45 ms·

40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

316 points by leohonexus 4y ago

chris92de 4y ago
Meanwhile, Github is completely unreachable via IPv6 to this day. Found that out the hard way the other week when I went to order a build server without an IPv4.
- samstave 4y ago
  Did you make a pull request?
  - 323 4y ago
    He can't access it to make a PR.
    - mardix 4y ago
      :)
- xPaw 4y ago
  Github also can't send webhooks to ipv6 only hosts.
- judge2020 4y ago
  I think they're extremely scared about their Enterprise github.com customers being unhappy when their IP allowlists or IP address audits are impacted by a switch to allowing v6 addresses, as this will surely lead to tons of headaches for their account managers. To add, if they're moving to Azure this might make IPv6 deployment complicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327773
zelphirkalt 4y ago
What happens to games and in general applications, which are old and only have an IPv4 input field? How is it bridged to IPv6? If a friend only has an IPv6 address, how can I connect to them? I guess I will have to set up a VPN, which internally uses IPv4 addressing?
- metadat 4y ago
  See other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31967691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31967691
jmrm 4y ago
In my country, an ISP giving an IPv6 is rare, but using CG-NAT is incredibly common. I think they don't want to update the routers in the main nodes.
vmoore 4y ago
Anyone go out of their way to disable IPV6 on all their systems, even at the hardware level, like on routers etc? What's a good reason to avoid IPV6?
- dekhn 4y ago
  Yes I turn it off because it's always causing unpredictable problems. I actually tried to switch to all IPv6 and that was worse than ipv4 because you still need to run a full ipv4 stock to visit almost anything on the web without a proxy
- leohonexus 4y ago
  I recently disabled IPv6 on my home network to make firewall rules more manageable, and I was always under the impression IPv6 adoption was slow. So I was pretty surprised to check and see Google user's adoption has reached 40%. I feel like ISPs are a big push for that.
  - patmorgan23 4y ago
    It's probably mostly from mobile carriers. Thought I know Comcast runs v6 on large portions of their residential networks.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  If you have a large estate of IPv4 addresses, the more ubiquitous IPv6 gets, the less they're worth.
  - zeristor 4y ago
    Not there yet it seems: https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      We're still at a point where at least 60$ of users (according to Google) are still IPv4-only. I imagine we're still a little far from the tipping point where IPv4 becomes less valuable.
shmde 4y ago
Are there any advantages to IPv6 other than more addresses ?
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/ipv4-vs-ipv6 https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/ipv4-vs-ip... Another, different take: http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-ipv6 http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-ipv6
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    The first link mentions no more NAT as an advantage, but I think it's actually one of the big issues holding up adoption. Rightly ot wrongly, since the 00's the perception is that sitting directly on the internet with a public address is a big security no-no.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      There's an argument to be made that mixing dynamic addresses with the pool of other users of the same ISP is beneficial for privacy. The fact that peer-to-peer applications can finally start working is an unquestionable advantage.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  "More addresses" has a handful of knock-on benefits; or, perhaps more accurately, ipv6 would let greenfield systems skip out on some workarounds made necessary by not enough addresses.
- cute_boi 4y ago
  I just hope ipv6 doesn't have privacy nightmare that 1 device will always get 1 IP. Currently, the isp I use provides dynamic ip, so on every router restart my ip gets changed. If they starts to provide ipv6, I hope they give options to rotate it frequently, so toxic companies like meta, facebook, microsoft can't connect my device & ip.
smcl 4y ago
The per-country view is interesting - a huge country like India really going for it is good to see.
- baybal2 4y ago
  There is a huge phone network/ISP called Jio there. I read they are using 624 only.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Weird, the stats on the first graph show the 6to4 traffic being extremely minimal
    - baybal2 4y ago
      I meant that they use NAT64, and it goes to Google over native v6
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
Why can't we paste aan ipv6 address into the browser address bar and have it go to that address? I'm forced to open [long brackets ] and the it works. Why!???? Ipv4 address just works without the hitch
- bcook 4y ago
  Because of colons. Colons separate the different sections of an ipv6 address but HTTP URLs also use colons for the port, so the ipv6 IP must be encompassed in brackets to differentiate between IP and port.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    is there "no" to automatically append brackets? like we do with ctrl+enter?
  - p1mrx 4y ago
    If IPv6 had used dots instead, then addresses like "2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de" would be ambiguous between an IP address and a hostname. Perhaps they could've required every IPv6 address to use ".." exactly once for zero compression. Then you'd have "..2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de", "2001.db8..beef.de", etc. I guess the nullary ".." could go in the middle, but that would enshrine the /64 boundary into the addressing scheme, which seems like a leaky abstraction.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Is "2001::0:8080" 2001::0 port 8080, or 2001::0:8080 port 80? There you go. Of course you can argue for automatic conversion when there's no ambiguity.
  - Dagger2 4y ago
    It's 2001::0:8080 port 80. Require the brackets for specifying a port number with a v6 address, and don't accept a port without the brackets. That way there's no ambiguity.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
michaelbuckbee 4y ago
I'm curious how much of this is mobile vs desktop. My assumption is that a much larger percentage of the traffic on mobile is ipv6.
- skrause 4y ago
  In Germany, where the Google statistics show 64% IPv6 adoption, mobile carriers were actually the last to support IPv6, but even the last mobile carrier enabled it around a year ago. Now it's mostly businesses that are still not using IPv6.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    I believe in the US ipv6 mobile adoption was much quicker.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    I’m on Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland. IPv4 only, my only option would be to switch to CGNAT to get IPv6, which I’d rather not.
    - ravis11 4y ago
      Not sure why thats the case for you. I'm on Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland too and got full ipv4/ipv6 dual stack? Is that one of those regional limitations that Vodafone seems to have?
