11 ms·

IPv6 support for cloning Git repositories from GitHub

245 points by stargrave 4y ago

CottonMcKnight 4y ago
Considering how long it took AWS to add IPv6 to services across the board, I'm not surprised that it's taking so long. On the other hand, it would be nice if they would be transparent about the challenges or the reason for the delay, rather than radio silence or, at best, "we're working on it."
- bragr 4y ago
  It's debatable to extent that AWS has IPv6 across the board. Many seem to be using a 6 to 4 layer under the hood which can result in noticeable behavior.
- luhn 4y ago
  > Considering how long it took AWS to add IPv6 to services across the board Unfortunately all but a handful of their APIs have yet to support IPv6.
waffle_ss 4y ago
This shortcoming becomes immediately apparent when you try to use certain VMs, like from Vultr, which are IPv6-only with no CG-NAT. You can't clone anything or fetch any release binaries at all.
- geraldcombs 4y ago
  If your VM provider issues IPv4 addresses you can run into another issue: your v4 address might be dirty. I recently spun up a development VM and was unable to download packages from maven.org. Apparently the address had previously been used for abuse and ended up on a blocklist.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  Hmm, interesting. I tried Vultr a few months ago and had a number of issues, wonder if that was related. Is it common for a provider to only give out v6? My experiences is really only with Linode - which I've never had a problem with for years, and a bit of playing with DO which seemed fine but didn't wow me enough to move infra.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    Hetzner sells v6 only dedicated servers, you have to pay a little extra for a v4 address now. So yeah, I'd consider it pretty common. I have a weather station I run on T-Mobile which is v6only with a ipv4 CGNAT. I just Cloudflare the v6 endpoint and my legacy (v4) users can visit the station.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I'd be more accurate to say it's becoming common for providers that compete on price to give IPv6 a price advantage. I don't use Vultr, but they seem to occasionally have $2.50/month instances with IPv6 only. Hetzner charges you $0.50/month for an IPv4 IP for cloud instances, and $1.70/month for one for dedicated servers.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    As others have said it's getting more and more common on the low-cost providers (especially if you get outside the US/Europe and into Asia). But even then they often have an ability to get a NAT IPv4 connection out somehow.
pantalaimon 4y ago
I also don't understand what stops ycombinator from supporting IPv6. It's a pretty simple website, what's the big effort?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tambre 4y ago
  The most touted reason is that their anti-spam systems only support IPv4. Their old Cloudflare endpoint however is still alive and you can't disable IPv6 on Cloudflare so feel free to add the following to your /etc/hosts: 2606:4700::6810:686e news.ycombinator.com Interestingly when I tried to post the above comment over IPv6 I got a Cloudflare "You have been blocked" page. This might be something they do not want you to know! :D
  - fzfaa 4y ago
    I know of so many websites that break spectacularly when you do that...
  - codeflo 4y ago
    Wouldn’t it be reasonable for their backend to only accept (write) requests from whatever the anti-spam proxy is? Otherwise, there’s little point.
    - tambre 4y ago
      Currently there are no proxies in front and you connect directly to their baremetal server hosting the site. I presume the anti-spam system is custom-built and part of their own codebase. Cloudflare is officially sanctioned, but retired from widespread use.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    You in fact CAN disable ipv6 on Cloudflare, but they make you do it with an API request.
forgot_old_user 4y ago
This is sad :( hetzner charges extra for ipv4 address, and this means I couldn't run `git clone` without paying extra.
- longsword 4y ago
  > This is sad :( hetzner charges extra for ipv4 address, and this means I couldn't run `git clone` without paying extra Well, they added the Option, so you can get your server for less then normal. The Servers are cheaper, if you Opt-Out of IPv4. I really liked that move.
- blibble 4y ago
  with no NAT64 gateway or something similar to it? pretty lame by hetzner if that's the case
  - ugjka 4y ago
    IPv4 is only 0.64€ upsell
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      Unless you have a dedicated server, then it is quite a bit more expensive.
      - tiernano 4y ago
        2 euro if you want one primary ip is not that bad. If you want extra, yes, they charge more for a setup (20 up front for 1, still only 2 quid per month extra).
  - xnyanta 4y ago
    Hetzner has an official NAT64/DNS64 gateway you can use with their v6-only offerings.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
I think what a lot of people like to miss is that a lot of detection and antispam stuff is not working well on ipv6. A server without any ipv4 is still limited in many more ways than not being able to reach github which probably means there is not a lot of pressure for github yet.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Any quick info on why anti-spam/bot detection is harder on IPv6?
