14 ms·

IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude

111 points by LaSombra 6y ago

quaintdev 6y ago
One terrible way to switch to Ipv6 faster is to make existing services available only on ipv6. Or create some cutting edge application that will work only on ipv6 I know ipv4 users like author mentioned will still be able to access them because someone else will plug in. We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we?
- toast0 6y ago
  > We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we? Probably. All the IPv4 only devices being made now aren't going to get IPv6 and they don't have the capacitor plague or junky lead free solder of the early 2000s to kill them. They'll probably live a long life, or at least until 2038.
  - DanAtC 6y ago
    Most IPv4-only things I see are cheap IoT junk whose requisite cloud services will shut down well before that.
- zokier 6y ago
  Ipv4 will not be going away because the long tail is very long, but it'll become irrelevant at some point for day-to-day stuff
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  A vps host I use offered v6 only servers for $2 cheaper but they removed that plan probably because people kept getting confused.
- dtech 6y ago
  > We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we? This was always going to be the case, even with more speedy adoption op IPv6. It's also not really a problem. Making services just available for IPv6 is going to be a recipe for disaster of the service, you've now made the service unavailable for 80-90% of your audience, and they can't do a thing to fix it (their ISP has to). You need to be better than start-up-era Google, Facebook, YouTube or Netflix to push through that and force ISPs to adopt IPv6 to support you. Basically impossible. Forced adoption is a much better model. Apple forcing iOS apps to work on only IPv6 connections if they want to get into the app store probably is one of the largest drivers of adoption by businesses small and large, and IaaS providers especially.
  - AndrewDucker 6y ago
    You're locking out 67% according to Google's latest figures. 51% in the USA. Still too many to make it practical, but getting there.
    - dtech 6y ago
      That's good to hear :) I had numbers from a good while ago in my head then.
  - bzb3 6y ago
    Given that ipv6 makes it much easier to track individual devices, I'm sure ad companies would be happy to have it deployed. I think Google could strongarm isps into supporting ipv6.
    - zlynx 6y ago
      You are behind the times by at least 12 years. Look up "IPv6 privacy extension" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941
      - Dagger2 6y ago
        Closer to 20 years: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3041 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3041 To give you some idea of the time frame: Windows XP uses privacy addresses.
alexarnesen 6y ago
The article was worth it just for this gem: 'If we were feeling snarky, we could perhaps describe IPv6 as "the String Theory of networking": a decades-long boondoggle that attracts True Believers, gets you flamed intensely if you question the doctrine, and which is notable mainly for how much progress it has held back.'
- Sean-Der 6y ago
  This trend has been bothering me a lot lately. In standards bodies you will have a 'True Believer' about a particular topic. They will push it for years and years, and eventually get their way. The idea isn't bad, and would be great if included in the spec from day one. Unfortunately adding it to what we have today causes massive breakage/incompatibility. Maybe I am just being resistant to good change. It just is frustrating because in most cases the 'True Believer' isn't going to go worry about the real-world impact of the change. This phenomena seems to be hurting a lot of programming languages as well. So much harder to say no, and idealistic people are always going to find a way :)
  - woodson 6y ago
    I like to see the other side (that of the true believer) as well. If all (or most) can agree on that it is the right thing to do and the current way of doing it is wrong, why oppose the change for 20 years saying it will cause breakage? If the change had been made at the beginning, any breakage would have been dealt with long ago. (I’m specifically not talking about change for the sake of making changes.)
  - m463 6y ago
    I think, like python 2->3, the chaos and confusion of trying to pull off a "clean slate reboot" is very rarely successful or worth it.
    - Dagger2 6y ago
      There wasn't really any way to avoid what v6 did though. v4 can't handle addresses that are bigger than 32 bits, and that's the end of it. v6 also has pretty much every backwards compatibility mechanism that can work with v4. It's hard to see how it could've done any better, and nobody I've ever talked to has managed to come up with anything that a) would work and b) isn't already a thing v6 does or can do. I've seen plenty of proposals that don't satisfy those two conditions (like, "just add an octet" or "just make the numbers go up to 999")...
hkt 6y ago
