30 ms·

Going IPv6 Only

221 points by MartijnBraam 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
No hackernews. No reddit. no github.
- takeda 5y ago
  https://ipv6.reddit.com https://ipv6.reddit.com https://ipv6.github.com https://ipv6.github.com - although it still is not configured, but maybe work in progress? I wonder though why they did it separately.
  - luto 5y ago
    GitHub accepts any sub domain, because that used to be the place for GitHub pages to go, try https://takeda.github.com/ https://takeda.github.com/ ;)
    - takeda 5y ago
      My bad, but those pages though work on IPv6 though.
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Reddit is very broken oat that domain on iOS.
can16358p 5y ago
And with many ISPs worldwide (including mine) still not supporting IPv6 at all, this becomes a problem, not giving incentive to anyone to do the work to support IPv6 (or at least abandon IPv4) as it will only harm them by being inaccessible.
- MartijnBraam 5y ago
  Which is why you make stuff dualstack first. Except most ISPs don't even seem to get that far...
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    The problem being that dualstack is worse in every way than IPv4, and worse in every way than IPv6. The very fact that IPv6 adoption actually requires dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 adoption first is the very reason that adoption took such a hugely long time. If IPv6 could have been made backwards compatible somehow (it's probably mathematically impossible) then adoption would have been much faster (just look at HTTP -> HTTP2 -> HTTP3 already).
    - mprovost 5y ago
      There were proposals at the time (1992!) for a backwards compatible version but they were rejected in favour of a clean slate approach. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.17487/RFC1385 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.17487/RFC1385
    - scott00 5y ago
      From a backwards compatibility perspective, HTTP2->HTTP3 is really very similar to IPv4->IPv6. HTTP3 isn't really backwards compatible with HTTP2. The client just establishes a lower version connection and then the server (which must implement both versions) adds a header to the response telling the client they can establish a HTTP3 connection if they want to. In IP land you get to skip the lower version initial connection because you've already figured it out from DNS, but other than that pretty much the same deal. In both cases both clients and servers that use a new version are dual-stacked because there are plenty of both clients and servers that only support the lower version.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        Yes, that was a poor example. Thinking about it more, the salient difference is that HTTP->HTTP2->HTTP3 is not a network-level problem to a similar extent (apart from clients and servers, you do have proxies and CDNs that need to support both, but these are far fewer actors, and it's much easier to switch CDN to one that supports HTTPx than it is to switch ISP as a server operator), that is the reason why adoption was much faster.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Yep, I have zero ISPs in my country supporting IPv6 AFAIK. Data centers support it, but nothing for home connections. Major ISP performed some IPv6 tests. In 2012. No news since then. Funny thing is that despite all IPv4 "shortage" I have white IPv4 right now and can accept connections. Also it's almost static, unless I'd turn off my modem for a prolonged period of time, it won't change. So no real shortage, it seems.
  - BenjiWiebe 5y ago
    Just because your ISP has enough IPs for its customers doesn't mean that there's no shortage and everybody has enough. I'm behind CGNAT. I set up a wireguard tunnel to a VPS to allow inbound connections, but that adds cost, complexity, and latency...
    - can16358p 5y ago
      Same here. CGNAT for years. I was into running home servers at some point, where I called my ISP and they kindly put me into a different pool where the IP is NOT static but a real IP (non-CGNAT). Actually now looking back, unless I need to host something at home (which is a hobby than a need) I find CGNAT to be actually safer while still using IP addresses efficiently. I'd still want to see real v6 adoption though.
  - LinAGKar 5y ago
    >So no real shortage, it seems. Which is why ISPs are pushing carrier-grade NAT.
- grishka 5y ago
  I asked my tiny ISP about IPv6 support a while ago. They said they have no plans "but you can buy a static IPv4 address if you want to run a server".
V__ 5y ago
If I remember correctly, one reason for the quick adaption of SSL certificates was the combination of Let's Encrypt and Google saying it would improve ranking. Why doesn't Google just do the same for IPv6? With all the benefits of IPv6, wouldn't Google benefit from such a move as well?
- RKearney 5y ago
  Their cloud platform doesn't even fully support IPv6, so I doubt they would do this before at least getting their own public offerings on board.
  - safaci2000 5y ago
    I was about to say. Cause they can't figure out IPV6 either. Their K8 and VPC networking is still not IPv6 complaint last I checked. If you're bored you can get this [extention](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...) and see just how much of the internet is actually IPv6
    - nouney 5y ago
      GKE can use IPv6 now
      - safaci2000 5y ago
        Do you have a link for any docs on that? Last I looked it was a weird hack using LB that translated IPv6 to K8s' native IPV4
  - takeda 5y ago