  - humanwhosits 4y ago
    My guess is that each user's IP suffix changes a lot more often
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    Probably because with IPv6 privacy is built-in somewhat into the protocol, eg you can have a different IP really easy. For example, I can see my desktop right now has 7 different addresses. Now, you could truncate this to eg a /64 or /56 range to identify users, but each ISP has different rules. Mine gives a /56, but I also hear many give only a /64 or less. As such, it basically means that you can’t really rely easily on IP addresses anymore for spam detection, rate limiting, etc. Note that I’m not an expert on spam filtering, but I do have quite some networking experience and QoS, and ran into these issues a lot.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      It's also the fact that having a datastructure that stores few bits per /24 range in RAM is very doable in IPv4. Banning a /24 doesn't have too much collateral damage. Whereas the same in IPv6 isn't feasible. There is no reasonable way to divide the IP space non-sparsely and keep in RAM and still ban without ending up banning a whole ISP.
      - zekica 4y ago
nfriedly 4y ago
My ISP (Metronet) uses CGNAT and refuses to touch IPv6. In my case, when I complained that port forwarding didn't work, they gave me a static IPv4 for free, but I have to call back once a year or else they start billing me $10/month for it. I don't need a static IP. I'd be completely fine with a dynamic IPv4 or even dynamic IPv6. But they don't offer that. Just static IPv4 or CGNAT IPv4. Oh well, some day...
- Symbiote 4y ago
  With most people leaving their router switched on all the time, the difference between a static and dynamic IPv4 address from the point of view of the ISP is probably marginal.
  - nfriedly 4y ago
    Yeah, that's true enough. I guess the point I was trying to make is that I think IPv6 is a better solution to their problem of not having enough IPv4 addresses.
  - foepys 4y ago
    In Germany all bigger DSL providers still disconnect you once a day and issue new IPs. Bad for at home hosting, good for privacy.
    - Wubdidu 4y ago
      Is that so? At least Telekom doesn't do that for IPv4 anymore. They do have a 24h dynamic prefix for IPv6 though (which feels very weird, considering they stopped doing that for IPv4)
      - dark-star 4y ago
        The ephemeral IPv6 addresses are just the IPv6 privacy extensions at work. They're just following RFCs I guess their router stack provides this for free, while the "Zwangstrennung" (disconnect every 24h) was implemented somewhere on their side. So it's actually easier now for them
dwheeler 4y ago
Lots of organizations do not support IPv6. For another example, Heroku does not (and many systems are based on Heroku): https://help.heroku.com/I8L6RW01/does-heroku-support-ipv6 https://help.heroku.com/I8L6RW01/does-heroku-support-ipv6 It's unfortunately harder to support IPv6 than I think it should be, so many organizations do not. I'd love to see GitHub support IPv6, but they are by no means the only one.
kuon 4y ago
For about 4 years I have considered IPv6 first and IPv4 second. If IPv6 has an issue, I consider the service down, not just half down or slightly non operational. If I call an ISP for an IPv6 issue, I say "internet is down" even if IPv4 is working. This policy helped move things forward on the networks I worked on. Lately I did setup a business internet with SLA, I specifically told the ISP I would not accept the contract if the SLA did not mention IPv6 as required. But it is still a lot of battle, where it should be the default. Github not fully supporting IPv6 is a real shame and they should really move things forward to support it quickly. Also, systems should not use IP addresses as a mean of security or authentication, it was a bad idea for IPv4, it is even a worst idea for IPv6. To give you an example of bad firewall behavior, I was checking my electric bill from the train, and suddenly my account got blocked, and it took me a lot of time and effort to fix (physical mail...). My IP changed while I was browsing a page and the firewall didn't like it.
- bityard 4y ago
  > For about 4 years I have considered IPv6 first and IPv4 second. If IPv6 has an issue, I consider the service down, not just half down or slightly non operational. If I call an ISP for an IPv6 issue, I say "internet is down" even if IPv4 is working. Wow, you live in a very different world than me. If I did that, I can 100% guarantee that the answer from the other end of the line would be, "The Internet is working for everyone else just fine, maybe try clearing your cookies. Have a nice day. click"
  - tiernano 4y ago
    That's the difference between residential and business class broadband. My isp in ireland, virgin media, has fairly useless support for residential, but for business, they are on the ball. And for enterprise (dedicated line in the office) they are even better. Suppose it depends on what you pay for.
  - kuon 4y ago
    I was speaking for business lines/contract. They usually have actual support with SLA. Residential is a lottery but local (public owned in a small village) will usually care.
sebazzz 4y ago