Honestly, having worked for a hosting company in the past that was fastidious about IPv6 support, I can say a couple of things: * It is almost definitely not worth it commercially, unless you've carved out your space in the community of people who specifically want IPv6 * It is much, much harder to work with than IPv4 and I don't believe this is only a lack of exposure * Dual stacking is expensive and requires staff to pursue training with very uncertain levels of reward IPv4 address space shortages.. could have been addressed by doubling the number of bits in an IPv4 address, rather than throwing out the many tools that already worked. The last point in particular is heresy to network engineers, but perfect sense to commercial types. Adoption should be cheap, if not free. The huge up front human cost of training people to operate IPv6 is uneconomical. A 64bit IPv4.1 would be fine for decades.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  There is a weird persistent idea that all anyone really needed to do was "extend ipv4 addresses" and everything ipv4 related would have remained compatible. No, it still absolutely would have completely broken everything and anything that used ipv4, all the tools would still need to be thrown out. There is basically no way such a proposal could work and maintain any sane level of compatibility. Its evident right on its face, how exactly would an ipv4 only tool connect to a 64 bit "ipv4.1 address" ?
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    Maintaining compatibility was never an option. But the most sensible solution to running out of address space is simply to extend the address space. Instead IPv6 decides to change the format into something which is not really human readable, and decides to kill NAT as well. Which was really a terrible decision imo. I like NAT, I like having addresses that I can remember, and I hate the idea of having a unique globally routable address for every device. The primary argument for adopting IPv6 is that IPv4 will be exhausted. Not that there’s something good about IPv6 that I would want to have. Personally I hope it never succeeds in getting sufficient adoption, so that eventually we can have a good IPv7 that’s just a bigger version of IPv4.
gorgoiler 6y ago
IPv6 is great if you control lots of components that need to talk to one another. Life is much simpler when you can trivially have thousands of globally routable addresses. It provides great value without having to be 100% deployed and for that, I am grateful. I liken it to a commercial kitchen. Large numbers of identical steel pans, everything measured in grams, Cambros, walk-in refrigeration. Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen, but when you operate at a larger scale, invaluable.
- tomalpha 6y ago
  > ...everything measured in grams... > Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen Given the posting time I’d guess you were likely not US based so I found this surprising. Even if that is so, then I continue to be surprised every time I rediscover the fact that the US hasn’t moved towards metrification. Edit: rereading this the wording is harsher than intended. So to add: Either way the wording tickled me for some reason. Whether intentional or not, thank you (genuinely) for the smile this morning.
  - nikanj 6y ago
    Metric units are a mouthful. Centiliter <-> ounce. Kilometer <-> mile. Centimeter <-> inch. I think having easy-to-pronounce names for the metric units would help. Kliks are much better than kilometers.
    - tomalpha 6y ago
      Completely agreed. And being in the UK, and of a certain age, I still use inches, miles, pounds and stone but I think that’s due to familiarity during childhood. I don’t use Fahrenheit like my parents did though when describing the weather. Oddly, I also tend to use metres instead of feet/miles for distances that aren’t drivable, or human-height related. It’s also interesting that in speech I often hear (and find myself), contracting to the SI prefix itself when the unit can be derived from context. For example: “It’s 25 millis” [long]
bsder 6y ago
IPv4 continues to exist because consumers are subject to ISP monopolies. "Symmetric bandwidth" or "Running my own server" are not criteria that can be used to choose an ISP because there is NO ISP that offers either one in most of the country (US). Since nobody can run their own servers, there is no pull for a larger chunk of addresses that would drive IPv6 adoption.
- shmerl 6y ago
  Then relatively easy solution is to not give ISPs licensees to operate if they don't provide IPv6. Sounds more like an administrative problem for the government than a technology issue. Same applies to many other problems caused by monopolies. That's why there is anti-trust, or at least should be.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    The ISPs only have a monopoly because the government literally makes it illegal to start a competing ISP in many areas. Even local governments were forbidden from competing with Comcast et al. in some cities.
    - shmerl 6y ago
      So it's something government can fix. The problem is that anti-trust became almost toothless due to corruption and monopolies buying policy.
    - toast0 6y ago
