8 ms·

I'm ignorant on these things, so please inform me - but given IPv6's awful adoption rate, and given how foreign it's numbering scheme is to many, why can't we i

by Alupis 3y ago

I'm ignorant on these things, so please inform me - but given IPv6's awful adoption rate, and given how foreign it's numbering scheme is to many, why can't we introduce IPv7 and just extend the IPv4 scheme with additional octets? Something like 0.0.0.0.0.0.0 and everything without the correct number of octets just gets filled with zeros. So 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1. Then also don't give out /8's to universities and the like (repeating old mistakes). This is probably naive, but it seems it would be easier for people to use vs. 2661:919a:023e:911a:44dc:f656:233e:8816

Macha 3y ago
Because the problem is not the numeric representation. The problem is when you get a message from 1.0.0.0.1.1.1.1 to 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1, and 192.168.0.1 is an IPv4 only device, what are you going to tell 192.168.0.1 about the source address? There's only a 32 bit field in the protocol. Are you going to lie and tell it it's 1.1.1.1? Congrats, you've just reinvented NAT. Enjoy your stateful boundary system and all that complexity again. Are you going to add some extension to IPv4 and try convince everyone to upgrade all their hardware, software and configurations? Then you have the exact same problem IPv6 adoption had, except IPv6 adoption is at like 45% globally and your new scheme is at 0%: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html If you have some other idea, make sure to check it against the list of IPv6 transition mechanisms before commenting - it probably exists for IPv6, and ultimately all of them have been displaced by dual stacking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism
- Alupis 3y ago
  > There's only a 32 bit field in the protocol IPv6 is 128 bits... so we already made a change. Why can IPv7 not be 128 bits as well, but vastly more readable/recognizable than IPv6. Hex is hard on the eyes, especially for those who don't stare at it all day.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    > Hex is hard on the eyes Thankfully there is near-100% compliance with PTR reverse-dns for IPv6 addresses and networks. /s
  - Macha 3y ago
    The move to hex is to avoid people having to memorise all these offhands like "so a /27 is x.x.x.0-31". Instead every "4" in the subnet is another digit. But also do you think 24414.64517.21200.44298.46574.49887.23623.7394 is really that much easier to type? Or 231.22.96.68.14.229.38.41.242.44.72.220.156.50.232.95 if you keep to 8 bit octets?
    - Alupis 3y ago
      Maybe I'm weird, but I do in fact think that is easier. People memorize long numbers all the time, such as SSN, phone numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, etc. People are not very good at memorizing lengthy alphanumeric sequences such as randomized passwords. I don't know why, but it "just is". But - > The move to hex is to avoid people having to memorise all these offhands Point taken. It does seem in practice though people will still have a need to memorize/recognize addresses for various purposes, such as administration/dns/etc.
      - nottorp 3y ago
        > People memorize long numbers all the time, such as SSN, phone numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, etc. People are not very good at memorizing lengthy alphanumeric sequences such as randomized passwords. It's easy. Long sequence of 10 possible tokens that we're always used to seeing together. Easier to memorize because you subconsciously use any patterns you notice, and with just 10 possibilities the patterns are there. And you've been reading sequences of digits since you were old enough to get given pocket money. Vs long sequence of 16 possible tokens, of which 10 belong in one cognitive group and 6 in another. The extra 6 you've never memorized before in random order because they're for representing your language and that has other ingrained patterns. Let's not forget they admitted ipv6 addresses are too long and allow you to skip parts of it so now you have to count the colons carefully...
- tomxor 3y ago