    I guess Vint Cerf wasn't hired by Google to provide any kind of input about TCP/IP or future of it.
    - adventured 5y ago
zamadatix 5y ago
Considering Microsoft's update of IPv6 https://www.arin.net/blog/2019/04/03/microsoft-works-toward-ipv6-only-single-stack-network/ https://www.arin.net/blog/2019/04/03/microsoft-works-toward-... I expected GitHub to get a revamp by now. If you already have a Linux router consider setting up NAT64. With it your entire internal network can be single stacked and when it comes to IPv4 only content you'll just NAT like you normally would.
iqanq 5y ago
There still isn't a 464XLAT implementation on Windows that can be used in WAN/LAN networks.
stingraycharles 5y ago
I’m curious as to why so many major sites are not working. I would expect them to be behind some kind of cloud load balancer which automatically brings IPv6?
- est31 5y ago
  There is a ton of logging infrastructure etc. that would all have to be changed to do ipv6. And sadly, the benefit to individual users is little, as every ISP has ipv4 already. So other features get prioritized: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224 Some major cloud companies also sit on giant piles of ipv4 addresses, like Amazon for example. They of course have negative incentives in ipv6 adoption, as they want their ipv4 investment, which lies in the billions, to pay off as much as possible. The ISPs on the other hand are heavily incentivized to support ipv6 because the less traffic there is via ipv4, the less load there is on their carrier grade NAT infrastructure. Furthermore, ipv6 allows for cleaner routing tables, at least that's the theory.
- nijave 5y ago
  Major sites that aren't cloud providers already supported IPv4 so there's not necessarily a clear incentive to spend lots of money upgrading equipment and rolling out IPv6. Only within the last couple months did AWS announce single stack IPv6 for VPCs (i.e. cloud providers don't have a great IPv6 support story)
bombcar 5y ago
There are no benefits and only costs associated with going ipv6 or dual stack. If hacker news can’t be bothered why should anyone bother? The main major wins for ipv6 have been management networks that have gone past the limits of private ipv4 ranges (comcast and mobiles devices). But what advantages do the servers have to switching?
- lmm 5y ago
  Better performance for users from those networks? I can see that it wouldn't matter for most cases, but for latency-sensitive services like VoIP or gaming, those users are going to notice that your site is faster than your competitors even if they don't know why.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Is there any better performance? As far as I see there's not meaningful difference.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      In most cases where I've been able to hit a dual-stack server from a dual-stack client, the IPv6 has been at best the same speed as IPv4, and often slower for unknown reasons somewhere in the pipeline.
    - lmm 5y ago
      It's noticeably better for me (on an NTT reseller) and most people in Japan, although I understand that's because the ISP is deliberately underprovisioning their IPv4 connections to create that incentive.
  - jlokier 5y ago
    IPv6 had higher latency than IPv4 last time I measured. It depends very much on which network, though.
- 10000truths 5y ago
  The benefits go beyond just curtailing address exhaustion. No NAT necessary. No need for DHCP to assign IP addresses in a LAN. IP scanning becoming infeasible due to 64-bit subnets. No more ARP spoofing with NDP+SEND. Etc etc.
imoverclocked 5y ago
Anyone use NAT64 and totd (trick or treat daemon) in 2022? I tried this last in 2007-ish and found some fun places where this broke (eg: Google web results would sometimes return an IPv4 address in an URL) but a lot things mostly just worked. Is there a newer/similar approach to try?
- MartijnBraam 5y ago
  464XLAT is the complete fix, lets you connect to ipv4 from legacy ipv4 applications with ipv6 in between
- adev_ 5y ago
  > Is there a newer/similar approach to try? I do use something like that everyday. My setup is: - Ipv6 only and NAT64/DNS64 for everything. That covers all wifi mobile traffic (Android/Iphone) and 99% of Laptop/Desktop traffic. - IPv4 statically configured for few laptop with special needs (corporate VPN) One good side effect of this approach is that it keeps most of the IoT shit (generally compatible IPv4 only) disconnected from the internet.
mhale 5y ago
The need for IPv6 support is real! This site: https://whynoipv6.com/country/us https://whynoipv6.com/country/us -- provides a "wall of shame" summary of sites that do not yet fully support IPv6, in order of Alexa rank. It is definitely surprising, even shameful, that so many top sites make this list. That Twitter and Amazon don't have full IPv6 support yet blows my mind. It's also worth noting that IPv6 networks definitely DO exist in the real world. My tiny startup provides software to run sports teams (mostly swim teams) and we've run into several cases where new wifi gets installed at a neighborhood pool, and the network is IPv6 only. So far, the pattern seems to be cases where AT&T is the ISP in the Houston area. To troubleshoot these issues via phone support, we ask if the customer can reach amazon.com or twitter.com. If not, it's a pretty good sign they are on a IPv6 only network. Apple also requires IPv6 support for backend services for approval of iOS apps in the App Store (although, in practice, this requirement is not consistently checked). See: https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ Fortunately, adding IPv6 support to a site is relatively simple using Cloudflare. See: https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6/ [Edit] To clarify, I'm not affiliated with the Why No IPv6? site. I just found it to be a useful resource. The site credits https://crawler.ninja/ https://crawler.ninja/ as the source of its data. [Edit 2] Added link to Apple's IPv6-only support policy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yaomtc 5y ago
