    When I got a new connection from Ziggo last year I got an ipv6 adres, so they seem to have started to roll this out in the Netherlands as well.
    - speleding 9y ago
      Depending on where you are in the Netherlands Ziggo will give proper Dual Stack or DS-lite to new customers. It reflects the networks that Ziggo was cobbled together from. If you are in a former UPC area you probably want to call them and ask them to downgrade you back to IPv4 (they do this for free). Their DS-lite solution employs carrier grade NAT which blows dog chunks.
      - aapjesverkoper 9y ago
        Would that DS-lite solution explain why VPN connections to my AWS vps seem really spotty on ipv6 connections?

kingosticks 9y ago

Should the title be "peaks" rather than "breaks"?

foota 9y ago
No, it is breaking past the limit of 20%. You generally only use peaks if you are expecting it to drop in the future or if it has since dropped.
- kingosticks 9y ago
  Fair enough, peaks isn't right,'reaches' maybe. Breaks just read wrong for me at first glance, I thought it was saying the usage of ipv6 was broken for 20% of users worldwide. That was obviously just a huge brain fail on my part.
richardwhiuk 9y ago
A peak broke 20% - so I think it's a reasonable title.
yelnatz 9y ago
I see your point, the title was a little bit ambiguous when I first read it. I thought 20% of IPv6 went down or something.

TekMol 9y ago

I just googled some IPv6 test tools and they all say "IPv6 not supported". Is there a way to find out why? If it's my settings, machine, my router, my provider...?

the8472 9y ago
modern operating systems have ipv6 support out of the box. so it likely is your ISP or the router. Even if the ISP supports ipv6 they might only roll it out to new customers. Beware though, some ISPs may switch to CGNAT via DS-Lite for IPv4 when they change you to a IPv6 setup.
ac29 9y ago
Try running 'ip addr' in Linux or 'ipconfig' in Windows. Do you even have a IPv6 address assigned to any interface? If not, it is your router or ISP, most likely.
- TekMol 9y ago
  I'm on Linux. Yes, looks like my machine has ipv6. It shows an ipv6 address in the output of "ip addr".
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    If it's just a link-local address that doesn't tell you anything at all.
  - scott_karana 9y ago
    Your router's LAN switch might support IPv6, but it might not support it on its WAN/NAT side, or you might not have any public IPv6 addresses assigned by your ISP, or no tunneling configured, etc.

Arnt 9y ago

So growth really is slowing down. It used to double every ten to twelve months, the last two doublings took fifteen (IIRC) and nineteen months. 40% around October 2019, then?

cm2187 9y ago
Some countries seem to have not even started getting into IPv6: Spain, Italy, Russia. So I think it could accelerate again the day the ISP in those countries make the switch (if that ever happens).
- mrkrabo 9y ago
  Spaniard here. The only major ISP that has tried to enable IPv6 is Orange. They did so by putting people in a DS-Lite connection. This is, CG-NAT for IPv4 and real IPv6 connectivity. Result: now everybody thinks "IPv6 sucks because it means I won't have an external IPv4 address". So they stopped the IPv6 programme. The other two major ISPs also are ready. They just have to flip the switch. That said... I bet most of the CPEs that are currently deployed have no IPv6 capability. The only ones that work with IPv6 are usually the fibre CPEs, which are more modern, by definition. IPv6 is simply a failure, especially if you, as an ISP, can afford to buy all the IPv4 addresses you need. And that's what happens in Spain for the three major ISPs: they have all the IP addresses they need, so there is no need at all for them to switch to IPv6. In fact, they are using this as a weapon against the new ISPs: one of the three major ISPs mocked a smaller one for having their clients behind a CG-NAT, which is something they had to do that because they simply have no IPv4 addresses. Our government forces the biggest ISP to share its last mile infrastructure with every ISP that wants to use it, so my question is, why doesn't the government force the big ISPs to share their IPv4 address pools?
  - mino 9y ago
    This. Italian market is the same.
  - ornitorrincos 9y ago
    yeah, Euskaltel(northern spain cable isp) had(and maybe still has) a huge amount of ips. Years ago they used to put a modem instead of a router in every home, the modem had three ports with each of them being assigned a public ip address.

squeed 9y ago

And yet, three of the four most valuable companies in the world are cloud providers, and none of them have more than rudimentary support for IPv6. This is a disaster. Half the world is not yet online. If we're going to change that, then we need to move to ipv6, and soon.