      That may be how they gained their monopoly, but they keep their monopoly because overbuilding an additional network is very expensive, very tedious (need pole access), and very hard to sell (it's going to be hard to convince most people to join because the internet is better, people think it's a commodity). And, incumbents can drop prices to keep you out, while keeping them high elsewhere.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > The ISPs only have a monopoly because They have a lot of money. They can out lobby you. They can undercut your pricing. And they cut "selectively upgrade" areas that would be profitable to come into. Google couldn't cut through them. Mainly because as soon as Google threatened to come somewhere *WHOA MAGIC! POOF!" and the ISPs suddenly had orders of magnitude more bandwidth for half the price. Funny that.
sandstrom 6y ago
Still some distance to go, but Google see 30% of traffic from IPv6 now. It’s slowly getting there. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it’s fairly trivial to enable dual stack support.
- teraflop 6y ago
  Google Compute Engine still does not support IPv6 for internal networking, only for external-facing load balancers, despite having made vague noises about it being "in progress" for the better part of a decade.
  - dsl 6y ago
    Are there any specific features of IPv6 you need for inner-cloud connectivity? If you are spinning up enough resources to exhaust even a /16 of IPv6, you can probably use your monthly bill as leverage to force the issue.
- zokier 6y ago
  > Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it’s fairly trivial to enable dual stack support. I say AWS IPv6 support is pretty atrocious. You still can not set up pure IPv6 VPC, even for internal use, afaik most AWS services are still accessible only through IPv4, IPv6 VPC has lots of weird limitations, etc etc. Somewhat sad, considering that one would think AWS would be one to benefit from v6
  - sandstrom 6y ago
    Agree, it's sad and strange that they can't provide that. Still, hosting an IPv6 service on AWS is fairly simple (at least in my experience).
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  What percentage of that is from cellular networks?
- 6y ago
ohazi 6y ago
This motivated me to bite the bullet and jump through the hoops to set up an IPv6 address for my personal server. I got all the way to the end and then just when everything looked like it was working, I tried to load the page and... nothing. Turns out my home network doesn't currently have an IPv6 address. Comcast in the SFBA seems to alternate giving out IPv6 addresses and then taking them away again every few months or so. Works on my phone, though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...
- divbzero 6y ago
  My ISP doesn’t support IPv6 either. I get 0/10 on WiFi vs. 10/10 on mobile using Test Your IPv6. [1] [1]: https://test-ipv6.com/ https://test-ipv6.com/ I’ve considered emailing to ask them to support it but haven’t come up with a persuasive reason for why they should.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    Find out what your ASN is (e.g. https://www.ultratools.com/tools/asnInfo https://www.ultratools.com/tools/asnInfo) and then look it up on peering dB: https://www.peeringdb.com/ https://www.peeringdb.com/ It'll give you an idea if your ISP is advertising IPv6 routing on their network if they have some prefixes. So whether it's something they're working on or not.
    - divbzero 6y ago
      Thanks! Didn’t know I could look this up. Looks like my ISP has no IPv6 prefixes so far.
  - executesorder66 6y ago
    > but haven’t come up with a persuasive reason for why they should. I don't know about you, but whenever I see an ISP, hosting provider, or website that supports IPv6 I think: These guys know what they are doing, they care about quality, and they actually plan for the future. I'd much rather do business with someone that supports IPv6 because of the above impression. If I was running my own business that provided network related products or services I'd make IPv6 support required because I don't want to seem like I'm incompetent/lazy/ignorant. So in short the persuasive reason is that it would improve their reputation. Technical people notice these things and base their recommendations on these sorts of impressions.
angrygoat 6y ago
The 'noise' on this plot of Google IPv6 adoption is interesting: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html It looks quite periodic when you zoom in: at first I thought it might be different adoption rates in different timezones, but there's only one sample available per day so that doesn't explain it. Anyone know what might be going on?
- teraflop 6y ago
  It's higher on weekends and holidays, which is presumably connected to mobile devices having a significantly higher rate of IPv6 adoption.
  - why_only_15 6y ago
    You can see on the graph between March 10 and March 24 the significant increase in the number of people working from home by the proportion of ipv6 usage
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      You can also see the much higher utilization of IPv6 at the end of December that's pretty consistent for the last few years.
  - angrygoat 6y ago
    That makes sense - thanks for that!