  > https://whynoipv6.com/country/us https://whynoipv6.com/country/us What a strange layout - the sidebar, which cannot be manually collapsed, covers up page content at moderate widths, until the page is quite wide. When the window gets narrow enough, some of what's in the sidebar can't be accessed at all.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  That site says reddit.com is IPv6 but I'm not able to resolve any AAAA records for it.
  - 5y ago
AniseAbyss 5y ago
I'm frequently running into sites that don't have https encryption. Nobody seems to care as long as stuff works.
radicaldreamer 5y ago
Enabling ipv6 creates a lot of routing problems and networking issues on my network, so it remains off and NAT with upnp is used instead (and sometimes tunnels which provide ipv6). ISPs and home routers need to do a better job handling ipv6 traffic as well and end user devices need to fix bugs with implementations.
jedberg 5y ago
For a few years now, I've tried enabling IPv6 at home (not exclusively, just dual stack). Every time I do, I inevitably turn it off because something breaks (usually some website that pretends to have an AAAA record but then it times out and has to fall back to IPv4). Until it's easy for nerds like me, I just don't see it taking off. So far I haven't found a compelling reason to spend the time to get it to work well, and it doesn't work well out of the box, so I see no reason to use IPv6.
- binkHN 5y ago
  I’ve been running dual stack for years, with multiple IPv6 subnets in fact, and don’t have these issues.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    That's great, but my lived experience is different from yours. Maybe my setup is broken, maybe my ISPs DNS is broken, maybe my router is misconfigured, maybe something else. The point is, I don't see a compelling reason to figure it out. Everything works just as well without IPv6, so there is no point in going through the hassle of figuring out why it doesn't work for me.
    - binkHN 5y ago
      Fair. I setup it up more for the learning experience than anything else. Yes, it was a bit of trial and error before everything Just Worked. Most of my traffic is IPv6 nowadays and this is mostly with the larger entities like Google. My biggest happiness is the NAT crutch goes away, but too few networks have IPv6 deployed for this to be a boon for me.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Yeah I have a friend at an IX, with a lot of insight into IPv6 and he's constantly "chasing" ipv6 support in his personal life. It's just not worth my time right now. And someone in this thread said the problem is not at the consumer level but at the enterprise level, BS. There is maybe 1 or 2 ISPs out of a dozen here that do IPv6 at all. Mostly it's enabled for mobile operators for some reason, maybe they need the IPs more than regular broadband operators.
jeffybefffy519 5y ago
I bet ipv6 is superseded soon by something else. To have a standard that is still not adopted after decades surely means theres some fundamental difficulty that means it’s actually really hard to migrate to for many or its just too complex.
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
  Or that the motivation for expending effort on it wasn’t high until ipv4 blocks had allocation costs
- stevekemp 5y ago
  The sheer fact that so many systems had to be updated for IPv6, and many many have not .. implies that any new system would struggle just as badly to reach adoption. The only successor to IPv4 that could stand a chance would be something that would require zero hardware replacements at ISPs, carriers, home-routers, and all the other devices that would potentially be impacted.
  - commandersaki 5y ago
    Doubtful. While it's taken awhile for vendors to do, updating software to be IPv6 capable hasn't really been an issue or a challenge. Even if a few Internet of Shit devices refuse to speak IPv6, the overwhelming majority of stacks do. The problem has always been with the IPv6 transition plan, which is nonexistent. This is the way it was selected, even when the contenders were offering actual transition plans where IPv4 interoperate with IPng. This has been a fundamental failure of the design and selection committee for IPng/IPv6.
- gpvos 5y ago
  No, it's just like why the US hasn't switched to metric yet. Installed base and little economic advantage. China, India and other upcoming countries will need to switch to ipv6 eventually, but it will take a long time for Europe and the US, and they may never switch completely.
merlyn 5y ago
The reason some of the bigger sites don't offer IPv6 is to not have to deal with stupid broken client configurations. There are so many groups out there that don't care to setup anything, and ignorantly, or not, break their existing IPv6 in weird ways. We offer IPv6 services, but have to publish an "IPv4 only" version of some of our endpoints to have customers get around their own brokeness. Also, I feel the biggest obsticle to IPv6 deployment is mostly the Enterprise firewall tech. Many residential users and mobile users have working IPv6 just fine right now. But I have yet to encounter an enterprise firewall setup for IPv6 properly, even if their ISP offered it. But yet, they are willing to complain left and right about the CG-NAT restrictions (or overburdened) that they run into, with the easiest solution right in front of their face.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  Then how does Google do it?