Well, if Github nowadays runs on Azure under the hood (which they probably don't) I understand. IPv6 support in Azure is patchy with many of their services.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I think they run their own servers; a little bit of DNS poking, followed by a traceroute, led me to what I think is a colo company called Twelve99. This is just for my region; I imagine they run servers in different datacenters all over the place, and maybe have some sort of presence in AWS or one of the other public clouds.
flas9sd 4y ago
from the NAT64 gateway in the thread I learned from ipv4 mapped ipv6 addresses 2001:67c:27e4:1064::140.82.121.3 github.com www.github.com if your curious too, see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6052#section-2.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6052#section-2.4
- remram 4y ago
  Does this use a gateway? edit: yes this is a gateway or "translator" (NAT), you can find a list of other public ones at https://go6lab.si/current-ipv6-tests/nat64dns64-public-test/ https://go6lab.si/current-ipv6-tests/nat64dns64-public-test/
pelorat 4y ago
Because of this post I decided to check my network interface statistics. I'm in the Netherlands and my IPv6 usage is ~10x that of IPv4.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
  in the US almost nobody uses v6. consumers or businesses
dark-star 4y ago
I have a dual stack DSL connection and do not particularly favor IPv4 or IPv6. But I just looked at my PiHole DNS statistics and I see that AAAA requests have taken over A requests by now, 47.2% vs 46.2%. Not much but it's something. I wasn't aware that over half of my internet traffic goes over IPv6 already
- Dagger2 4y ago
  That's just DNS requests, not traffic. You'd expect the number of A and AAAA requests to be about equal, because software simultaneously looks up both record types for each hostname in order to determine which protocols the hostname is reachable over. A number of high traffic sites (e.g. Youtube and Netflix) have v6, so you might find the percentage of your Internet traffic that goes over v6 is actually much higher than that.
- evgpbfhnr 4y ago
  That doesn't mean much. browsers etc usually request both AAAA and A in parallel, then try to connect to both in parallel (as soon as either reply comes in), and use whichever established connection first. Look for "happy eyeballs" That being said, looking at real stats (number of packets/bytes through ipv4 and ipv6 firewall on my home router) I have a x1.56 ratio in favor of ipv6. It really depends on what content you consume though.
xvilka 4y ago
Meanwhile in both India[1] and China[2] (two biggest countries by Internet users count) IPv6 is mandated by the national policy. Everyone else should do that, otherwise the transition would never be finished. ISPs and other network businesses should be forced to do upgrades by the law or policy, otherwise they will never allocate budget and resources for that. [1] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/india-sets-new-deadline-for-upgrading-internet-protocol-to-ipv6-heres-why-it-matters-553484.html https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/india-sets-new-de... [2] http://www.stdaily.com/English/ChinaNews/202208/e154b19bb5b04093b9f88424bf46ac75.shtml http://www.stdaily.com/English/ChinaNews/202208/e154b19bb5b0...
- gerdesj 4y ago
  I have had a dual stack at home and work for around a decade now but "Everyone else should do that" is a bit proscriptive. If it ain't broke (and it really isn't quite yet) then I suggest we crack on. IPv4/6 are simply transports, one has a larger address space and quite a lot of attitude! There are translation mechanisms so it is unlikely that anyone will be left behind. As systems move to IPv6, parts of IPv4 space are released and 6to4 n that tunnels can patch up the holes. You need to learn patience. It took me about two years to persuade a firm with around 6000 employees to deploy DHCP back in the day. I made sure it was everyone else's idea and took my time. That was a tiny thing. This is the entire internet and it requires a massive mindset shift, engineering, purchasing and what not. I'm going to tentatively put IPv4 -> IPv6 in the "paradigm shift" category. It isn't really technically: the wires (ethernet etc) are the same but the bits are somewhat different! If you really want to get steamed up then why not debate the semantics of how multi-WAN connections should work with IPv6? Suppose you have two ISP connections for WAN and hence two lots of addresses. How do you deal with an ISP outage? How do your PCs know which set of source addresses to use? Do you use NAT64 or NPT or something else. Another thing to consider is how do you "bootstrap" your network with IPv6 and how do you deal with a change of ISP? Do you set DNS servers with ULA addresses so they stay static or what? Bear in mind that SLAAC doesn't give out DNS servers. OK, lets do DHCPv6 ... not on Android ... IPv6 needs some care. It has been messed and muddled around with so many times and it still has some gaping holes. For me the biggest problem is the righteous indignation you find at nearly every turn where stuff gets broken for its own good. It all starts to go wrong with "everyone should"! The starry eyed approach that you think that India and China espouse is simply twaddle. No one really thinks that in the real world, despite what is said on TV. Nation policy of that sort is normally a case of "Do as I say and not as I do". In my opinion we should damn well continue to muddle along as best we can with what we've got. We will patch the flaws and paper over the cracks because that is what engineers do.