      - Semaphor 4y ago
        You are sure you are not behind a CGNAT? From what I’ve heard, that’s the case for everyone with IPv6.
      - sarnowski 4y ago
        Oftentimes you can just ask the customer service of Vodafone. If you reach a good agent, they will switch you away from CGNAT and you get a proper /56 public routable prefix on your cable line. Also works great for me. Be aware, the Vodafone modem won‘t forward the prefix for you. Use a Fritzbox or one of the other few cable modems where you get full control.
pxeger1 4y ago
A 7-day moving average on this graph would be nice.
fulafel 4y ago
Northern countries have lower adoption, I wonder if IPv6 works better in warm climates.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  Higher mobile usage in Africa.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  IPV6 works better in countries that didn't start with a legacy ipv4 infrastructure.
  - ATsch 4y ago
    It works better for entities that were able to gobble up all of the ipv4 space before the rest had a chance in general
- FujiApple 4y ago
  Just a small anecdote (I’m usually based in Asia); Recently I’ve been building a network analysis tool (like mtr) and I wanted to test it on macOS with IPv6 and struggled to find _anywhere_ where I could (i.e. home broadband, office, Internet cafes, mobile hotspot etc). Of course, spinning up a cloud VM is an easy solution these days, but I was surprised at how poor the IPv6 adoption was where I live.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I sure wish Starlink supported IPv6. They're a brand new ISP planning for millions of customers and decided from the start they couldn't get enough IPv4 addresses for everyone. Fair enough! But we're stuck with Carrier Grade NAT and it is a drag. On Starlink it's impossible to host a server socket directly, which makes any peer to peer networking a PITA. Geocoding IP addresses doesn't work so I have to bend over backwards to convince, say, Youtube TV that I'm in the Sacramento metro and not LA where the POP is. Also the shared IP addresses seem to trip a lot of DDOS protection; I fill out 10x as many CAPTCHAs on Starlink as I do on my other ISP. And I sometimes get random network stability problems; a few weeks ago Starlink screwed something up so no one could keep a persistent connection up more than a few minutes. Seems to be fixed now, but I bet it was their CGNAT system. I realize half the world lives with CGNAT. It's not unusable, at least web browsing works more or less. But IPv6 would solve all these problems. A little surprised that a new ISP created in 2021 wouldn't have IPv6 support as one of their launch features. There's hints they are trying to get it working but it's not an official thing now. Some discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/tjr90n/starlink_ipv6_in_2022/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/tjr90n/starlink_i...
- sneak 4y ago
  Get a raspberry pi, set up two vlans, run wireguard, and send 100% of your uplink traffic to a remote vpn endpoint. This gets you off their IP, and also has the added benefit of not letting them analyze your traffic.
  - NelsonMinar 4y ago
    And adds 20ms+ latency, another complex point of failure, and potential problems depending on the reputation of the IP address block of wherever you're hosting the endpoint. I've used VPNs to smooth over various Starlink problems since I got the service and it helps but it's not a great solution.
    - stereo 4y ago
      My he.net ipv6 tunnel adds about 2ms of latency on average, which I can totally live with.
krnlpnc 4y ago
“In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF,[2] which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.” 40% adoption after 25 years? Really highlights how terrible IPv6 is in terms of backwards compatibility. What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack. The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful and time consuming, proven by the extremely slow adoption rate.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Despite the downvotes you are right. IPv6 replaces IPv4 rather than building on top of it and this really harmed adoption.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    I read all of the IPv6-ish proposals at the time, and they all had major problems of one kind or another. The chosen proposal "really harmed adoption" when compared to a pie in the sky, not to the other proposals.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  It's not as simple as that. There's no just "extending" the IPv4 stack unless you're going to "extend" every device that supports IPv4 with it. By that point you'd might as well just have IPv6.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack. My understanding is that the reason it's a new version is so existing IPv4 infrastructure would not need to be changed. This "ships in the night" approach has pros and cons, of course, but I'm personally happy to give folks who thought about this problem for many years the benefit of the doubt. > The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful and time consuming, proven by the extremely slow adoption rate. The beauty of the IPv6 approach is that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. I don't understand how it's "wasteful". Is it wasteful to support 3 versions of HTTP?
TekMol 4y ago
My website has a few hundred thousand users. My development is completely user driven. I get hundreds of feature requests and other emails regarding my site per month. So far, not a single user mentioned IPv6. So I never added an AAAA record. The codebase has grown for over 10 years now. God knows what subtle breakages would happen when IPv6 requests come in. I wonder if I ever will add IPv6 or just leave the site running on IPv4 forever.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > So I never added an AAAA record. IPv4 servers are reachable by IPv6-only clients. ipv6test.google.com famously has only an A (IPv4) record for a reason. > God knows what subtle breakages would happen when IPv6 requests come in. Unless your product deals with the nitty gritty of the networking stack itself, pretty sure everything continues to hum along just fine, if the basics are covered.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - aoetalks 4y ago
    >IPv4 servers are reachable by IPv6-only clients How does this work?
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      It unfortunately involves CGNATted IPv4, but it's either DS-Lite (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6333 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6333) where the end-user router emulates a dual-stack network but encapsulates IPv4 traffic on IPv6 from the perimeter to the CGNAT device at the ISP or just plain NAT64/DNS64 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6147 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6147) where IPv4 traffic is relayed at dedicated IPv6 addresses operated by the ISP with the help of special DNS (which might be the GP meant for IPv6-only networks, but it tends to be unreliable for a lot of reasons). In practice DNS64 is now being removed from a majority of networks because some specialty applications (I say "specialty" but these are work VPNs, conference systems and the like) reacts badly (because usually they can't understand IPv6 in the first place), replaced by either DS-Lite or plain dual-stack (possibly with CGNAT for IPv4).