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    This actually deserves an answer. Google can do this because it has a clout on ISPs to interconnect to them, and ISPs do have an incentive to not break Google, so Google's job is easier than many others which don't operate an autonomous network. Essentially Google has its own ISP (which to be clear is separate from Google Fiber's), and you don't (unless you're representing a large corporation here). Also the only cost for ISPs to connect to Google is fiber and equipment costs, which incentivises ISPs to peer with Google. The real problem of deploying IPv6 is that despite record-high prices of IPv4 addresses and the cost of CGNAT (both monentary and performance-wise), it's still cheaper to do IPv4 only rather than dealing with the hassles of running both IPv4 and IPv6. With IPv4, you can just pick a Tier-1 carrier and you're guaranteed to traverse the whole internet, at least those who didn't proactively blocked you. With IPv6, you are exposed to ugly Tier-1 fights like when Hurricane-Electric tried to interconnect to Cogent to no avail (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/22/peering-disputes-migrate-to-ipv6 https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/22/peer...), even trying to bake a cake à la Microsoft-Mozilla browser cake wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CObnXjmDtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CObnXjmDtg), and even today it's still not resolved (https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabbles/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabble...). Even Google is not spared with this interconnection woes: it's mitigated, sure, but there are still some parts of IPv6 internet that cannot reach Google, it's just those parts don't really use Google's services or have sane IPv4 interconnectivity (and to clarify, this isn't due to state-level blocking, those people just didn't realised that they don't have a path to Google via IPv6).
tomjen3 5y ago
This is exactly the kind of things for which the government is necessary. We won't have IPv6 unless it is legally mandated that any service which is available over IPv4 is also available over IPv6 and that all customers be given IPv6 addresses. Slap a physical loadbalancer in front of them of your services or whatever, but we either get the government to do it, get the telcos to end IPv4 support or give up.
ulzeraj 5y ago
I always wanted to go full native ipv6. However all the ipv6 enable ISPs I’ve used in multiple countries will give you a /64 address, which cant be subneted without some ugly hacks. Worst part is that there is no reason for that. There are plenty of addresses. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the recommended addresspace for a home user would be /48.
- philjohn 5y ago
  Strange - UK here and my previous ISP, BT, gave me a /56 (although on a lease so it could change) and my current ISP, Zen, gave me a /48 (static).
kristianpaul 5y ago
I wish it would be as easy as to disable ipv6 from sysctl: net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
1970-01-01 5y ago
>>Running an IPv6-only network isn't super useful for daily use. There's simply too many services that still fully rely on IPv4 to function. This is IPv6 in a nutshell. The enormous lack of return for enabling IPv6 is still stopping global adoption.
MR4D 5y ago
Hackernews isn’t IP6 ??? Is it just me, or is anyone else bothered that HN isn’t IP6 yet? I think this and GitHub being non IP6 were the biggest surprises.
jamjamjamjamjam 5y ago
Is it possible to get an allocation in ipv6? And what are the steps you’d take to do so? Im interested in making my projects ipv6 only if I can have a long term address allocation which I cant do in ipv4
tristor 5y ago
What's sad about so many major services failing to get IPv6 going is that other service providers who are considered lesser have managed it without much issue, and every single person I know who works in tech has IPv6 dual stack networks at their home. IPv6 seems to have more residential service penetration in the US than it does in commercial/provider space. Neither GCP nor AWS correctly support IPv6 dual stack across their entire portfolio, yet has-beens like Rackspace Cloud had it working on OpenStack over a decade ago. The point I'm making is that getting IPv6 dual stack networks in place where you have existing IPv4 connectivity /really/ isn't that hard. Organizations make it difficult, rather than it being intrinsically difficult, and it's only gotten easier as time has gone on and early adopters have paved the way. Hell I've got dual stack IPv6 set up on my Digital Ocean droplets without any issues and all their services correctly support dual stack configurations... what's the story with Google and Amazon?
jfalcon 5y ago
At one time, the ISP SIXXS.net who was a early adopter of IPv6 offered a v6to4/v4to6 gateway that allowed for reaching either network. I suspect there will be a future need to proxy between the two networks - great opportunity for entrepreneurs, cybercriminals or governments who pry. https://web.archive.org/web/20120505075239/http://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120505075239/http://www.sixxs....