245 points by stargrave 4y ago

Considering how long it took AWS to add IPv6 to services across the board, I'm not surprised that it's taking so long. On the other hand, it would be nice if they would be transparent about the challenges or the reason for the delay, rather than radio silence or, at best, "we're working on it."

bragr 4y ago
It's debatable to extent that AWS has IPv6 across the board. Many seem to be using a 6 to 4 layer under the hood which can result in noticeable behavior.
luhn 4y ago
> Considering how long it took AWS to add IPv6 to services across the board Unfortunately all but a handful of their APIs have yet to support IPv6.

waffle_ss 4y ago

This shortcoming becomes immediately apparent when you try to use certain VMs, like from Vultr, which are IPv6-only with no CG-NAT. You can't clone anything or fetch any release binaries at all.

geraldcombs 4y ago
If your VM provider issues IPv4 addresses you can run into another issue: your v4 address might be dirty. I recently spun up a development VM and was unable to download packages from maven.org. Apparently the address had previously been used for abuse and ended up on a blocklist.
bongobingo1 4y ago
Hmm, interesting. I tried Vultr a few months ago and had a number of issues, wonder if that was related. Is it common for a provider to only give out v6? My experiences is really only with Linode - which I've never had a problem with for years, and a bit of playing with DO which seemed fine but didn't wow me enough to move infra.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  Hetzner sells v6 only dedicated servers, you have to pay a little extra for a v4 address now. So yeah, I'd consider it pretty common. I have a weather station I run on T-Mobile which is v6only with a ipv4 CGNAT. I just Cloudflare the v6 endpoint and my legacy (v4) users can visit the station.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I'd be more accurate to say it's becoming common for providers that compete on price to give IPv6 a price advantage. I don't use Vultr, but they seem to occasionally have $2.50/month instances with IPv6 only. Hetzner charges you $0.50/month for an IPv4 IP for cloud instances, and $1.70/month for one for dedicated servers.
- bombcar 4y ago
  As others have said it's getting more and more common on the low-cost providers (especially if you get outside the US/Europe and into Asia). But even then they often have an ability to get a NAT IPv4 connection out somehow.