  > IPv6 adoption is at like 45% globally [...] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html > link -> The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6 How does this work in practice, does user equipment end up with dual IPv4 IPv6? if not how do they access IPv4 only sites (of which there are still plenty)?
  - Macha 3y ago
    The way it's supposed to work is the ISP delegates a prefix to the user's router, the router will advertise for that subnet and client devices will use slaac to configure their ipv6 addresses. Meanwhile for IPv4 it operates as normal. For incumbent, mostly wired, Western ISPs that means a pool of IPv4 addresses and subscriber level NAT. For everyone else, that probably means CGNAT.
  - orangeboats 3y ago
    It's just as you have described, this is called dual stacking and is currently the most common type of IPv6 deployment. Alternatively, cellular ISPs may make use of NAT64+DNS64. In this case, the IPv4 addresses are combined with a NAT64 prefix (most likely 64:ff9b::/96), producing addresses such as `64:ff9b::198.51.100.1`. It is effectively the same as CGNAT, but pretty much everything is single stacked IPv6 up to the IPv4<->IPv6 border relay in the ISP network.
  - Goz3rr 3y ago
    My ISP gives me both an IPv4 address and a heap of IPv6, most browsers will use what is called Happy Eyeballs to try both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time and use the one that connects the fastest.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Are you going to lie and tell it it's 1.1.1.1? Congrats, you've just reinvented NAT. Enjoy your stateful boundary system and all that complexity again. (Shrug) It works. What problem is being solved here, again?
  - nottorp 3y ago
    The funding of the ipv6 commitee probably. And porn for those who like overcomplicated 'enterprisey' solutions where they aren't needed.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Just look at your favourite game console provider's forum discussions on "NAT types" and you'll see that it really doesn't. Or try self host on CGNAT. Or realise the only direction for IPv4 prices at AWS etc. is up
- arp242 3y ago
  > Are you going to add some extension to IPv4 and try convince everyone to upgrade all their hardware, software and configurations? Then you have the exact same problem IPv6 adoption had Yeah, so I'm going to say that's just not true. If IPv6 had been significantly simpler (e.g. by mainly focusing on increasing the address space) then adoption would be much higher today – probably universal. The problem is that IPv6 changes a lot, and that implementing it is a fair amount of work. The entire business with tunnel brokers and other compatibility schemes are complex and difficult to use. To completely change gears now would be silly and too late, but it's been almost 30 years and it baffles me how anyone does not consider the entire thing a spectacular failure. People use Python 3 as a warning about compatibility, but IPv6 is a much larger catastrofuck, and that's largely due to decisions IPv6 people made. Whether IPv6 is "better" or not doesn't even come in to play.
Plasmoid 3y ago
This comes up every time IPv6 is discussed. Any change to IPv4 to extend the IP space (eg your example) would require a breaking change to the specification. So this would require changing every router on the planet to support it. You're also focusing on how the IP address is written when that doesn't really matter. Changing the format isn't dragging out IP adoption.
- chungy 3y ago
  Changing the IP protocol to support more stuff has been considered... that's how we got IPv6 in the first place.
Twirrim 3y ago
Awful adoption rate? https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html It's sitting just shy of 45%, based on what Google sees, and growing at a steady pace. The main issue is not technical, it's need. Right now, everything is accessible over IPv4, and probably over IPv6. There's no negative consequences from not having IPv4, it really needs initiatives like this one, and the US federal government one to drive things forwards (US federal agencies have to be single-stack IPv6 within a couple of years, which is forcing every government dealing vendor to get their act together on IPv6)
- wharvle 3y ago
  A couple months ago I got a new router and some stuff didn’t work until I turned off ipv6 (I don’t recall what, exactly) I tried that solution early because when I first got Google Fiber the Amazon store website didn’t load, on any machine in our house, until I turned off ipv6. If stuff tries to route over ipv6, it doesn’t work, has been my entire experience with the protocol on the open internet (private networks seem Ok)