cronjobber 9y ago
"We" don't have to move to ipv6, even if "they" have to. The internet can plausibly support both protocols forever.
- libeclipse 9y ago
  I disagree, but even still suppose you're right. Why? ipv6 is so much better than ipv4 it's insane that we're even discussing this.
  - cronjobber 9y ago
    It sucks at being compatible with ipv4. The "billion dollar mistake" :-) It also sucks at having software/hardware stacks nearly as well debugged as those for ipv4, which means running ipv6 at all is a security risk. Nobody would switch for sundry technical advantages. The main driver for conversion is that ipv4 addresses are scarce. As soon as "we" seriously "move to ipv6", however, the scarcity driven pressure to convert is relieved. We're bound to reach an equilibrium that will include ipv4 for a long time, possibly forever.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      > It sucks at being compatible with ipv4. The "billion dollar mistake" :-) You cannot make it compatible. The whole point is address extension, and a legacy IPv4 endpoint cannot possibly talk to a new, extended-address endpoint. > It also sucks at having software/hardware stacks nearly as well debugged as those for ipv4, which means running ipv6 at all is a security risk. There is no "stack". The software above the IP layer is still UDP, TCP, HTTP, SMTP, ... > Nobody would switch for sundry technical advantages. Yeah, actually, lots of competent people do, because NAT and duplicate addresses just cause so many pointless problems. > As soon as "we" seriously "move to ipv6", however, the scarcity driven pressure to convert is relieved. Yep, the pressure to convert will be relieved because people simply won't bother setting up IPv4 in the first place at some point because it adds so much unnecessary complexity, so no need to convert. And once that happens, even the last holdouts will enable IPv6, at which point IPv4 will be a largely useless legacy protocol that just causes maintenance costs for nothing.

Symbiote 9y ago

$ host -t aaaa news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net. news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net has no AAAA record But there's an option to turn it on, documented here: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168746-How-do-I-turn-the-Cloudflare-IPv6-gateway-on-or-off- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168746-H...

mrkrabo 9y ago
Probably the software requires an update to support IPv6 addresses and they simply know it's not worth the hassle.
3pt14159 9y ago
Can you explain to me what will happen if I don't turn on the AAAA record? Like in theory of course I want to support IPv6, but in practice I've got a huge TODO list, and if there are present work-arounds that are doing good enough for now, I'd like to prioritise it correctly.
- andruby 9y ago
  This is why IPv6 adoption is slow. There are always more pressing issues.
- ancarda 9y ago
  The two biggest arguments are Carrier Grade NAT and dodgy transitional stacks. 1) ISPs are increasingly deploying Carrier Grade NAT, which puts several people behind a single IP. This completely breaks end-to-end as you can't port forward but if you're running a website, the worst issue is if you ban an IP address, you could be cutting off several legitimate users to get rid of 1 person. It's like banning a whole country because of a few people which Wikipedia has done in the past by mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97.69 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97.69 see https://techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar/ This problem will only get worse as time goes on. The Internet is starting to feel broken when an entire country shares a single IP address. 2) In some cases, ISPs might address the shortage slightly differently, by serving up an IPv6 address that proxies back to your website over IPv4. To you it looks like Carrier Grade NAT, but you can actually do this yourself if you have an IPv6 enabled server (Linode, DigitalOcean work) and use nginx to reverse proxy. That way you can at-least set an X-Forwarded-For header that will give you better analytics and more precise blocking. Either you do it or the ISP will do it for you but give absolutely no data.

z3t4 9y ago

Can anyone recommend a guides on IPv6 for developers and sysops ?

tajen 9y ago
I once ticked "IPv6" when ordering a Debian VPS. It was super-slow and I didn't know IPv6 was the cause. Basically the system always tries IPv6 first, times out at 30s, then tries IPv4. I never completed an `apt-get update` and I assumed my provider had sold me crap. Years later, I discovered that disabling IPv6 did the trick. So, my noob advice: If you ask for a guide about IPv6, it's not for you yet.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Actually, your provider did sell you crap. IPv6 will only be tried if your host has configured IPv6 connectivity and the destination host has IPv6 DNS entries. Debian mirrors generally support IPv6, so apt-get hanging probably means that the IPv6 connectivity of your provider was broken.
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    That was my thought too. IPv6 shouldn't cause hangs if it is configured correctly.
    - deathanatos 9y ago
      I just want to emphasize this a bit: IPv6 won't cause hangs even if the connection is IPv4 only if things are configured correctly. (That said, I've seen incorrect configurations: Comcast, at one point, assigned me an IPv6 address (automatically) and led the system to believe that their was a valid IPv6 route, but proceeded to drop all IPv6 packets. This same scenario can happen on IPv4, too, and the resolution is the same: worm your way through the bowels of support until you reach someone competent.)