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Not just mobile, the big US cable ISPs have been doing IPv6 for years. People go home and everything is IPv6 and they don't even know.
pferde 6y ago
> That is, the ability for your connections to keep going even if you hop between IP addresses. If you had IP mobility, then you could migrate connections between your two internets in real time, based on live quality feedback. This bit is solved pretty well by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP, but of course, both ends of a TCP connection have to support it.
PaulAJ 6y ago
The people who make the decisions about IPv6 adoption are not users, they are ISPs. You get an IPv4 address on your router WAN port because that is what your ISP gives to you. From an ISP's point of view IPv6 is a lot of No Business Case. Those three words are the death knell for any proposal to do anything in any business that expects to be here next year. It has exactly nothing to do with the geeky I-could-have-designed-it-better arguments about the technology. If you are an ISP that is a going concern, with a bunch of customers sitting on IPv4 addresses, then handing out IPv6 addresses makes no difference, except when it breaks something. You still have to give your customers just as many IPv4 addresses. So why bother? If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. Its going to break stuff. Lots of websites don't exist on IPv6, and customers are going to notice. Also your customers have spent the last 20 years slowly picking up bits of IPv4 lore, like the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more. All of this translates into higher support costs and more customer churn. Also, your allocated block of IPv4 addresses is a valuable asset in its own right; not only does it have real financial value (around $20 per address at present), but it also acts as a barrier to entry for competitors; if you want to set up in business as an ISP you are going to have to acquire some IPv4 address blocks from somewhere, and they aren't making any more of them. Managers are trained to look for barriers to entry to their industry, and the current IPv4 situation is exactly that. No sane manager is going to do something to make it easier for new competitors. Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.
- antientropic 6y ago
  > If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. According to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-..., IPv6 adoption in the US is above 42%. Was that all done by lunatics?
  - goalieca 6y ago
Causality1 6y ago
A lack of fail-over is a problem at almost every level. Like how if my home internet has gone out and I've connected over wifi to my phone's hotspot, I have to disable my ethernet adapter before I can get at the outside world over wifi.
javier10e6 6y ago
In 2008 I was asked in one company to add ipv6 from a network stack because it was going ot be a government mandate to support ipv6. That came and went. In 2015 I was asked to add VLAN support to another network stack https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt to allow duplicate ipv4 address to co-exist in the same network. Ipv4 is not going anywhere, it doesn't have to. IpV6 is an effective way to segment your network at the hardware level.
lostmsu 6y ago
What I am severely disappointed about is Microsoft restricting Teredo to their Xbox services. Previously it was quite easy to get IPv6 connectivity at home when your provider only offered IPv4. In fact you'd get IPv6 connectivity by default. But at some point 1 or 2 years ago that just stopped working altogether, and my recent attempts to get IPv6 over Teredo back failed: you can establish tunnel, but it does not transmit packages to IPv6 hosts. Now I am at the hands of my ISP.
ncmncm 6y ago
This article demonstrates yet another way that Postel's Law is a terrible design principle. The amount of damage adherence to Postel's Law has caused can never be exaggerated. It has made securing TLS extremely difficult. It makes every kind of migration or evolution difficult, and interferes with securing anything. The way to enforce The Anti-Postel's Law is with tests that include requests and responses to be rejected, and fuzzers that explore the whole boundary of well-formed interaction. Such a test will never detect every improper toleration, but it will make equipment and programs that don't conform hardly ever work, until they are fixed. People used to like compilers that were lax about syntax requirements and provided lots of extensions. GNU compilers obliged, for a while, and then stopped. Now, even users of Microsoft compilers have demanded Standard conformance, and have nearly got it. A compiler that won't report errors is a way to generate lock-in. That was fine with Microsoft until they understood that it was locking them in, too.
themew 6y ago
As long as Reddit is ip4 only, ip4 won't go anywhere...
- Dagger2 6y ago
  NAT64+DNS64 works fine for Reddit. I run my desktop without a v4 address and have no problems with it. I'm running the NAT64 myself, but it could be done by the ISP just fine, at which point they wouldn't need to provision me with a v4 address. There are major ISPs out there that do exactly this (for example T-Mobile in the US).