pantalaimon 4y ago

I also don't understand what stops ycombinator from supporting IPv6. It's a pretty simple website, what's the big effort?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tambre 4y ago
The most touted reason is that their anti-spam systems only support IPv4. Their old Cloudflare endpoint however is still alive and you can't disable IPv6 on Cloudflare so feel free to add the following to your /etc/hosts: 2606:4700::6810:686e news.ycombinator.com Interestingly when I tried to post the above comment over IPv6 I got a Cloudflare "You have been blocked" page. This might be something they do not want you to know! :D
- fzfaa 4y ago
  I know of so many websites that break spectacularly when you do that...
- codeflo 4y ago
  Wouldn’t it be reasonable for their backend to only accept (write) requests from whatever the anti-spam proxy is? Otherwise, there’s little point.
  - tambre 4y ago
    Currently there are no proxies in front and you connect directly to their baremetal server hosting the site. I presume the anti-spam system is custom-built and part of their own codebase. Cloudflare is officially sanctioned, but retired from widespread use.
- exabrial 4y ago
  You in fact CAN disable ipv6 on Cloudflare, but they make you do it with an API request.

forgot_old_user 4y ago

This is sad :( hetzner charges extra for ipv4 address, and this means I couldn't run `git clone` without paying extra.

longsword 4y ago
> This is sad :( hetzner charges extra for ipv4 address, and this means I couldn't run `git clone` without paying extra Well, they added the Option, so you can get your server for less then normal. The Servers are cheaper, if you Opt-Out of IPv4. I really liked that move.
blibble 4y ago
with no NAT64 gateway or something similar to it? pretty lame by hetzner if that's the case
- ugjka 4y ago
  IPv4 is only 0.64€ upsell
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Unless you have a dedicated server, then it is quite a bit more expensive.
    - tiernano 4y ago
      2 euro if you want one primary ip is not that bad. If you want extra, yes, they charge more for a setup (20 up front for 1, still only 2 quid per month extra).
- xnyanta 4y ago
  Hetzner has an official NAT64/DNS64 gateway you can use with their v6-only offerings.
  - duskwuff 4y ago

the_mitsuhiko 4y ago

I think what a lot of people like to miss is that a lot of detection and antispam stuff is not working well on ipv6. A server without any ipv4 is still limited in many more ways than not being able to reach github which probably means there is not a lot of pressure for github yet.

djbusby 4y ago
Any quick info on why anti-spam/bot detection is harder on IPv6?
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  My guess is that each user's IP suffix changes a lot more often
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Probably because with IPv6 privacy is built-in somewhat into the protocol, eg you can have a different IP really easy. For example, I can see my desktop right now has 7 different addresses. Now, you could truncate this to eg a /64 or /56 range to identify users, but each ISP has different rules. Mine gives a /56, but I also hear many give only a /64 or less. As such, it basically means that you can’t really rely easily on IP addresses anymore for spam detection, rate limiting, etc. Note that I’m not an expert on spam filtering, but I do have quite some networking experience and QoS, and ran into these issues a lot.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    It's also the fact that having a datastructure that stores few bits per /24 range in RAM is very doable in IPv4. Banning a /24 doesn't have too much collateral damage. Whereas the same in IPv6 isn't feasible. There is no reasonable way to divide the IP space non-sparsely and keep in RAM and still ban without ending up banning a whole ISP.
    - zekica 4y ago

nfriedly 4y ago

My ISP (Metronet) uses CGNAT and refuses to touch IPv6. In my case, when I complained that port forwarding didn't work, they gave me a static IPv4 for free, but I have to call back once a year or else they start billing me $10/month for it. I don't need a static IP. I'd be completely fine with a dynamic IPv4 or even dynamic IPv6. But they don't offer that. Just static IPv4 or CGNAT IPv4. Oh well, some day...