sliken 9y ago

Google reports over 35% of their traffic is IPv6 for the USA. Source (click on per country tab) https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption

avian 9y ago

In my experience IPv6 support in home Wi-Fi routers is still hit or miss. I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices refused to get a IPv6 address due to failing duplicate address detection (it was some kind of multicast issue as far as I could see) The router in question got several firmware updates where changelog mentioned an unspecified "IPv6 fix", but none fixed the issue for me. Finally I just gave up and bought a new one from a different vendor. https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_problems_on_tp_link_archer_c20/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/04/ipv6_pro...

y0ghur7_xxx 9y ago
> I recently had to replace a new TP-link router because some wireless devices refused to get a IPv6 address What's the advantage of having an ipv6 home lan? I think for a home network the 192.168.0.0 subnet should be more than enough. Or am I missing something?
- Filligree 9y ago
  Publicly exposed ports. Running nginx on more than one of your machines, for example.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Maybe someone wants to have non-NATed devices on the LAN and actually use their /48?
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Each device gets a globally routeable address. You could, for example, configure the firewall to give access to your IoT fridge, camera, baby monitor and toaster's web interfaces, all on port 80. With IPv4 NAT, you'd need to remember a port number for all but one of these services. You can more easily accept an incoming connection, whether that's for gaming, video chat, P2P file sharing, etc. The computer knows its own address. If the ISP is so short of IPv4 addresses that even the router only gets a private address (so, two layers of NAT), then without IPv6 there's no way to set up any type of server. The IPv6 firewall user interface (my router calls it "pinholes") is simpler than the IPv4 port forwarding interface.

nepotism2018 9y ago

Whats with the dip in Jan 2017 lol

rohan1024 9y ago

Reliance jio has contributed a lot for the ipv6 adoption in India.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

SwellJoe 9y ago

We added support for IPv6 to Virtualmin projects about a decade ago. Even today, only a tiny percentage of our users ever enable it (this mostly includes our own sites, embarrassingly enough, even though some of our servers in colo do have IPv6 subnets available to them). I should work on making that a thing that happens more by default. There's a lot of cool things you can do when you don't have to worry about running out of IP addresses. A lot of complex stuff people are doing with cloud meshnets and overlay networks and bridged private networks with port forwarding and such becomes mostly moot if every VM and container can have as many dedicated real IPs as it needs to do its job. It's also funny/weird to think about how much development effort has gone into stretching IPv4. NAT, port forwarding, SNI (and some hacky other SSL tricks before that to fit multiple SSL sites on one IP), masquerading, tunneling, VPNs, etc. The list is incredibly long and the hours spent on development unfathomable.

otabdeveloper1 9y ago
> NAT, port forwarding, SNI, masquerading, tunneling, VPNs, etc. All that stuff is mostly done for security purposes, not because we ran out of IP addresses. (And before you reply: yes, it really works and is a valid security tool.)
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  Please explain the security purpose of four of those six.
  - otabdeveloper1 9y ago
    Not being to address a corporate or home network computer from the outside is a feature, not a bug. Doubly so for the datacenter. Corporate IT doesn't want random internet hackers accessing sensitive information on the local corporate network. Yes, you can theoretically migrate everyone to IPv6 and implement some sort of firewall system to block outside access, but now you're effectively duplicating NAT in IPv6. Worse, due to second-system effect you're bound to end up with something even stupider and nastier than the existing stupid and nasty NAT solutions.

nikon 9y ago

Does Google Cloud even offer IPv6?

mikelward 9y ago
Externally (load balancer VIPs, AppEngine, Cloud SQL), yes. Internally (GCE instances), not yet. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/ipv6 https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/ipv6 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine-and-ipv6-round-2.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2010/07/app-engine-and-... https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instances-now-come-with-free-ipiv6-address.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/11/cloudsql-instan... https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-compute-engine/suggestions/8518246-support-ipv6 https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/302595-comp...