Going IPv6 Only

221 points by MartijnBraam 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

No hackernews. No reddit. no github.

takeda 5y ago
https://ipv6.reddit.com https://ipv6.reddit.com https://ipv6.github.com https://ipv6.github.com - although it still is not configured, but maybe work in progress? I wonder though why they did it separately.
- luto 5y ago
  GitHub accepts any sub domain, because that used to be the place for GitHub pages to go, try https://takeda.github.com/ https://takeda.github.com/ ;)
  - takeda 5y ago
    My bad, but those pages though work on IPv6 though.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Reddit is very broken oat that domain on iOS.

can16358p 5y ago

And with many ISPs worldwide (including mine) still not supporting IPv6 at all, this becomes a problem, not giving incentive to anyone to do the work to support IPv6 (or at least abandon IPv4) as it will only harm them by being inaccessible.

MartijnBraam 5y ago
Which is why you make stuff dualstack first. Except most ISPs don't even seem to get that far...
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  The problem being that dualstack is worse in every way than IPv4, and worse in every way than IPv6. The very fact that IPv6 adoption actually requires dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 adoption first is the very reason that adoption took such a hugely long time. If IPv6 could have been made backwards compatible somehow (it's probably mathematically impossible) then adoption would have been much faster (just look at HTTP -> HTTP2 -> HTTP3 already).
  - mprovost 5y ago
    There were proposals at the time (1992!) for a backwards compatible version but they were rejected in favour of a clean slate approach. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.17487/RFC1385 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.17487/RFC1385
  - scott00 5y ago
    From a backwards compatibility perspective, HTTP2->HTTP3 is really very similar to IPv4->IPv6. HTTP3 isn't really backwards compatible with HTTP2. The client just establishes a lower version connection and then the server (which must implement both versions) adds a header to the response telling the client they can establish a HTTP3 connection if they want to. In IP land you get to skip the lower version initial connection because you've already figured it out from DNS, but other than that pretty much the same deal. In both cases both clients and servers that use a new version are dual-stacked because there are plenty of both clients and servers that only support the lower version.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Yes, that was a poor example. Thinking about it more, the salient difference is that HTTP->HTTP2->HTTP3 is not a network-level problem to a similar extent (apart from clients and servers, you do have proxies and CDNs that need to support both, but these are far fewer actors, and it's much easier to switch CDN to one that supports HTTPx than it is to switch ISP as a server operator), that is the reason why adoption was much faster.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Yep, I have zero ISPs in my country supporting IPv6 AFAIK. Data centers support it, but nothing for home connections. Major ISP performed some IPv6 tests. In 2012. No news since then. Funny thing is that despite all IPv4 "shortage" I have white IPv4 right now and can accept connections. Also it's almost static, unless I'd turn off my modem for a prolonged period of time, it won't change. So no real shortage, it seems.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Just because your ISP has enough IPs for its customers doesn't mean that there's no shortage and everybody has enough. I'm behind CGNAT. I set up a wireguard tunnel to a VPS to allow inbound connections, but that adds cost, complexity, and latency...
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Same here. CGNAT for years. I was into running home servers at some point, where I called my ISP and they kindly put me into a different pool where the IP is NOT static but a real IP (non-CGNAT). Actually now looking back, unless I need to host something at home (which is a hobby than a need) I find CGNAT to be actually safer while still using IP addresses efficiently. I'd still want to see real v6 adoption though.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  >So no real shortage, it seems. Which is why ISPs are pushing carrier-grade NAT.
grishka 5y ago
I asked my tiny ISP about IPv6 support a while ago. They said they have no plans "but you can buy a static IPv4 address if you want to run a server".

V__ 5y ago

If I remember correctly, one reason for the quick adaption of SSL certificates was the combination of Let's Encrypt and Google saying it would improve ranking. Why doesn't Google just do the same for IPv6? With all the benefits of IPv6, wouldn't Google benefit from such a move as well?

RKearney 5y ago
Their cloud platform doesn't even fully support IPv6, so I doubt they would do this before at least getting their own public offerings on board.
- safaci2000 5y ago
  I was about to say. Cause they can't figure out IPV6 either. Their K8 and VPC networking is still not IPv6 complaint last I checked. If you're bored you can get this [extention](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffngcegjmadlcijfolapggal?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipvfoo/ecanpcehffn...) and see just how much of the internet is actually IPv6
  - nouney 5y ago
    GKE can use IPv6 now
    - safaci2000 5y ago
      Do you have a link for any docs on that? Last I looked it was a weird hack using LB that translated IPv6 to K8s' native IPV4
- takeda 5y ago
  I guess Vint Cerf wasn't hired by Google to provide any kind of input about TCP/IP or future of it.
  - adventured 5y ago

zamadatix 5y ago

Considering Microsoft's update of IPv6 https://www.arin.net/blog/2019/04/03/microsoft-works-toward-ipv6-only-single-stack-network/ https://www.arin.net/blog/2019/04/03/microsoft-works-toward-... I expected GitHub to get a revamp by now. If you already have a Linux router consider setting up NAT64. With it your entire internal network can be single stacked and when it comes to IPv4 only content you'll just NAT like you normally would.