111 points by LaSombra 6y ago

One terrible way to switch to Ipv6 faster is to make existing services available only on ipv6. Or create some cutting edge application that will work only on ipv6 I know ipv4 users like author mentioned will still be able to access them because someone else will plug in. We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we?

toast0 6y ago
> We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we? Probably. All the IPv4 only devices being made now aren't going to get IPv6 and they don't have the capacitor plague or junky lead free solder of the early 2000s to kill them. They'll probably live a long life, or at least until 2038.
- DanAtC 6y ago
  Most IPv4-only things I see are cheap IoT junk whose requisite cloud services will shut down well before that.
zokier 6y ago
Ipv4 will not be going away because the long tail is very long, but it'll become irrelevant at some point for day-to-day stuff
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
A vps host I use offered v6 only servers for $2 cheaper but they removed that plan probably because people kept getting confused.
dtech 6y ago
> We are stuck with ipv4 for decades, aren't we? This was always going to be the case, even with more speedy adoption op IPv6. It's also not really a problem. Making services just available for IPv6 is going to be a recipe for disaster of the service, you've now made the service unavailable for 80-90% of your audience, and they can't do a thing to fix it (their ISP has to). You need to be better than start-up-era Google, Facebook, YouTube or Netflix to push through that and force ISPs to adopt IPv6 to support you. Basically impossible. Forced adoption is a much better model. Apple forcing iOS apps to work on only IPv6 connections if they want to get into the app store probably is one of the largest drivers of adoption by businesses small and large, and IaaS providers especially.
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  You're locking out 67% according to Google's latest figures. 51% in the USA. Still too many to make it practical, but getting there.
  - dtech 6y ago
    That's good to hear :) I had numbers from a good while ago in my head then.
- bzb3 6y ago
  Given that ipv6 makes it much easier to track individual devices, I'm sure ad companies would be happy to have it deployed. I think Google could strongarm isps into supporting ipv6.
  - zlynx 6y ago
    You are behind the times by at least 12 years. Look up "IPv6 privacy extension" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941
    - Dagger2 6y ago
      Closer to 20 years: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3041 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3041 To give you some idea of the time frame: Windows XP uses privacy addresses.

alexarnesen 6y ago

The article was worth it just for this gem: 'If we were feeling snarky, we could perhaps describe IPv6 as "the String Theory of networking": a decades-long boondoggle that attracts True Believers, gets you flamed intensely if you question the doctrine, and which is notable mainly for how much progress it has held back.'

Sean-Der 6y ago
This trend has been bothering me a lot lately. In standards bodies you will have a 'True Believer' about a particular topic. They will push it for years and years, and eventually get their way. The idea isn't bad, and would be great if included in the spec from day one. Unfortunately adding it to what we have today causes massive breakage/incompatibility. Maybe I am just being resistant to good change. It just is frustrating because in most cases the 'True Believer' isn't going to go worry about the real-world impact of the change. This phenomena seems to be hurting a lot of programming languages as well. So much harder to say no, and idealistic people are always going to find a way :)
- woodson 6y ago
  I like to see the other side (that of the true believer) as well. If all (or most) can agree on that it is the right thing to do and the current way of doing it is wrong, why oppose the change for 20 years saying it will cause breakage? If the change had been made at the beginning, any breakage would have been dealt with long ago. (I’m specifically not talking about change for the sake of making changes.)
- m463 6y ago
  I think, like python 2->3, the chaos and confusion of trying to pull off a "clean slate reboot" is very rarely successful or worth it.
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    There wasn't really any way to avoid what v6 did though. v4 can't handle addresses that are bigger than 32 bits, and that's the end of it. v6 also has pretty much every backwards compatibility mechanism that can work with v4. It's hard to see how it could've done any better, and nobody I've ever talked to has managed to come up with anything that a) would work and b) isn't already a thing v6 does or can do. I've seen plenty of proposals that don't satisfy those two conditions (like, "just add an octet" or "just make the numbers go up to 999")...

hkt 6y ago

Honestly, having worked for a hosting company in the past that was fastidious about IPv6 support, I can say a couple of things: * It is almost definitely not worth it commercially, unless you've carved out your space in the community of people who specifically want IPv6 * It is much, much harder to work with than IPv4 and I don't believe this is only a lack of exposure * Dual stacking is expensive and requires staff to pursue training with very uncertain levels of reward IPv4 address space shortages.. could have been addressed by doubling the number of bits in an IPv4 address, rather than throwing out the many tools that already worked. The last point in particular is heresy to network engineers, but perfect sense to commercial types. Adoption should be cheap, if not free. The huge up front human cost of training people to operate IPv6 is uneconomical. A 64bit IPv4.1 would be fine for decades.