toast42 9y ago

The Google Fiber router doesn't support IPv6 port forwarding. That was a frustrating afternoon and a bit of a surprise to learn.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
What would you possibly want to use IPv6 port forwarding for?
- ianburrell 9y ago
  IPv6 port forwarding likely just means allowing incoming connections in IPv6 firewall. Exposing internal machines with IPv4 uses NAT and is called "port forwarding". IPv6 doesn't need NAT but people still call it "port forwarding".
noselasd 9y ago
does it do ipv6 nat - that is a very rare scenario ? otherwise I don't see how it can do portforwarding.
- bleke 9y ago
  Yes ipv6 have nat and do port forwarding at least on linux, usefull scenario is when developing embedded devices and don't want make easily guess your isp how many devices have.
  - nimish 9y ago
    That's a phenomenally strange requirement. If you wanna run interference on your ISPs device count snoops, just create a bunch of fake interfaces, but why you would want to do that is beyond me.
  - noselasd 9y ago
    note that I was asking the parent specifically about the google router . While ipv6 does have nat, i have yet to see isps deploying it anywhere

jokoon 9y ago

I wonder if there are hardware or software issues with IPv6. Issues like the hardware/software being mature enough, security stuff, etc. Since it is such a low level issue and implies a lot of software and hardware, I would not be surprised to not see it progress fast enough.

vbernat 9y ago

Related, LinkedIn has more than 50% usage: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin-passes-ipv6-milestone https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/07/linkedin-passe....

koffiezet 9y ago
Mostly due to it being "mobile devices" - where every major platform has good support for IPv6, and the carriers need a massive amount of IP's - which are simply not available.

nemetroid 9y ago

I was surprised to see such a low level of adoption for Sweden, so I looked up the IPv4 assignments by country[0]. Sweden has the second highest number of IPv4 addresses per capita, at 3.3. I wonder if that is the reason why.

BillinghamJ 9y ago
Where is your [0]?
- jakobgm 9y ago
  [0] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Internet/IP-addresses-per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Interne...
- nemetroid 9y ago
  Here, sorry. Too late to edit now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_ad...

sspiff 9y ago

I run IPv6 only servers on Scaleway because IPv4 addresses are €1/month extra and my node costs €2/month. That's a 50% cost increase. The biggest stumbling blocks for IPv6 are the fact that many prominent cloud services don't fully support IPv6. The biggest problems for me are Amazon S3 and Github. I end up having to pass traffic for those services through an SSH tunnel to a nearby node with both IPv4 and IPv6. On an unrelated note, I'm happy to see that apparently my home country Belgium has one of the highest adoption levels worldwide, if not the highest.

mgbmtl 9y ago
Same here! Google-Cloud still doesn't really support IPv6 on public-facing nodes (?), and Github ... However, this encouraged me to self-host with Gitlab and to use other hosting providers (ex: OVH). Sometimes I will NAT the outgoing IPv4 connections on VMs (if I control the host, and the host has one IPv4 address). A lot of internal services, such as logs, build systems, etc, don't need public IPv4 addresses, but giving them 10.x.x.x addresses quickly becomes a burden when dealing with multiple networks.
rsync 9y ago
"The biggest stumbling blocks for IPv6 are the fact that many prominent cloud services don't fully support IPv6." rsync.net has been ipv6 accessible (the storage, not the website) for 7-8 years ...
ianburrell 9y ago
NAT64/DNS64 is supposed to work well for allowing IPv6-only networks outgoing access to IPv4. Servers are less likely to use software like Skype that only works with IPv4. It would be nice if providers that support IPv6-only networking would provide NAT64 gateways and DNS64 DNS servers.
btgeekboy 9y ago
S3 is available over IPv6, but you need to use a different endpoint. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ipv6-support-for-amazon-s3/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-ipv6-support-...
9y ago

JepZ 9y ago

Looks like we will see more than 50% IPv6 in about 4 years from today :-)

dingo_bat 9y ago

Looks like India has better IPv6 adoption than Japan. Yay!

heipei 9y ago

If you want to see the percentage of requests from a website that are IPv6, my service https://urlscan.io https://urlscan.io supports both IPv4 and IPv6. A lot of similar services only scan via IPv4, which I believe is an oversight.

djhworld 9y ago
Your website just made my day, thanks for sharing it!
TekMol 9y ago
Interesting service. What is the use case? What is your motivation to build it?
- heipei 9y ago
  My original motivation was: "This website is slow as shit, let me fire up Chrome Devtools to see how many requests it is making." This doesn't scale and doesn't contain additional info such as GeoIP information, so I created https://urlscan.io https://urlscan.io. By now it has become a service that is heavily used by security researchers for detecting such things as phishing websites.
majewsky 9y ago
Awesome service! Thanks very much for providing it.
rkeene2 9y ago
All I get is: "invalid csrf token Error code 403"
p1mrx 9y ago
I made a Chrome extension[0] that does this for all sites you visit, without consulting a third-party service. [0] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo

exabrial 9y ago

All advertising companies (Google, FaceBook, Amazon) are pushing ipv6 hard for good reason: it allows them to [easily] see how many individual hosts a private network has and track them. I'm sure the NSA and other 3 letter agencies are delighted as well.