Symbiote 4y ago
With most people leaving their router switched on all the time, the difference between a static and dynamic IPv4 address from the point of view of the ISP is probably marginal.
- nfriedly 4y ago
  Yeah, that's true enough. I guess the point I was trying to make is that I think IPv6 is a better solution to their problem of not having enough IPv4 addresses.
- foepys 4y ago
  In Germany all bigger DSL providers still disconnect you once a day and issue new IPs. Bad for at home hosting, good for privacy.
  - Wubdidu 4y ago
    Is that so? At least Telekom doesn't do that for IPv4 anymore. They do have a 24h dynamic prefix for IPv6 though (which feels very weird, considering they stopped doing that for IPv4)
    - dark-star 4y ago
      The ephemeral IPv6 addresses are just the IPv6 privacy extensions at work. They're just following RFCs I guess their router stack provides this for free, while the "Zwangstrennung" (disconnect every 24h) was implemented somewhere on their side. So it's actually easier now for them

dwheeler 4y ago

Lots of organizations do not support IPv6. For another example, Heroku does not (and many systems are based on Heroku): https://help.heroku.com/I8L6RW01/does-heroku-support-ipv6 https://help.heroku.com/I8L6RW01/does-heroku-support-ipv6 It's unfortunately harder to support IPv6 than I think it should be, so many organizations do not. I'd love to see GitHub support IPv6, but they are by no means the only one.

kuon 4y ago

For about 4 years I have considered IPv6 first and IPv4 second. If IPv6 has an issue, I consider the service down, not just half down or slightly non operational. If I call an ISP for an IPv6 issue, I say "internet is down" even if IPv4 is working. This policy helped move things forward on the networks I worked on. Lately I did setup a business internet with SLA, I specifically told the ISP I would not accept the contract if the SLA did not mention IPv6 as required. But it is still a lot of battle, where it should be the default. Github not fully supporting IPv6 is a real shame and they should really move things forward to support it quickly. Also, systems should not use IP addresses as a mean of security or authentication, it was a bad idea for IPv4, it is even a worst idea for IPv6. To give you an example of bad firewall behavior, I was checking my electric bill from the train, and suddenly my account got blocked, and it took me a lot of time and effort to fix (physical mail...). My IP changed while I was browsing a page and the firewall didn't like it.

bityard 4y ago
> For about 4 years I have considered IPv6 first and IPv4 second. If IPv6 has an issue, I consider the service down, not just half down or slightly non operational. If I call an ISP for an IPv6 issue, I say "internet is down" even if IPv4 is working. Wow, you live in a very different world than me. If I did that, I can 100% guarantee that the answer from the other end of the line would be, "The Internet is working for everyone else just fine, maybe try clearing your cookies. Have a nice day. click"
- tiernano 4y ago
  That's the difference between residential and business class broadband. My isp in ireland, virgin media, has fairly useless support for residential, but for business, they are on the ball. And for enterprise (dedicated line in the office) they are even better. Suppose it depends on what you pay for.
- kuon 4y ago
  I was speaking for business lines/contract. They usually have actual support with SLA. Residential is a lottery but local (public owned in a small village) will usually care.

sebazzz 4y ago

Well, if Github nowadays runs on Azure under the hood (which they probably don't) I understand. IPv6 support in Azure is patchy with many of their services.

kelnos 4y ago
I think they run their own servers; a little bit of DNS poking, followed by a traceroute, led me to what I think is a colo company called Twelve99. This is just for my region; I imagine they run servers in different datacenters all over the place, and maybe have some sort of presence in AWS or one of the other public clouds.

flas9sd 4y ago

from the NAT64 gateway in the thread I learned from ipv4 mapped ipv6 addresses 2001:67c:27e4:1064::140.82.121.3 github.com www.github.com if your curious too, see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6052#section-2.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6052#section-2.4

remram 4y ago
Does this use a gateway? edit: yes this is a gateway or "translator" (NAT), you can find a list of other public ones at https://go6lab.si/current-ipv6-tests/nat64dns64-public-test/ https://go6lab.si/current-ipv6-tests/nat64dns64-public-test/

pelorat 4y ago

Because of this post I decided to check my network interface statistics. I'm in the Netherlands and my IPv6 usage is ~10x that of IPv4.