iqanq 5y ago

There still isn't a 464XLAT implementation on Windows that can be used in WAN/LAN networks.

stingraycharles 5y ago

I’m curious as to why so many major sites are not working. I would expect them to be behind some kind of cloud load balancer which automatically brings IPv6?

est31 5y ago
There is a ton of logging infrastructure etc. that would all have to be changed to do ipv6. And sadly, the benefit to individual users is little, as every ISP has ipv4 already. So other features get prioritized: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224 Some major cloud companies also sit on giant piles of ipv4 addresses, like Amazon for example. They of course have negative incentives in ipv6 adoption, as they want their ipv4 investment, which lies in the billions, to pay off as much as possible. The ISPs on the other hand are heavily incentivized to support ipv6 because the less traffic there is via ipv4, the less load there is on their carrier grade NAT infrastructure. Furthermore, ipv6 allows for cleaner routing tables, at least that's the theory.
nijave 5y ago
Major sites that aren't cloud providers already supported IPv4 so there's not necessarily a clear incentive to spend lots of money upgrading equipment and rolling out IPv6. Only within the last couple months did AWS announce single stack IPv6 for VPCs (i.e. cloud providers don't have a great IPv6 support story)

bombcar 5y ago

There are no benefits and only costs associated with going ipv6 or dual stack. If hacker news can’t be bothered why should anyone bother? The main major wins for ipv6 have been management networks that have gone past the limits of private ipv4 ranges (comcast and mobiles devices). But what advantages do the servers have to switching?

lmm 5y ago
Better performance for users from those networks? I can see that it wouldn't matter for most cases, but for latency-sensitive services like VoIP or gaming, those users are going to notice that your site is faster than your competitors even if they don't know why.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Is there any better performance? As far as I see there's not meaningful difference.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    In most cases where I've been able to hit a dual-stack server from a dual-stack client, the IPv6 has been at best the same speed as IPv4, and often slower for unknown reasons somewhere in the pipeline.
  - lmm 5y ago
    It's noticeably better for me (on an NTT reseller) and most people in Japan, although I understand that's because the ISP is deliberately underprovisioning their IPv4 connections to create that incentive.
- jlokier 5y ago
  IPv6 had higher latency than IPv4 last time I measured. It depends very much on which network, though.
10000truths 5y ago
The benefits go beyond just curtailing address exhaustion. No NAT necessary. No need for DHCP to assign IP addresses in a LAN. IP scanning becoming infeasible due to 64-bit subnets. No more ARP spoofing with NDP+SEND. Etc etc.

imoverclocked 5y ago

Anyone use NAT64 and totd (trick or treat daemon) in 2022? I tried this last in 2007-ish and found some fun places where this broke (eg: Google web results would sometimes return an IPv4 address in an URL) but a lot things mostly just worked. Is there a newer/similar approach to try?

MartijnBraam 5y ago
464XLAT is the complete fix, lets you connect to ipv4 from legacy ipv4 applications with ipv6 in between
adev_ 5y ago
> Is there a newer/similar approach to try? I do use something like that everyday. My setup is: - Ipv6 only and NAT64/DNS64 for everything. That covers all wifi mobile traffic (Android/Iphone) and 99% of Laptop/Desktop traffic. - IPv4 statically configured for few laptop with special needs (corporate VPN) One good side effect of this approach is that it keeps most of the IoT shit (generally compatible IPv4 only) disconnected from the internet.

mhale 5y ago

The need for IPv6 support is real! This site: https://whynoipv6.com/country/us https://whynoipv6.com/country/us -- provides a "wall of shame" summary of sites that do not yet fully support IPv6, in order of Alexa rank. It is definitely surprising, even shameful, that so many top sites make this list. That Twitter and Amazon don't have full IPv6 support yet blows my mind. It's also worth noting that IPv6 networks definitely DO exist in the real world. My tiny startup provides software to run sports teams (mostly swim teams) and we've run into several cases where new wifi gets installed at a neighborhood pool, and the network is IPv6 only. So far, the pattern seems to be cases where AT&T is the ISP in the Houston area. To troubleshoot these issues via phone support, we ask if the customer can reach amazon.com or twitter.com. If not, it's a pretty good sign they are on a IPv6 only network. Apple also requires IPv6 support for backend services for approval of iOS apps in the App Store (although, in practice, this requirement is not consistently checked). See: https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ Fortunately, adding IPv6 support to a site is relatively simple using Cloudflare. See: https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ipv6/ [Edit] To clarify, I'm not affiliated with the Why No IPv6? site. I just found it to be a useful resource. The site credits https://crawler.ninja/ https://crawler.ninja/ as the source of its data. [Edit 2] Added link to Apple's IPv6-only support policy.