kingsleyopara 4y ago
Can anyone explain why the trend is cyclical with a period of a week?
- Orochikaku 4y ago
  Office workers accessing the internet from their offices perhaps? My understanding is that NAT’s are more common for residential connections
- Dachande663 4y ago
  The peaks are on Saturdays so my guess is residential ISPs/personal traffic peaking on weekends while the mon-fri 9-5 are on older legacy IPv4 systems. But that's just a guess as the reason why.
  - kingsleyopara 4y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense.
  - mypalmike 4y ago
    Also, perhaps more people are out and about using mobile networks rather than WiFi on the weekends.
Teknoman117 4y ago
I'd be using IPv6, but it's not directly supported by Sonic Fiber in the bay area, strangely enough. Need to use 6in4 tunnelling if you want it.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  I’m a Sonic customer, and have a fully working IPv6 connection from them.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    How? https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000419168-Fiber-FAQ https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000419168-Fiber-... Gigabit fiber from them explicitly says it isn't supported.
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      Whoa. I have no idea. I absolutely, 100% certainly, do though. I have Sonic gigabit fiber, and can use IPv6 to connect to remote hosts (and can connect to my LAN from remote hosts on specific ports I have open).
      - zootboy 4y ago
        If your IPv6 prefix begins with 2602:240, then your router is using the Sonic 6RD tunnel.
        kstrauser 4y ago
        It doesn't. I'm in the 2600:1700 network.
totallyunknown 4y ago
At waipu.tv (Video streaming) we have 64% of users connected via IPv6. Compared to 2021 adoption has stalled. 2020 was 56%. waipu.tv is germany-only traffic.
- totallyunknown 4y ago
  Here the link from our Prometheus showing the data for 2020, 2021 and 2022: https://twitter.com/waipuTech/status/1543593614411964416?t=-Ozz78KoWcISXGlVVn56rQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/waipuTech/status/1543593614411964416?t=-...
staticassertion 4y ago
I realize there are a million ways to leak addresses, but in theory is a private ipv6 space brute forceable? ie: I have every service listen on a port on some IP, they all discover each other through some specific channel (like dns). Assuming the attacker doesn't have access to that channel, they would have to start scanning every ip to try to discover services, yeah?
- syrrim 4y ago
  There's neighbor discovery.
- doublepg23 4y ago
  There are ways to optimize an attack but pure brute force like IPv4 is impossible.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  On a local link, if you know the ipv6 address of one machine you can guess others by getting their device ID (MAC address) and then modifying the known address. So you can use neighbor discovery to find the other MAC addresses to craft the IP addresses. I think you can also take advantage of router advertisement or client solicitations somehow but I’m not familiar with the details (i.e. passive listening on multicast vis a vis broadcast)
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    Thanks. I'll have to do some googling on that.
spookyuser 4y ago
Can anyone tell me why my iPhone has 4 ipv6 addresses but only 1 ipv4 address. I just don’t understand what’s happening here
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/223050/why-do-i-have-2-ipv6-addresses https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/223050/why-do-i-ha...
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    Edit: my mind might been blurred by too many 4s and 6es, whoops. I thought it said "6 IPv6 addresses". This still doesn't explain why it's six though, although I can think of four simultaneous IPv6 addresses - transient and persistent GUAs (which are accessible to the internet) a ULA (equivalent to IPv4 private address but which is rare in practice) and a link-local address (for communication to the router).
    - DrudgeCorporate 4y ago
      https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363938 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363938
  - spookyuser 4y ago
    Thanks!
BirAdam 4y ago
Well… only about 10 years after headlines were fearmongering about the world breaking due to IP addresses not being available.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Hardly seems like “fear mongering”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Any given resource, as it becomes more scarce, goes up in price thus preventing there ever being zero of the given resource. The “world ending” result that fear mongering press outlets pushed is therefore not possible.
    - Dagger2 4y ago
      So why did you ever pay any mind to them? The world isn't going to end just because v4 addresses are scarce (...and I don't think anybody was arguing that it would...), but that doesn't make the problems any less real, expensive or damaging.
      - BirAdam 4y ago
        Good question. No idea. Hate reading? I am not certain. Probably should reflect on it a bit.
- cranekam 4y ago
  The “breakage” is happening. It’s just in the form of crappy solutions like CGNAT and DS-lite to work around the shortage rather than the internet just not working at all.
  - kazen44 4y ago
    also, ipv4 address space is becoming intrenched by large players because address pricing is becoming very expensive. Want to start a new service and require global connectivity, good luck winning IPv4 auctions because AWS is buying up all address space, even if they are not using it.
Pakdef 4y ago
wakeupcall 4y ago
My guess is mostly mobile traffic? I run a personal tech website containing OSS projects, and have been supporting v6 for more than a decade. Currently seeing few hundred unique visitors per day. IPv6 has been steady at ~15% of all inbound requests for the past 5 years, with zero signs of increase. Both my own fixed adsl service and a different mobile carrier do not offer v6, so I have to jump through hoops to verify my server setup.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Yeah I came here to say this. Mobile carriers in Sweden seem to have much better ipv6 support than regular broadband ISPs.
oldjavacoder 4y ago
None of the computers I own personally use IPv6. IPv6 is a bad idea. IPv6 is a straight connection from the Internet through everything in the network, right to the individual machine. Give my IPv4 and NAT or turn the Internet off.
- spystath 4y ago
  I know it's been repeated a million times by now, but NAT is not a replacement for a firewall. Most residential routers are deny in by default so you get zero incoming connections from the internet unless you open the relevant ports, exactly as with NAT.
  - roamerz 4y ago
    NAT is id10t proof though. It takes a concerted effort to set a static internal IP then NAT traffic to it and then allow that traffic through the firewall. The other advantage is that it obfuscates the internal addresses. IPV6 is is unnecessarily complex for what it solves. How hard would it have been to just add an additional octet? Pretty sure a large number of those that embrace it just love the opportunity to change something for the sake of change or their boss said do it. I’ll be sticking with IP4 as long as I can or until there is an actual benefit to IP6.