ranger_danger 4y ago
in the US almost nobody uses v6. consumers or businesses

dark-star 4y ago

I have a dual stack DSL connection and do not particularly favor IPv4 or IPv6. But I just looked at my PiHole DNS statistics and I see that AAAA requests have taken over A requests by now, 47.2% vs 46.2%. Not much but it's something. I wasn't aware that over half of my internet traffic goes over IPv6 already

Dagger2 4y ago
That's just DNS requests, not traffic. You'd expect the number of A and AAAA requests to be about equal, because software simultaneously looks up both record types for each hostname in order to determine which protocols the hostname is reachable over. A number of high traffic sites (e.g. Youtube and Netflix) have v6, so you might find the percentage of your Internet traffic that goes over v6 is actually much higher than that.
evgpbfhnr 4y ago
That doesn't mean much. browsers etc usually request both AAAA and A in parallel, then try to connect to both in parallel (as soon as either reply comes in), and use whichever established connection first. Look for "happy eyeballs" That being said, looking at real stats (number of packets/bytes through ipv4 and ipv6 firewall on my home router) I have a x1.56 ratio in favor of ipv6. It really depends on what content you consume though.

xvilka 4y ago

Meanwhile in both India[1] and China[2] (two biggest countries by Internet users count) IPv6 is mandated by the national policy. Everyone else should do that, otherwise the transition would never be finished. ISPs and other network businesses should be forced to do upgrades by the law or policy, otherwise they will never allocate budget and resources for that. [1] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/india-sets-new-deadline-for-upgrading-internet-protocol-to-ipv6-heres-why-it-matters-553484.html https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/india-sets-new-de... [2] http://www.stdaily.com/English/ChinaNews/202208/e154b19bb5b04093b9f88424bf46ac75.shtml http://www.stdaily.com/English/ChinaNews/202208/e154b19bb5b0...

gerdesj 4y ago
I have had a dual stack at home and work for around a decade now but "Everyone else should do that" is a bit proscriptive. If it ain't broke (and it really isn't quite yet) then I suggest we crack on. IPv4/6 are simply transports, one has a larger address space and quite a lot of attitude! There are translation mechanisms so it is unlikely that anyone will be left behind. As systems move to IPv6, parts of IPv4 space are released and 6to4 n that tunnels can patch up the holes. You need to learn patience. It took me about two years to persuade a firm with around 6000 employees to deploy DHCP back in the day. I made sure it was everyone else's idea and took my time. That was a tiny thing. This is the entire internet and it requires a massive mindset shift, engineering, purchasing and what not. I'm going to tentatively put IPv4 -> IPv6 in the "paradigm shift" category. It isn't really technically: the wires (ethernet etc) are the same but the bits are somewhat different! If you really want to get steamed up then why not debate the semantics of how multi-WAN connections should work with IPv6? Suppose you have two ISP connections for WAN and hence two lots of addresses. How do you deal with an ISP outage? How do your PCs know which set of source addresses to use? Do you use NAT64 or NPT or something else. Another thing to consider is how do you "bootstrap" your network with IPv6 and how do you deal with a change of ISP? Do you set DNS servers with ULA addresses so they stay static or what? Bear in mind that SLAAC doesn't give out DNS servers. OK, lets do DHCPv6 ... not on Android ... IPv6 needs some care. It has been messed and muddled around with so many times and it still has some gaping holes. For me the biggest problem is the righteous indignation you find at nearly every turn where stuff gets broken for its own good. It all starts to go wrong with "everyone should"! The starry eyed approach that you think that India and China espouse is simply twaddle. No one really thinks that in the real world, despite what is said on TV. Nation policy of that sort is normally a case of "Do as I say and not as I do". In my opinion we should damn well continue to muddle along as best we can with what we've got. We will patch the flaws and paper over the cracks because that is what engineers do.