throwaway2048 6y ago
There is a weird persistent idea that all anyone really needed to do was "extend ipv4 addresses" and everything ipv4 related would have remained compatible. No, it still absolutely would have completely broken everything and anything that used ipv4, all the tools would still need to be thrown out. There is basically no way such a proposal could work and maintain any sane level of compatibility. Its evident right on its face, how exactly would an ipv4 only tool connect to a 64 bit "ipv4.1 address" ?
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Maintaining compatibility was never an option. But the most sensible solution to running out of address space is simply to extend the address space. Instead IPv6 decides to change the format into something which is not really human readable, and decides to kill NAT as well. Which was really a terrible decision imo. I like NAT, I like having addresses that I can remember, and I hate the idea of having a unique globally routable address for every device. The primary argument for adopting IPv6 is that IPv4 will be exhausted. Not that there’s something good about IPv6 that I would want to have. Personally I hope it never succeeds in getting sufficient adoption, so that eventually we can have a good IPv7 that’s just a bigger version of IPv4.

gorgoiler 6y ago

IPv6 is great if you control lots of components that need to talk to one another. Life is much simpler when you can trivially have thousands of globally routable addresses. It provides great value without having to be 100% deployed and for that, I am grateful. I liken it to a commercial kitchen. Large numbers of identical steel pans, everything measured in grams, Cambros, walk-in refrigeration. Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen, but when you operate at a larger scale, invaluable.

tomalpha 6y ago
> ...everything measured in grams... > Ideas and tech that are unlikely to catch on in the home kitchen Given the posting time I’d guess you were likely not US based so I found this surprising. Even if that is so, then I continue to be surprised every time I rediscover the fact that the US hasn’t moved towards metrification. Edit: rereading this the wording is harsher than intended. So to add: Either way the wording tickled me for some reason. Whether intentional or not, thank you (genuinely) for the smile this morning.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Metric units are a mouthful. Centiliter <-> ounce. Kilometer <-> mile. Centimeter <-> inch. I think having easy-to-pronounce names for the metric units would help. Kliks are much better than kilometers.
  - tomalpha 6y ago
    Completely agreed. And being in the UK, and of a certain age, I still use inches, miles, pounds and stone but I think that’s due to familiarity during childhood. I don’t use Fahrenheit like my parents did though when describing the weather. Oddly, I also tend to use metres instead of feet/miles for distances that aren’t drivable, or human-height related. It’s also interesting that in speech I often hear (and find myself), contracting to the SI prefix itself when the unit can be derived from context. For example: “It’s 25 millis” [long]

bsder 6y ago

IPv4 continues to exist because consumers are subject to ISP monopolies. "Symmetric bandwidth" or "Running my own server" are not criteria that can be used to choose an ISP because there is NO ISP that offers either one in most of the country (US). Since nobody can run their own servers, there is no pull for a larger chunk of addresses that would drive IPv6 adoption.

shmerl 6y ago
Then relatively easy solution is to not give ISPs licensees to operate if they don't provide IPv6. Sounds more like an administrative problem for the government than a technology issue. Same applies to many other problems caused by monopolies. That's why there is anti-trust, or at least should be.
- logicchains 6y ago
  The ISPs only have a monopoly because the government literally makes it illegal to start a competing ISP in many areas. Even local governments were forbidden from competing with Comcast et al. in some cities.
  - shmerl 6y ago
    So it's something government can fix. The problem is that anti-trust became almost toothless due to corruption and monopolies buying policy.
  - toast0 6y ago
    That may be how they gained their monopoly, but they keep their monopoly because overbuilding an additional network is very expensive, very tedious (need pole access), and very hard to sell (it's going to be hard to convince most people to join because the internet is better, people think it's a commodity). And, incumbents can drop prices to keep you out, while keeping them high elsewhere.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > The ISPs only have a monopoly because They have a lot of money. They can out lobby you. They can undercut your pricing. And they cut "selectively upgrade" areas that would be profitable to come into. Google couldn't cut through them. Mainly because as soon as Google threatened to come somewhere *WHOA MAGIC! POOF!" and the ISPs suddenly had orders of magnitude more bandwidth for half the price. Funny that.