    - Dagger2 4y ago
      Quite hard, actually, since that's mostly what v6 already does and you can see how many things need to change to accommodate it. Most other parts of v6's design are the same as v4, so it's not really very complicated compared to what we've already got. (Of course v6 adds more than just one octet, since one additional octet wouldn't be enough even for the current size of the Internet, let alone for future growth. It would be really stupid to go through all this effort, only to have to turn around and do it all again immediately afterwards because you forgot to add enough the first time around.)
      - roamerz 4y ago
collsni 4y ago
The whole removal of nat and directly connecting to the destination with the source address seems like a privacy and security nightmare.. imo.. The security extension thing seems a bit wack. I'd still like all my traffic to originate from a single source and be tagged with that address only. This possible?
- bejelentkezni 4y ago
  You can use NAT6 if you insist but there's no reason to. The aforementioned privacy extensions keep you from being tracked long-term based on address alone and your firewall is still blocking incoming traffic.
- jhugo 4y ago
  Nothing stops you using site- or link-local addresses and NATing to a single (or several) public IPv6 addresses, just as you do with IPv4. There was no "removal of NAT", it's just not necessary any more. A proper firewall without NAT is generally fine, especially in combination with privacy extensions (which likely overall give better privacy than IPv4+NAT), but if you want to completely conceal the network layout behind your router, go nuts with NAT, no problem.
thedougd 4y ago
I appreciate IPv6 link local. mDNS + ipv6 ll addresses on my home network means I can connect to local devices, by name (mydevice.local) regardless of whether or not the router or DHCP/RA+DNS is working.
dboreham 4y ago
That was easy.
hss 4y ago
Glad to see India in deep green.
jrmg 4y ago
And if you click through to see the US, it’s over 50%.
0x006A 4y ago
Its mostly impossible to run servers only with IPv6 since for some reason Canonical/Ubuntu decided to require IPv4 for snap, after years of not having any issues with IPv6 only deb mirrors. Go is also basically bound to IPv4 since it depends on github to pull packages its time to make hall of shame for software that does not allow developers to build IPv6 only going forward.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > Go is also basically bound to IPv4 since it depends on github to pull packages Is this also true for the Go module proxy?
  - arccy 4y ago
    no: $ dig +short AAAA proxy.golang.org 2a00:1450:4009:820::2011
    - hnarn 4y ago
      So Go is not “basically bound to IPv4” since the proxy is enabled by default.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Wait, GitHub still doesn't support IPv6?
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Neither does DuckDuckGo. Been a feature request for >5 years now. I'm 99% certain that they turn off IPv6 to avoid complaints. Implementing IPv6 on a frontend load balancer is a trivial networking change. But the only way to ensure an IPv6 connection works is for the user's OS, networking, firewall, router, modem, ISP backend network, ISP DNS resolver, target website DNS, and target website load balancer & firewall, all have IPv6 configured properly. If a single step is misconfigured, or uses IPv6 tunneling/translation, every request might be blocked until the website disables IPv6. So don't support IPv6 at all and you avoid headaches. Avoiding an unnecessary support headache is the basic reason why IPv6 has existed for 26 years and yet Google can still barely get 40% use for its own website. Everybody loves to design a spaceship, but nobody designs for moving between spaceships mid-launch.
avsavani 4y ago
Seems like India is leading in IPv6 adoptions , Jio has leading ISP.
ralph84 4y ago
iCloud Private Relay is helping here. The network I’m on right now doesn’t have IPv6 but with iCloud Private Relay enabled visiting the IPv6 testing sites shows IPv6 in use.
prmoustache 4y ago
I am surprised of such a low number. ISP and mobile carriers have been supporting ipv6 for years already. Is it because a large portion of the traffic is done through corporate enterprise networks and proxies? Enterprises are the ones slowing down the adoption of ipv6.
teska 4y ago
In the UK at least one of our main providers Virgin Media has still not enabled support for IPv6, to the extent that websites such as https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ exist to vent frustration
kortex 4y ago
Question for the peanut gallery: Suppose I have a legacy ipv4 host which simply cannot do ipv6. Why couldn't I put some black box on my network connection in between my host and my uplink, which translates my host's IPv4 into a 4-over-6 IPv6 address? The black box can accept either v6 traffic and translate it for my host, or v4 and pass it straight through. The host only ever sees v4 traffic. V6-only clients can resolve an AAAA record against my host, and V4 clients can still resolve an A record. As long as there is sufficient penetration of these black boxes, virtually everything should be able to talk to everything over v6, and the v4 shim can be removed. I imagine this black box could be a relatively inexpensive ASIC or FPGA that could be a stand-alone widget, baked into hardware network adapters, or just built into routers, middleboxes, etc.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  You're basically describing Cloudflare. It is easy to make an IPv4 server accept IPv6 connections. It is relatively difficult to make an IPv4 client connect to IPv6 servers, because there aren't enough bits in the 'destination' field.
- wmf 4y ago
  That's basically NAT64+DNS64.
- lmm 4y ago
  > I imagine this black box could be a relatively inexpensive ASIC or FPGA that could be a stand-alone widget, baked into hardware network adapters, or just built into routers, middleboxes, etc. It's not that simple: - The box has to translate IPv6 address space into IPv4 address space, but it's too big to fit. So the box has to be some kind of stateful reverse NAT, with all the problems that that involves, and the hardware requirements go way up. - The IPv4-only host might make all sorts of assumptions about IPv4 addresses that are no longer valid. E.g. it might cut off addresses that it detects an attack from - but now as soon as two IPv6 addresess get mapped to the same IPv4 address you're going to block a legitimate user (in fact, since changing IPv6 address is easy, you're probably going to pretty quickly block the whole internet). E.g. it might expect to use an IPv4 geoIP database. E.g. it might be speaking a protocol like FTP where it's supposed to make an outbound connection to the client, so now your middlebox has to not only keep track of TCP streams but also the details of every protocol you want to be able to support.
roeles 4y ago
Around 2008, my university (utwente.nl) supported IPv6. Google contacted us, asking if they could wishlist our network for IPv6 Google services. We agreed.
alam2000 4y ago