deleted 5y ago
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yaomtc 5y ago
> https://whynoipv6.com/country/us https://whynoipv6.com/country/us What a strange layout - the sidebar, which cannot be manually collapsed, covers up page content at moderate widths, until the page is quite wide. When the window gets narrow enough, some of what's in the sidebar can't be accessed at all.
zamadatix 5y ago
That site says reddit.com is IPv6 but I'm not able to resolve any AAAA records for it.
- 5y ago

AniseAbyss 5y ago

I'm frequently running into sites that don't have https encryption. Nobody seems to care as long as stuff works.

radicaldreamer 5y ago

Enabling ipv6 creates a lot of routing problems and networking issues on my network, so it remains off and NAT with upnp is used instead (and sometimes tunnels which provide ipv6). ISPs and home routers need to do a better job handling ipv6 traffic as well and end user devices need to fix bugs with implementations.

jedberg 5y ago

For a few years now, I've tried enabling IPv6 at home (not exclusively, just dual stack). Every time I do, I inevitably turn it off because something breaks (usually some website that pretends to have an AAAA record but then it times out and has to fall back to IPv4). Until it's easy for nerds like me, I just don't see it taking off. So far I haven't found a compelling reason to spend the time to get it to work well, and it doesn't work well out of the box, so I see no reason to use IPv6.

binkHN 5y ago
I’ve been running dual stack for years, with multiple IPv6 subnets in fact, and don’t have these issues.
- jedberg 5y ago
  That's great, but my lived experience is different from yours. Maybe my setup is broken, maybe my ISPs DNS is broken, maybe my router is misconfigured, maybe something else. The point is, I don't see a compelling reason to figure it out. Everything works just as well without IPv6, so there is no point in going through the hassle of figuring out why it doesn't work for me.
  - binkHN 5y ago
    Fair. I setup it up more for the learning experience than anything else. Yes, it was a bit of trial and error before everything Just Worked. Most of my traffic is IPv6 nowadays and this is mostly with the larger entities like Google. My biggest happiness is the NAT crutch goes away, but too few networks have IPv6 deployed for this to be a boon for me.
INTPenis 5y ago
Yeah I have a friend at an IX, with a lot of insight into IPv6 and he's constantly "chasing" ipv6 support in his personal life. It's just not worth my time right now. And someone in this thread said the problem is not at the consumer level but at the enterprise level, BS. There is maybe 1 or 2 ISPs out of a dozen here that do IPv6 at all. Mostly it's enabled for mobile operators for some reason, maybe they need the IPs more than regular broadband operators.

jeffybefffy519 5y ago

I bet ipv6 is superseded soon by something else. To have a standard that is still not adopted after decades surely means theres some fundamental difficulty that means it’s actually really hard to migrate to for many or its just too complex.

GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
Or that the motivation for expending effort on it wasn’t high until ipv4 blocks had allocation costs
stevekemp 5y ago
The sheer fact that so many systems had to be updated for IPv6, and many many have not .. implies that any new system would struggle just as badly to reach adoption. The only successor to IPv4 that could stand a chance would be something that would require zero hardware replacements at ISPs, carriers, home-routers, and all the other devices that would potentially be impacted.
- commandersaki 5y ago
  Doubtful. While it's taken awhile for vendors to do, updating software to be IPv6 capable hasn't really been an issue or a challenge. Even if a few Internet of Shit devices refuse to speak IPv6, the overwhelming majority of stacks do. The problem has always been with the IPv6 transition plan, which is nonexistent. This is the way it was selected, even when the contenders were offering actual transition plans where IPv4 interoperate with IPng. This has been a fundamental failure of the design and selection committee for IPng/IPv6.
gpvos 5y ago
No, it's just like why the US hasn't switched to metric yet. Installed base and little economic advantage. China, India and other upcoming countries will need to switch to ipv6 eventually, but it will take a long time for Europe and the US, and they may never switch completely.