sandstrom 6y ago

Still some distance to go, but Google see 30% of traffic from IPv6 now. It’s slowly getting there. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it’s fairly trivial to enable dual stack support.

teraflop 6y ago
Google Compute Engine still does not support IPv6 for internal networking, only for external-facing load balancers, despite having made vague noises about it being "in progress" for the better part of a decade.
- dsl 6y ago
  Are there any specific features of IPv6 you need for inner-cloud connectivity? If you are spinning up enough resources to exhaust even a /16 of IPv6, you can probably use your monthly bill as leverage to force the issue.
zokier 6y ago
> Also, with most cloud hosting (AWS et. al.) it’s fairly trivial to enable dual stack support. I say AWS IPv6 support is pretty atrocious. You still can not set up pure IPv6 VPC, even for internal use, afaik most AWS services are still accessible only through IPv4, IPv6 VPC has lots of weird limitations, etc etc. Somewhat sad, considering that one would think AWS would be one to benefit from v6
- sandstrom 6y ago
  Agree, it's sad and strange that they can't provide that. Still, hosting an IPv6 service on AWS is fairly simple (at least in my experience).
LinuxBender 6y ago
What percentage of that is from cellular networks?
6y ago

ohazi 6y ago

This motivated me to bite the bullet and jump through the hoops to set up an IPv6 address for my personal server. I got all the way to the end and then just when everything looked like it was working, I tried to load the page and... nothing. Turns out my home network doesn't currently have an IPv6 address. Comcast in the SFBA seems to alternate giving out IPv6 addresses and then taking them away again every few months or so. Works on my phone, though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...

divbzero 6y ago
My ISP doesn’t support IPv6 either. I get 0/10 on WiFi vs. 10/10 on mobile using Test Your IPv6. [1] [1]: https://test-ipv6.com/ https://test-ipv6.com/ I’ve considered emailing to ask them to support it but haven’t come up with a persuasive reason for why they should.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Find out what your ASN is (e.g. https://www.ultratools.com/tools/asnInfo https://www.ultratools.com/tools/asnInfo) and then look it up on peering dB: https://www.peeringdb.com/ https://www.peeringdb.com/ It'll give you an idea if your ISP is advertising IPv6 routing on their network if they have some prefixes. So whether it's something they're working on or not.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    Thanks! Didn’t know I could look this up. Looks like my ISP has no IPv6 prefixes so far.
- executesorder66 6y ago
  > but haven’t come up with a persuasive reason for why they should. I don't know about you, but whenever I see an ISP, hosting provider, or website that supports IPv6 I think: These guys know what they are doing, they care about quality, and they actually plan for the future. I'd much rather do business with someone that supports IPv6 because of the above impression. If I was running my own business that provided network related products or services I'd make IPv6 support required because I don't want to seem like I'm incompetent/lazy/ignorant. So in short the persuasive reason is that it would improve their reputation. Technical people notice these things and base their recommendations on these sorts of impressions.

angrygoat 6y ago

The 'noise' on this plot of Google IPv6 adoption is interesting: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html It looks quite periodic when you zoom in: at first I thought it might be different adoption rates in different timezones, but there's only one sample available per day so that doesn't explain it. Anyone know what might be going on?

teraflop 6y ago
It's higher on weekends and holidays, which is presumably connected to mobile devices having a significantly higher rate of IPv6 adoption.
- why_only_15 6y ago
  You can see on the graph between March 10 and March 24 the significant increase in the number of people working from home by the proportion of ipv6 usage
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    You can also see the much higher utilization of IPv6 at the end of December that's pretty consistent for the last few years.
- angrygoat 6y ago
  That makes sense - thanks for that!
- bluGill 6y ago
  Not just mobile, the big US cable ISPs have been doing IPv6 for years. People go home and everything is IPv6 and they don't even know.

pferde 6y ago

> That is, the ability for your connections to keep going even if you hop between IP addresses. If you had IP mobility, then you could migrate connections between your two internets in real time, based on live quality feedback. This bit is solved pretty well by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP, but of course, both ends of a TCP connection have to support it.