316 points by leohonexus 4y ago

Meanwhile, Github is completely unreachable via IPv6 to this day. Found that out the hard way the other week when I went to order a build server without an IPv4.

samstave 4y ago
Did you make a pull request?
- 323 4y ago
  He can't access it to make a PR.
  - mardix 4y ago
    :)
xPaw 4y ago
Github also can't send webhooks to ipv6 only hosts.
judge2020 4y ago
I think they're extremely scared about their Enterprise github.com customers being unhappy when their IP allowlists or IP address audits are impacted by a switch to allowing v6 addresses, as this will surely lead to tons of headaches for their account managers. To add, if they're moving to Azure this might make IPv6 deployment complicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327773

zelphirkalt 4y ago

What happens to games and in general applications, which are old and only have an IPv4 input field? How is it bridged to IPv6? If a friend only has an IPv6 address, how can I connect to them? I guess I will have to set up a VPN, which internally uses IPv4 addressing?

metadat 4y ago
See other comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31967691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31967691

jmrm 4y ago

In my country, an ISP giving an IPv6 is rare, but using CG-NAT is incredibly common. I think they don't want to update the routers in the main nodes.

vmoore 4y ago

Anyone go out of their way to disable IPV6 on all their systems, even at the hardware level, like on routers etc? What's a good reason to avoid IPV6?

dekhn 4y ago
Yes I turn it off because it's always causing unpredictable problems. I actually tried to switch to all IPv6 and that was worse than ipv4 because you still need to run a full ipv4 stock to visit almost anything on the web without a proxy
leohonexus 4y ago
I recently disabled IPv6 on my home network to make firewall rules more manageable, and I was always under the impression IPv6 adoption was slow. So I was pretty surprised to check and see Google user's adoption has reached 40%. I feel like ISPs are a big push for that.
- patmorgan23 4y ago
  It's probably mostly from mobile carriers. Thought I know Comcast runs v6 on large portions of their residential networks.
cassianoleal 4y ago
If you have a large estate of IPv4 addresses, the more ubiquitous IPv6 gets, the less they're worth.
- zeristor 4y ago
  Not there yet it seems: https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/ https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    We're still at a point where at least 60$ of users (according to Google) are still IPv4-only. I imagine we're still a little far from the tipping point where IPv4 becomes less valuable.

shmde 4y ago

Are there any advantages to IPv6 other than more addresses ?

rhn_mk1 4y ago
https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/ipv4-vs-ipv6 https://www.thousandeyes.com/learning/techtorials/ipv4-vs-ip... Another, different take: http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-ipv6 http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/six-benefits-ipv6
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  The first link mentions no more NAT as an advantage, but I think it's actually one of the big issues holding up adoption. Rightly ot wrongly, since the 00's the perception is that sitting directly on the internet with a public address is a big security no-no.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    There's an argument to be made that mixing dynamic addresses with the pool of other users of the same ISP is beneficial for privacy. The fact that peer-to-peer applications can finally start working is an unquestionable advantage.
naniwaduni 4y ago
"More addresses" has a handful of knock-on benefits; or, perhaps more accurately, ipv6 would let greenfield systems skip out on some workarounds made necessary by not enough addresses.
cute_boi 4y ago
I just hope ipv6 doesn't have privacy nightmare that 1 device will always get 1 IP. Currently, the isp I use provides dynamic ip, so on every router restart my ip gets changed. If they starts to provide ipv6, I hope they give options to rotate it frequently, so toxic companies like meta, facebook, microsoft can't connect my device & ip.

smcl 4y ago

The per-country view is interesting - a huge country like India really going for it is good to see.

baybal2 4y ago
There is a huge phone network/ISP called Jio there. I read they are using 624 only.
- smcl 4y ago
  Weird, the stats on the first graph show the 6to4 traffic being extremely minimal
  - baybal2 4y ago
    I meant that they use NAT64, and it goes to Google over native v6

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

Why can't we paste aan ipv6 address into the browser address bar and have it go to that address? I'm forced to open [long brackets ] and the it works. Why!???? Ipv4 address just works without the hitch

bcook 4y ago
Because of colons. Colons separate the different sections of an ipv6 address but HTTP URLs also use colons for the port, so the ipv6 IP must be encompassed in brackets to differentiate between IP and port.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  is there "no" to automatically append brackets? like we do with ctrl+enter?
- p1mrx 4y ago
  If IPv6 had used dots instead, then addresses like "2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de" would be ambiguous between an IP address and a hostname. Perhaps they could've required every IPv6 address to use ".." exactly once for zero compression. Then you'd have "..2001.db8.1.2.3.4.beef.de", "2001.db8..beef.de", etc. I guess the nullary ".." could go in the middle, but that would enshrine the /64 boundary into the addressing scheme, which seems like a leaky abstraction.
oefrha 4y ago
Is "2001::0:8080" 2001::0 port 8080, or 2001::0:8080 port 80? There you go. Of course you can argue for automatic conversion when there's no ambiguity.
- Dagger2 4y ago
  It's 2001::0:8080 port 80. Require the brackets for specifying a port number with a v6 address, and don't accept a port without the brackets. That way there's no ambiguity.
jeroenhd 4y ago

michaelbuckbee 4y ago

I'm curious how much of this is mobile vs desktop. My assumption is that a much larger percentage of the traffic on mobile is ipv6.

skrause 4y ago
In Germany, where the Google statistics show 64% IPv6 adoption, mobile carriers were actually the last to support IPv6, but even the last mobile carrier enabled it around a year ago. Now it's mostly businesses that are still not using IPv6.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  I believe in the US ipv6 mobile adoption was much quicker.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I’m on Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland. IPv4 only, my only option would be to switch to CGNAT to get IPv6, which I’d rather not.
  - ravis11 4y ago
    Not sure why thats the case for you. I'm on Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland too and got full ipv4/ipv6 dual stack? Is that one of those regional limitations that Vodafone seems to have?
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      You are sure you are not behind a CGNAT? From what I’ve heard, that’s the case for everyone with IPv6.
    - sarnowski 4y ago
      Oftentimes you can just ask the customer service of Vodafone. If you reach a good agent, they will switch you away from CGNAT and you get a proper /56 public routable prefix on your cable line. Also works great for me. Be aware, the Vodafone modem won‘t forward the prefix for you. Use a Fritzbox or one of the other few cable modems where you get full control.

pxeger1 4y ago

A 7-day moving average on this graph would be nice.

fulafel 4y ago

Northern countries have lower adoption, I wonder if IPv6 works better in warm climates.