  - denysvitali 3y ago
    Next time try: https://test-ipv6.com/ https://test-ipv6.com/ If you get 10/10 here everything should work. Most likely your issue was a firewall rule on the IPv6 part, or a misconfigured DNS server (only returning A records)
    - wharvle 3y ago
      My home connection fails because it’s disabled (of course). Kicked my phone over to my T-Mobile cell connection. Finds that I have an ipv6 address, but dies on one of the first tests. It’s 2024 and I have two major US ISPs available and neither will let me reliably use IPv6 unless I’m on a vpn and the addresses are all private ones that don’t (logically) route to the Internet.
viraptor 3y ago
> IPv6's awful adoption rate https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ~50% worldwide with lots of countries way over that is not what I'd call awful. > introduce IPv7 and just extend the IPv4 scheme? Every proposal like that requires changing all the routing hardware anyway, because we effectively ran out of bits in the IP packets to mark anything new. And once you need to change hardware, you may as well just go with a better designed protocol like ipv6. > This is probably naive, but it seems it would be easier for people to use vs. ... People don't use IP addresses anymore. DNS and local discovery covers this for anyone apart from geeks and IT people. If it doesn't, it's a bug at this point.
- Alupis 3y ago
  > https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ~50% worldwide with lots of countries way over that is not what I'd call awful. IPv6 was drafted in 1998, and ratified in 2017. 7 years after becoming "official" only 50% adoption rate world-wide is not what I would call stellar either. Also, looking at that chart it's closer to 40%...
  - Macha 3y ago
    Industry doesn't adopt a thing until there is a need for it. In 1998, there really wasn't a need for it. Now there is. So now it gets adopted. News at 11.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Also, it's worth to keep in mind the delay on the hardware replacement. There were home routers which didn't support ipv6 even 7 years ago. And there many home routers deployed today which are over 7 years old. Also, my provider fully supports IPv6 and so does my hardware, but I have to click a button in the control panel to activate it explicitly. That's practically around a million of people who could be on IPv6 right now if they just opted in.
      - 3y ago
sylware 3y ago
In my country, rare are the ISPs which don't provide IPv6 (it has been the case for years, and that includes mobile internet). I think the lagging services about ipv6 are steam, github, HN, and a few smtp servers here and there.
- Seb-C 3y ago
  I think that Reddit and AWS are mostly non-ipv6 yet as well, that's a pretty big deal.
  - sylware 3y ago
    Oh, I don't use reddit, but AWS... mmmmh... and that makes me think about akamai. It seems ipv6 is slowed down by big tech, the one with the bucks to move to ipv6, paradox, or they know IPv4 mechanically favor strongley centralized services? As it is toxic to clean and simple p2p protocols? mmmmmh....
orangeboats 3y ago
>IPv6's awful adoption rate 40+% adoption rate since the World IPv6 Launch Day in 2012 is not what I would call awful [0]. >extend the IPv4 scheme with additional octets? To clarify, IPv6 and IPv4 addresses are effectively just a number. On Linux, you can even do `ping 16843009` and see the tool actually pinging the address 1.1.1.1! The octets you see in typical IPv4 addresses, or the hextets in IPv6 ones, are just a way to represent those addresses. If you think the address representation is the main thing holding IPv6 back, you are thinking it wrong. The most likely reason is actually software & hardware support, and the industry's general sentiment of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" keeping NATs alive. >seems it would be easier for people to use The ship has already sailed. If IPv4 addresses are really that easy to remember, DNS would not have been invented. Furthermore, when it comes to memorization of IPv6 addresses it's very helpful to split them into two halves. The second half can change rather arbitrarily (to maintain privacy by preventing address tracking), but the first half often won't because it is assigned to you by the ISP. [0]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