stephen_g 9y ago
Absolutely false. All modern IPv6 implementations support privacy extensions and randomly generate new addresses periodically, so there is no practical advantage over NAT'ed IPv4.

notheguyouthink 9y ago

Here's a question, I know next to nothing about IPv6, but I imagine a big part of the problem is migration of IPv4 (of course). So, for new projects.. I don't have this issue, right? What are my options to implement proper IPv6 support for my new apps right from the start?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
If you have to ask: Nothing, that is handled at lower layers. Except you might want to actually configure IPv6 on any backend servers you run and add IPv6 DNS records so that your client software can actually use IPv6.
stepik777 9y ago
Off the top of my head: * If you store IP addresses ensure that you can store IPv6 address if necessary. * Rent servers only from IPv6 capable providers. * When configuring DNS don't forget AAAA records. * If you ban users by IP you might need to ban entire IPv6 subnets.
bluGill 9y ago
That depends. If you write your code using a high level abstraction you don't have to do anything, it should just work. High level could be as high as an http module (python), or as low as a wrapper (boost::ASIO). Odds are very good your language has one or more. In general this is the way to go choose something that handles the details for you in a language correct way. If you write low level sockets you at least need to be aware of both when you connect the sockets. The easiest is a server as you just need to listen for connections on two sockets. When connecting you should be aware of cases where it seems like either protocol will work, but in fact one is broken (generally this means the local machine supports ipv6 but the network is not connected - it is common to ignore this, but you will get support requests because of it unless you implement a try both scheme). Either way once communication is established there is no real difference in the code. The above is the common case. If you need to do more than communicate it can get complex quickly. In general I wouldn't use raw sockets unless you actually need to do something complex enough that no existing wrapper will work for you (performance alone is reason to use raw sockets if you have profile data to prove it). However since I don't know your domain I cannot suggest how complex your code will need to be to support both.

shmerl 9y ago

Verizon and Optimum still didn't deploy IPv6 support.

johnhenry 9y ago

Just wondering about the data collection, -- why isn't it strictly monotonic over time? Edit: Answered my own question -- it looks like the data specify access daily, not what I assumed was overall adoption. This does present some interesting patterns, however. For instance, noting that there's a peak weekly on Friday and bottom out on Monday, one might be able to make a conclusion about workplace adoption versus home usage.

mrb 9y ago
You are absolutely right. Home networks are more IPv6-enabled than company networks!
- syncsynchalt 9y ago
  Makes sense. I've had home IPv6 via Comcast for at least half a decade, and they're the largest ISP in the US. They are an early adopter and innovator of IPv6, partly because they had more modems in their private network than the number of all possible 10.x addresses.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    "Early adopter and innovator" because they started using a technology that was being used by other people for 10 to 15 years before that?!
    - syncsynchalt 9y ago
      Yes. As an inventor of CG transition technologies like DS-Lite (RFC 6333), Comcast has really led in building the technologies that were needed for transition in the past decade. I was on 6bone too, but there's a lot of difference between ping6'ing each other over tunnels and rolling out v6 to millions of customers without them noticing.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago

Icedcool 9y ago

I work for a major university hospital in IT, and when IPv6 was enabled as a default additional component to IPv4, it caused all kinds of hell. The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a lot of applications aren't ready for. I know IPv6 is more secure, better, conditions your hair for you, but I am not excited to move IPv6 forward with our network.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> The issues were generally around the OS prioritizing IPv6 over IPv4 which a lot of applications aren't ready for. If the application doesn't explicitly request IPv6, it doesn't get IPv6.
- wmf 9y ago
  Almost all popular apps started requesting IPv6 before IPv6 was broadly deployed, so they weren't actually using it. Then when IPv6 was deployed, it was less reliable because stuff was untested and suddenly there was intermittent breakage everywhere. So apps had to be updated to use happy eyeballs.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    If an app needs happy eyeballs, then that is because the IPv6 connectivity is broken, so you don't get to say that the app was not ready for IPv6.

jakeNiemiec 9y ago

Thats a great graph.

stretchwithme 9y ago

Came across this useful description of how IPv6 addresses work. Is it still true that Windows does not fully support IPv6? http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know-about-ipv6-addressing/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-sho...

stretchwithme 9y ago
Oops, that's really old actually. From 2010.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]