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
Higher mobile usage in Africa.
HWR_14 4y ago
IPV6 works better in countries that didn't start with a legacy ipv4 infrastructure.
- ATsch 4y ago
  It works better for entities that were able to gobble up all of the ipv4 space before the rest had a chance in general
FujiApple 4y ago
Just a small anecdote (I’m usually based in Asia); Recently I’ve been building a network analysis tool (like mtr) and I wanted to test it on macOS with IPv6 and struggled to find _anywhere_ where I could (i.e. home broadband, office, Internet cafes, mobile hotspot etc). Of course, spinning up a cloud VM is an easy solution these days, but I was surprised at how poor the IPv6 adoption was where I live.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

I sure wish Starlink supported IPv6. They're a brand new ISP planning for millions of customers and decided from the start they couldn't get enough IPv4 addresses for everyone. Fair enough! But we're stuck with Carrier Grade NAT and it is a drag. On Starlink it's impossible to host a server socket directly, which makes any peer to peer networking a PITA. Geocoding IP addresses doesn't work so I have to bend over backwards to convince, say, Youtube TV that I'm in the Sacramento metro and not LA where the POP is. Also the shared IP addresses seem to trip a lot of DDOS protection; I fill out 10x as many CAPTCHAs on Starlink as I do on my other ISP. And I sometimes get random network stability problems; a few weeks ago Starlink screwed something up so no one could keep a persistent connection up more than a few minutes. Seems to be fixed now, but I bet it was their CGNAT system. I realize half the world lives with CGNAT. It's not unusable, at least web browsing works more or less. But IPv6 would solve all these problems. A little surprised that a new ISP created in 2021 wouldn't have IPv6 support as one of their launch features. There's hints they are trying to get it working but it's not an official thing now. Some discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/tjr90n/starlink_ipv6_in_2022/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/tjr90n/starlink_i...

sneak 4y ago
Get a raspberry pi, set up two vlans, run wireguard, and send 100% of your uplink traffic to a remote vpn endpoint. This gets you off their IP, and also has the added benefit of not letting them analyze your traffic.
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  And adds 20ms+ latency, another complex point of failure, and potential problems depending on the reputation of the IP address block of wherever you're hosting the endpoint. I've used VPNs to smooth over various Starlink problems since I got the service and it helps but it's not a great solution.
  - stereo 4y ago
    My he.net ipv6 tunnel adds about 2ms of latency on average, which I can totally live with.

krnlpnc 4y ago

“In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF,[2] which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.” 40% adoption after 25 years? Really highlights how terrible IPv6 is in terms of backwards compatibility. What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack. The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful and time consuming, proven by the extremely slow adoption rate.

goodpoint 4y ago
Despite the downvotes you are right. IPv6 replaces IPv4 rather than building on top of it and this really harmed adoption.
- Arnt 4y ago
  I read all of the IPv6-ish proposals at the time, and they all had major problems of one kind or another. The chosen proposal "really harmed adoption" when compared to a pie in the sky, not to the other proposals.
neilalexander 4y ago
It's not as simple as that. There's no just "extending" the IPv4 stack unless you're going to "extend" every device that supports IPv4 with it. By that point you'd might as well just have IPv6.
CharlesW 4y ago
> What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack. My understanding is that the reason it's a new version is so existing IPv4 infrastructure would not need to be changed. This "ships in the night" approach has pros and cons, of course, but I'm personally happy to give folks who thought about this problem for many years the benefit of the doubt. > The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful and time consuming, proven by the extremely slow adoption rate. The beauty of the IPv6 approach is that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. I don't understand how it's "wasteful". Is it wasteful to support 3 versions of HTTP?

TekMol 4y ago

My website has a few hundred thousand users. My development is completely user driven. I get hundreds of feature requests and other emails regarding my site per month. So far, not a single user mentioned IPv6. So I never added an AAAA record. The codebase has grown for over 10 years now. God knows what subtle breakages would happen when IPv6 requests come in. I wonder if I ever will add IPv6 or just leave the site running on IPv4 forever.

ignoramous 4y ago
> So I never added an AAAA record. IPv4 servers are reachable by IPv6-only clients. ipv6test.google.com famously has only an A (IPv4) record for a reason. > God knows what subtle breakages would happen when IPv6 requests come in. Unless your product deals with the nitty gritty of the networking stack itself, pretty sure everything continues to hum along just fine, if the basics are covered.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aoetalks 4y ago
  >IPv4 servers are reachable by IPv6-only clients How does this work?
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    It unfortunately involves CGNATted IPv4, but it's either DS-Lite (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6333 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6333) where the end-user router emulates a dual-stack network but encapsulates IPv4 traffic on IPv6 from the perimeter to the CGNAT device at the ISP or just plain NAT64/DNS64 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6147 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6147) where IPv4 traffic is relayed at dedicated IPv6 addresses operated by the ISP with the help of special DNS (which might be the GP meant for IPv6-only networks, but it tends to be unreliable for a lot of reasons). In practice DNS64 is now being removed from a majority of networks because some specialty applications (I say "specialty" but these are work VPNs, conference systems and the like) reacts badly (because usually they can't understand IPv6 in the first place), replaced by either DS-Lite or plain dual-stack (possibly with CGNAT for IPv4).

kingsleyopara 4y ago

Can anyone explain why the trend is cyclical with a period of a week?

Orochikaku 4y ago
Office workers accessing the internet from their offices perhaps? My understanding is that NAT’s are more common for residential connections
Dachande663 4y ago
The peaks are on Saturdays so my guess is residential ISPs/personal traffic peaking on weekends while the mon-fri 9-5 are on older legacy IPv4 systems. But that's just a guess as the reason why.
- kingsleyopara 4y ago
  Thanks, that makes sense.
- mypalmike 4y ago
  Also, perhaps more people are out and about using mobile networks rather than WiFi on the weekends.