Dylan16807 3y ago
If you mostly dislike the long addresses, you can cut out the second half. You can make your device be 2661:919a:023e:9100::1. If you want a near-exact equivalent of 192.168.0.1, then you can use fec0::1 or fd00::1. That's even shorter than IPv4! You kind of shouldn't, but it'll work fine for a tiny network. But as other people have explained, the compatibility will be just as bad. And IPv6 does have address ranges like that. Nobody talks about them because not much can be done with them.
- Macha 3y ago
  And the reason it's recommended against is that you might later decide to join your local network to another one and then you'll have to renumber them. Which is exactly the same problem with IPv4 local addresses. Except unlike IPv4, there is a mechanism to prevent that ahead of time
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Which is absolutely important once you're a business with a bunch of subnets, the kind of network that would be on 10. in IPv4. If you're on 192.168 and you just want the convenient addresses, go for it.
patmorgan23 3y ago
If you're typing out IP addresses your doing it wrong. We've had DNS for checks watch 40 years. IPv6 isn't THAT different from IPv4. It's a 128 bit number instead of a 32 bit number. When righting it out we use hex (because it's shorter). We use multicast instead of broadcast so your Subnets can be bigger The smallest subnet is /64 so vendors can do optimization hardware. Routers announce the prefix they route (and a DNS server) and let endpoints autoconfigure(with built in IP conflict detection!). Instead of a stateful DHCP server(which is still an option). And we let nodes have local and global addresses so issues with the router don't necessarily break local communication. (And they're easy to tell apart, if starts with an f it's a local adress, if it starts with 2 it's a global address) That's pretty much all that's different. 80% of what's different is the address space.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Having done basic tech support, sometimes typing out addresses is necessary. You'd think mDNS would help computers find your modem when you're first setting up your internet connection, but the super "helpful" modern browsers all try to go to google.com/search?q=myrouter.localnet even if mDNS is providing various IP addresses to try first. That's not IPv6's fault, but it is a pain. Especially considering that local networks differ from router to router, making it impossible to write a manual to access a router's settings for when the thing needs to be configured before it can connect to the internet. Of course, in those cases there's nothing preventing manufacturers from providing some 192.168/16 IPv4 addresses for those specific use cases (and not route them to the internet). I've even seen one manufacturer listen on a bunch of 169.254/16 addresses for when DHCP fails somehow, and I think that'd solve the problem perfectly without even needing a DHCPv4 server.
  - nijave 3y ago
    169.254 is IPv4 link local range like IPv6 fe80 Windows will try to auto configure with a 169.254 link local if DHCP is unavailable. Not sure if anyone is actually using them for LAN. They come up sometimes in point to point or for other shenanigans (commonly on cloud or virtualized networks for special services) Afaik for Firefox and Chrome you can add a trailing / to prevent it from doing a web search and attempt to do a DNS lookup instead
p_l 3y ago
Because that would be starting from scratch the migration with all the warts and less of the benefits. About the only part that would be easier is that more people use less broken APIs compared to BSD Sockets, with getaddrinfo and similar solutions ported from XTI/Plan9 finally becoming the norm. So no more "you need to duplicate code to add support for new IP version". But that's still worse than migrating to v6, which has widespread hardware support in switching equipment, considerable preference in mobile networks and not only (TL;Dr it's cheaper to use v6 to carry v4 traffic using 464 stateless translation rather than other forms of CGNAT), and some IOT systems (industrial, not home stuff) are v6-only if they have IP connectivity on the embedded side at all.