PaulAJ 6y ago

The people who make the decisions about IPv6 adoption are not users, they are ISPs. You get an IPv4 address on your router WAN port because that is what your ISP gives to you. From an ISP's point of view IPv6 is a lot of No Business Case. Those three words are the death knell for any proposal to do anything in any business that expects to be here next year. It has exactly nothing to do with the geeky I-could-have-designed-it-better arguments about the technology. If you are an ISP that is a going concern, with a bunch of customers sitting on IPv4 addresses, then handing out IPv6 addresses makes no difference, except when it breaks something. You still have to give your customers just as many IPv4 addresses. So why bother? If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. Its going to break stuff. Lots of websites don't exist on IPv6, and customers are going to notice. Also your customers have spent the last 20 years slowly picking up bits of IPv4 lore, like the vital importance of 192.168.0.1, and are going to be puzzled when this doesn't work any more. All of this translates into higher support costs and more customer churn. Also, your allocated block of IPv4 addresses is a valuable asset in its own right; not only does it have real financial value (around $20 per address at present), but it also acts as a barrier to entry for competitors; if you want to set up in business as an ISP you are going to have to acquire some IPv4 address blocks from somewhere, and they aren't making any more of them. Managers are trained to look for barriers to entry to their industry, and the current IPv4 situation is exactly that. No sane manager is going to do something to make it easier for new competitors. Eventually, of course, the dam is going to break and IPv6 will become ubiquitous. ISPs will decide that buying blocks of IPv4 addresses costs more than providing new customers with IPv6 plus some kind of carrier-grade NAT for legacy IPv4 addresses. More website hosting companies will support IPv6 in response, and suddenly IPv4 will be so last-decade.

antientropic 6y ago
> If you plan to migrate your customers to IPv6 then you are a lunatic. According to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-..., IPv6 adoption in the US is above 42%. Was that all done by lunatics?
- goalieca 6y ago

Causality1 6y ago

A lack of fail-over is a problem at almost every level. Like how if my home internet has gone out and I've connected over wifi to my phone's hotspot, I have to disable my ethernet adapter before I can get at the outside world over wifi.

javier10e6 6y ago

In 2008 I was asked in one company to add ipv6 from a network stack because it was going ot be a government mandate to support ipv6. That came and went. In 2015 I was asked to add VLAN support to another network stack https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5517.txt to allow duplicate ipv4 address to co-exist in the same network. Ipv4 is not going anywhere, it doesn't have to. IpV6 is an effective way to segment your network at the hardware level.

lostmsu 6y ago

What I am severely disappointed about is Microsoft restricting Teredo to their Xbox services. Previously it was quite easy to get IPv6 connectivity at home when your provider only offered IPv4. In fact you'd get IPv6 connectivity by default. But at some point 1 or 2 years ago that just stopped working altogether, and my recent attempts to get IPv6 over Teredo back failed: you can establish tunnel, but it does not transmit packages to IPv6 hosts. Now I am at the hands of my ISP.

ncmncm 6y ago

This article demonstrates yet another way that Postel's Law is a terrible design principle. The amount of damage adherence to Postel's Law has caused can never be exaggerated. It has made securing TLS extremely difficult. It makes every kind of migration or evolution difficult, and interferes with securing anything. The way to enforce The Anti-Postel's Law is with tests that include requests and responses to be rejected, and fuzzers that explore the whole boundary of well-formed interaction. Such a test will never detect every improper toleration, but it will make equipment and programs that don't conform hardly ever work, until they are fixed. People used to like compilers that were lax about syntax requirements and provided lots of extensions. GNU compilers obliged, for a while, and then stopped. Now, even users of Microsoft compilers have demanded Standard conformance, and have nearly got it. A compiler that won't report errors is a way to generate lock-in. That was fine with Microsoft until they understood that it was locking them in, too.

themew 6y ago

As long as Reddit is ip4 only, ip4 won't go anywhere...

Dagger2 6y ago
NAT64+DNS64 works fine for Reddit. I run my desktop without a v4 address and have no problems with it. I'm running the NAT64 myself, but it could be done by the ISP just fine, at which point they wouldn't need to provision me with a v4 address. There are major ISPs out there that do exactly this (for example T-Mobile in the US).