Teknoman117 4y ago

I'd be using IPv6, but it's not directly supported by Sonic Fiber in the bay area, strangely enough. Need to use 6in4 tunnelling if you want it.

kstrauser 4y ago
I’m a Sonic customer, and have a fully working IPv6 connection from them.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  How? https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000419168-Fiber-FAQ https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000419168-Fiber-... Gigabit fiber from them explicitly says it isn't supported.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Whoa. I have no idea. I absolutely, 100% certainly, do though. I have Sonic gigabit fiber, and can use IPv6 to connect to remote hosts (and can connect to my LAN from remote hosts on specific ports I have open).
    - zootboy 4y ago
      If your IPv6 prefix begins with 2602:240, then your router is using the Sonic 6RD tunnel.
      - kstrauser 4y ago
        It doesn't. I'm in the 2600:1700 network.

totallyunknown 4y ago

At waipu.tv (Video streaming) we have 64% of users connected via IPv6. Compared to 2021 adoption has stalled. 2020 was 56%. waipu.tv is germany-only traffic.

totallyunknown 4y ago
Here the link from our Prometheus showing the data for 2020, 2021 and 2022: https://twitter.com/waipuTech/status/1543593614411964416?t=-Ozz78KoWcISXGlVVn56rQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/waipuTech/status/1543593614411964416?t=-...

staticassertion 4y ago

I realize there are a million ways to leak addresses, but in theory is a private ipv6 space brute forceable? ie: I have every service listen on a port on some IP, they all discover each other through some specific channel (like dns). Assuming the attacker doesn't have access to that channel, they would have to start scanning every ip to try to discover services, yeah?

syrrim 4y ago
There's neighbor discovery.
doublepg23 4y ago
There are ways to optimize an attack but pure brute force like IPv4 is impossible.
dc-programmer 4y ago
On a local link, if you know the ipv6 address of one machine you can guess others by getting their device ID (MAC address) and then modifying the known address. So you can use neighbor discovery to find the other MAC addresses to craft the IP addresses. I think you can also take advantage of router advertisement or client solicitations somehow but I’m not familiar with the details (i.e. passive listening on multicast vis a vis broadcast)
- staticassertion 4y ago
  Thanks. I'll have to do some googling on that.

spookyuser 4y ago

Can anyone tell me why my iPhone has 4 ipv6 addresses but only 1 ipv4 address. I just don’t understand what’s happening here

ntoskrnl 4y ago
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/223050/why-do-i-have-2-ipv6-addresses https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/223050/why-do-i-ha...
- zinekeller 4y ago
  Edit: my mind might been blurred by too many 4s and 6es, whoops. I thought it said "6 IPv6 addresses". This still doesn't explain why it's six though, although I can think of four simultaneous IPv6 addresses - transient and persistent GUAs (which are accessible to the internet) a ULA (equivalent to IPv4 private address but which is rare in practice) and a link-local address (for communication to the router).
  - DrudgeCorporate 4y ago
    https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363938 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/363938
- spookyuser 4y ago
  Thanks!

BirAdam 4y ago

Well… only about 10 years after headlines were fearmongering about the world breaking due to IP addresses not being available.

CharlesW 4y ago
Hardly seems like “fear mongering”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Any given resource, as it becomes more scarce, goes up in price thus preventing there ever being zero of the given resource. The “world ending” result that fear mongering press outlets pushed is therefore not possible.
  - Dagger2 4y ago
    So why did you ever pay any mind to them? The world isn't going to end just because v4 addresses are scarce (...and I don't think anybody was arguing that it would...), but that doesn't make the problems any less real, expensive or damaging.
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      Good question. No idea. Hate reading? I am not certain. Probably should reflect on it a bit.
cranekam 4y ago
The “breakage” is happening. It’s just in the form of crappy solutions like CGNAT and DS-lite to work around the shortage rather than the internet just not working at all.
- kazen44 4y ago
  also, ipv4 address space is becoming intrenched by large players because address pricing is becoming very expensive. Want to start a new service and require global connectivity, good luck winning IPv4 auctions because AWS is buying up all address space, even if they are not using it.

Pakdef 4y ago

wakeupcall 4y ago

My guess is mostly mobile traffic? I run a personal tech website containing OSS projects, and have been supporting v6 for more than a decade. Currently seeing few hundred unique visitors per day. IPv6 has been steady at ~15% of all inbound requests for the past 5 years, with zero signs of increase. Both my own fixed adsl service and a different mobile carrier do not offer v6, so I have to jump through hoops to verify my server setup.

INTPenis 4y ago
Yeah I came here to say this. Mobile carriers in Sweden seem to have much better ipv6 support than regular broadband ISPs.

oldjavacoder 4y ago

None of the computers I own personally use IPv6. IPv6 is a bad idea. IPv6 is a straight connection from the Internet through everything in the network, right to the individual machine. Give my IPv4 and NAT or turn the Internet off.

spystath 4y ago
I know it's been repeated a million times by now, but NAT is not a replacement for a firewall. Most residential routers are deny in by default so you get zero incoming connections from the internet unless you open the relevant ports, exactly as with NAT.
- roamerz 4y ago
  NAT is id10t proof though. It takes a concerted effort to set a static internal IP then NAT traffic to it and then allow that traffic through the firewall. The other advantage is that it obfuscates the internal addresses. IPV6 is is unnecessarily complex for what it solves. How hard would it have been to just add an additional octet? Pretty sure a large number of those that embrace it just love the opportunity to change something for the sake of change or their boss said do it. I’ll be sticking with IP4 as long as I can or until there is an actual benefit to IP6.
  - Dagger2 4y ago
    Quite hard, actually, since that's mostly what v6 already does and you can see how many things need to change to accommodate it. Most other parts of v6's design are the same as v4, so it's not really very complicated compared to what we've already got. (Of course v6 adds more than just one octet, since one additional octet wouldn't be enough even for the current size of the Internet, let alone for future growth. It would be really stupid to go through all this effort, only to have to turn around and do it all again immediately afterwards because you forgot to add enough the first time around.)
    - roamerz 4y ago

collsni 4y ago

The whole removal of nat and directly connecting to the destination with the source address seems like a privacy and security nightmare.. imo.. The security extension thing seems a bit wack. I'd still like all my traffic to originate from a single source and be tagged with that address only. This possible?