merlyn 5y ago

The reason some of the bigger sites don't offer IPv6 is to not have to deal with stupid broken client configurations. There are so many groups out there that don't care to setup anything, and ignorantly, or not, break their existing IPv6 in weird ways. We offer IPv6 services, but have to publish an "IPv4 only" version of some of our endpoints to have customers get around their own brokeness. Also, I feel the biggest obsticle to IPv6 deployment is mostly the Enterprise firewall tech. Many residential users and mobile users have working IPv6 just fine right now. But I have yet to encounter an enterprise firewall setup for IPv6 properly, even if their ISP offered it. But yet, they are willing to complain left and right about the CG-NAT restrictions (or overburdened) that they run into, with the easiest solution right in front of their face.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
Then how does Google do it?
- zinekeller 5y ago
  This actually deserves an answer. Google can do this because it has a clout on ISPs to interconnect to them, and ISPs do have an incentive to not break Google, so Google's job is easier than many others which don't operate an autonomous network. Essentially Google has its own ISP (which to be clear is separate from Google Fiber's), and you don't (unless you're representing a large corporation here). Also the only cost for ISPs to connect to Google is fiber and equipment costs, which incentivises ISPs to peer with Google. The real problem of deploying IPv6 is that despite record-high prices of IPv4 addresses and the cost of CGNAT (both monentary and performance-wise), it's still cheaper to do IPv4 only rather than dealing with the hassles of running both IPv4 and IPv6. With IPv4, you can just pick a Tier-1 carrier and you're guaranteed to traverse the whole internet, at least those who didn't proactively blocked you. With IPv6, you are exposed to ugly Tier-1 fights like when Hurricane-Electric tried to interconnect to Cogent to no avail (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/22/peering-disputes-migrate-to-ipv6 https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/22/peer...), even trying to bake a cake à la Microsoft-Mozilla browser cake wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CObnXjmDtg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CObnXjmDtg), and even today it's still not resolved (https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabbles/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabble...). Even Google is not spared with this interconnection woes: it's mitigated, sure, but there are still some parts of IPv6 internet that cannot reach Google, it's just those parts don't really use Google's services or have sane IPv4 interconnectivity (and to clarify, this isn't due to state-level blocking, those people just didn't realised that they don't have a path to Google via IPv6).

tomjen3 5y ago

This is exactly the kind of things for which the government is necessary. We won't have IPv6 unless it is legally mandated that any service which is available over IPv4 is also available over IPv6 and that all customers be given IPv6 addresses. Slap a physical loadbalancer in front of them of your services or whatever, but we either get the government to do it, get the telcos to end IPv4 support or give up.

ulzeraj 5y ago

I always wanted to go full native ipv6. However all the ipv6 enable ISPs I’ve used in multiple countries will give you a /64 address, which cant be subneted without some ugly hacks. Worst part is that there is no reason for that. There are plenty of addresses. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the recommended addresspace for a home user would be /48.

philjohn 5y ago
Strange - UK here and my previous ISP, BT, gave me a /56 (although on a lease so it could change) and my current ISP, Zen, gave me a /48 (static).

kristianpaul 5y ago

I wish it would be as easy as to disable ipv6 from sysctl: net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

1970-01-01 5y ago

>>Running an IPv6-only network isn't super useful for daily use. There's simply too many services that still fully rely on IPv4 to function. This is IPv6 in a nutshell. The enormous lack of return for enabling IPv6 is still stopping global adoption.

MR4D 5y ago

Hackernews isn’t IP6 ??? Is it just me, or is anyone else bothered that HN isn’t IP6 yet? I think this and GitHub being non IP6 were the biggest surprises.

jamjamjamjamjam 5y ago

Is it possible to get an allocation in ipv6? And what are the steps you’d take to do so? Im interested in making my projects ipv6 only if I can have a long term address allocation which I cant do in ipv4

tristor 5y ago

What's sad about so many major services failing to get IPv6 going is that other service providers who are considered lesser have managed it without much issue, and every single person I know who works in tech has IPv6 dual stack networks at their home. IPv6 seems to have more residential service penetration in the US than it does in commercial/provider space. Neither GCP nor AWS correctly support IPv6 dual stack across their entire portfolio, yet has-beens like Rackspace Cloud had it working on OpenStack over a decade ago. The point I'm making is that getting IPv6 dual stack networks in place where you have existing IPv4 connectivity /really/ isn't that hard. Organizations make it difficult, rather than it being intrinsically difficult, and it's only gotten easier as time has gone on and early adopters have paved the way. Hell I've got dual stack IPv6 set up on my Digital Ocean droplets without any issues and all their services correctly support dual stack configurations... what's the story with Google and Amazon?

jfalcon 5y ago

At one time, the ISP SIXXS.net who was a early adopter of IPv6 offered a v6to4/v4to6 gateway that allowed for reaching either network. I suspect there will be a future need to proxy between the two networks - great opportunity for entrepreneurs, cybercriminals or governments who pry. https://web.archive.org/web/20120505075239/http://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120505075239/http://www.sixxs....