bejelentkezni 4y ago
You can use NAT6 if you insist but there's no reason to. The aforementioned privacy extensions keep you from being tracked long-term based on address alone and your firewall is still blocking incoming traffic.
jhugo 4y ago
Nothing stops you using site- or link-local addresses and NATing to a single (or several) public IPv6 addresses, just as you do with IPv4. There was no "removal of NAT", it's just not necessary any more. A proper firewall without NAT is generally fine, especially in combination with privacy extensions (which likely overall give better privacy than IPv4+NAT), but if you want to completely conceal the network layout behind your router, go nuts with NAT, no problem.

thedougd 4y ago

I appreciate IPv6 link local. mDNS + ipv6 ll addresses on my home network means I can connect to local devices, by name (mydevice.local) regardless of whether or not the router or DHCP/RA+DNS is working.

dboreham 4y ago

That was easy.

hss 4y ago

Glad to see India in deep green.

jrmg 4y ago

And if you click through to see the US, it’s over 50%.

0x006A 4y ago

Its mostly impossible to run servers only with IPv6 since for some reason Canonical/Ubuntu decided to require IPv4 for snap, after years of not having any issues with IPv6 only deb mirrors. Go is also basically bound to IPv4 since it depends on github to pull packages its time to make hall of shame for software that does not allow developers to build IPv6 only going forward.

hnarn 4y ago
> Go is also basically bound to IPv4 since it depends on github to pull packages Is this also true for the Go module proxy?
- arccy 4y ago
  no: $ dig +short AAAA proxy.golang.org 2a00:1450:4009:820::2011
  - hnarn 4y ago
    So Go is not “basically bound to IPv4” since the proxy is enabled by default.
jacooper 4y ago
Wait, GitHub still doesn't support IPv6?
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Neither does DuckDuckGo. Been a feature request for >5 years now. I'm 99% certain that they turn off IPv6 to avoid complaints. Implementing IPv6 on a frontend load balancer is a trivial networking change. But the only way to ensure an IPv6 connection works is for the user's OS, networking, firewall, router, modem, ISP backend network, ISP DNS resolver, target website DNS, and target website load balancer & firewall, all have IPv6 configured properly. If a single step is misconfigured, or uses IPv6 tunneling/translation, every request might be blocked until the website disables IPv6. So don't support IPv6 at all and you avoid headaches. Avoiding an unnecessary support headache is the basic reason why IPv6 has existed for 26 years and yet Google can still barely get 40% use for its own website. Everybody loves to design a spaceship, but nobody designs for moving between spaceships mid-launch.

avsavani 4y ago

Seems like India is leading in IPv6 adoptions , Jio has leading ISP.

ralph84 4y ago

iCloud Private Relay is helping here. The network I’m on right now doesn’t have IPv6 but with iCloud Private Relay enabled visiting the IPv6 testing sites shows IPv6 in use.

prmoustache 4y ago

I am surprised of such a low number. ISP and mobile carriers have been supporting ipv6 for years already. Is it because a large portion of the traffic is done through corporate enterprise networks and proxies? Enterprises are the ones slowing down the adoption of ipv6.

teska 4y ago

In the UK at least one of our main providers Virgin Media has still not enabled support for IPv6, to the extent that websites such as https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ exist to vent frustration

kortex 4y ago

Question for the peanut gallery: Suppose I have a legacy ipv4 host which simply cannot do ipv6. Why couldn't I put some black box on my network connection in between my host and my uplink, which translates my host's IPv4 into a 4-over-6 IPv6 address? The black box can accept either v6 traffic and translate it for my host, or v4 and pass it straight through. The host only ever sees v4 traffic. V6-only clients can resolve an AAAA record against my host, and V4 clients can still resolve an A record. As long as there is sufficient penetration of these black boxes, virtually everything should be able to talk to everything over v6, and the v4 shim can be removed. I imagine this black box could be a relatively inexpensive ASIC or FPGA that could be a stand-alone widget, baked into hardware network adapters, or just built into routers, middleboxes, etc.

p1mrx 4y ago
You're basically describing Cloudflare. It is easy to make an IPv4 server accept IPv6 connections. It is relatively difficult to make an IPv4 client connect to IPv6 servers, because there aren't enough bits in the 'destination' field.
wmf 4y ago
That's basically NAT64+DNS64.
lmm 4y ago
> I imagine this black box could be a relatively inexpensive ASIC or FPGA that could be a stand-alone widget, baked into hardware network adapters, or just built into routers, middleboxes, etc. It's not that simple: - The box has to translate IPv6 address space into IPv4 address space, but it's too big to fit. So the box has to be some kind of stateful reverse NAT, with all the problems that that involves, and the hardware requirements go way up. - The IPv4-only host might make all sorts of assumptions about IPv4 addresses that are no longer valid. E.g. it might cut off addresses that it detects an attack from - but now as soon as two IPv6 addresess get mapped to the same IPv4 address you're going to block a legitimate user (in fact, since changing IPv6 address is easy, you're probably going to pretty quickly block the whole internet). E.g. it might expect to use an IPv4 geoIP database. E.g. it might be speaking a protocol like FTP where it's supposed to make an outbound connection to the client, so now your middlebox has to not only keep track of TCP streams but also the details of every protocol you want to be able to support.

roeles 4y ago

Around 2008, my university (utwente.nl) supported IPv6. Google contacted us, asking if they could wishlist our network for IPv6 Google services. We agreed.

alam2000 4y ago