by Alupis 3y ago

Macha 3y ago

Because the problem is not the numeric representation. The problem is when you get a message from 1.0.0.0.1.1.1.1 to 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1, and 192.168.0.1 is an IPv4 only device, what are you going to tell 192.168.0.1 about the source address? There's only a 32 bit field in the protocol. Are you going to lie and tell it it's 1.1.1.1? Congrats, you've just reinvented NAT. Enjoy your stateful boundary system and all that complexity again. Are you going to add some extension to IPv4 and try convince everyone to upgrade all their hardware, software and configurations? Then you have the exact same problem IPv6 adoption had, except IPv6 adoption is at like 45% globally and your new scheme is at 0%: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html If you have some other idea, make sure to check it against the list of IPv6 transition mechanisms before commenting - it probably exists for IPv6, and ultimately all of them have been displaced by dual stacking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanism

Alupis 3y ago
> There's only a 32 bit field in the protocol IPv6 is 128 bits... so we already made a change. Why can IPv7 not be 128 bits as well, but vastly more readable/recognizable than IPv6. Hex is hard on the eyes, especially for those who don't stare at it all day.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  > Hex is hard on the eyes Thankfully there is near-100% compliance with PTR reverse-dns for IPv6 addresses and networks. /s
- Macha 3y ago
  The move to hex is to avoid people having to memorise all these offhands like "so a /27 is x.x.x.0-31". Instead every "4" in the subnet is another digit. But also do you think 24414.64517.21200.44298.46574.49887.23623.7394 is really that much easier to type? Or 231.22.96.68.14.229.38.41.242.44.72.220.156.50.232.95 if you keep to 8 bit octets?
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Maybe I'm weird, but I do in fact think that is easier. People memorize long numbers all the time, such as SSN, phone numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, etc. People are not very good at memorizing lengthy alphanumeric sequences such as randomized passwords. I don't know why, but it "just is". But - > The move to hex is to avoid people having to memorise all these offhands Point taken. It does seem in practice though people will still have a need to memorize/recognize addresses for various purposes, such as administration/dns/etc.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > People memorize long numbers all the time, such as SSN, phone numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, etc. People are not very good at memorizing lengthy alphanumeric sequences such as randomized passwords. It's easy. Long sequence of 10 possible tokens that we're always used to seeing together. Easier to memorize because you subconsciously use any patterns you notice, and with just 10 possibilities the patterns are there. And you've been reading sequences of digits since you were old enough to get given pocket money. Vs long sequence of 16 possible tokens, of which 10 belong in one cognitive group and 6 in another. The extra 6 you've never memorized before in random order because they're for representing your language and that has other ingrained patterns. Let's not forget they admitted ipv6 addresses are too long and allow you to skip parts of it so now you have to count the colons carefully...
tomxor 3y ago
> IPv6 adoption is at like 45% globally [...] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html > link -> The graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6 How does this work in practice, does user equipment end up with dual IPv4 IPv6? if not how do they access IPv4 only sites (of which there are still plenty)?
- Macha 3y ago
  The way it's supposed to work is the ISP delegates a prefix to the user's router, the router will advertise for that subnet and client devices will use slaac to configure their ipv6 addresses. Meanwhile for IPv4 it operates as normal. For incumbent, mostly wired, Western ISPs that means a pool of IPv4 addresses and subscriber level NAT. For everyone else, that probably means CGNAT.
- orangeboats 3y ago
  It's just as you have described, this is called dual stacking and is currently the most common type of IPv6 deployment. Alternatively, cellular ISPs may make use of NAT64+DNS64. In this case, the IPv4 addresses are combined with a NAT64 prefix (most likely 64:ff9b::/96), producing addresses such as `64:ff9b::198.51.100.1`. It is effectively the same as CGNAT, but pretty much everything is single stacked IPv6 up to the IPv4<->IPv6 border relay in the ISP network.
- Goz3rr 3y ago
  My ISP gives me both an IPv4 address and a heap of IPv6, most browsers will use what is called Happy Eyeballs to try both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time and use the one that connects the fastest.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Are you going to lie and tell it it's 1.1.1.1? Congrats, you've just reinvented NAT. Enjoy your stateful boundary system and all that complexity again. (Shrug) It works. What problem is being solved here, again?
- nottorp 3y ago
  The funding of the ipv6 commitee probably. And porn for those who like overcomplicated 'enterprisey' solutions where they aren't needed.
- Macha 3y ago
  Just look at your favourite game console provider's forum discussions on "NAT types" and you'll see that it really doesn't. Or try self host on CGNAT. Or realise the only direction for IPv4 prices at AWS etc. is up
arp242 3y ago
> Are you going to add some extension to IPv4 and try convince everyone to upgrade all their hardware, software and configurations? Then you have the exact same problem IPv6 adoption had Yeah, so I'm going to say that's just not true. If IPv6 had been significantly simpler (e.g. by mainly focusing on increasing the address space) then adoption would be much higher today – probably universal. The problem is that IPv6 changes a lot, and that implementing it is a fair amount of work. The entire business with tunnel brokers and other compatibility schemes are complex and difficult to use. To completely change gears now would be silly and too late, but it's been almost 30 years and it baffles me how anyone does not consider the entire thing a spectacular failure. People use Python 3 as a warning about compatibility, but IPv6 is a much larger catastrofuck, and that's largely due to decisions IPv6 people made. Whether IPv6 is "better" or not doesn't even come in to play.

Plasmoid 3y ago

This comes up every time IPv6 is discussed. Any change to IPv4 to extend the IP space (eg your example) would require a breaking change to the specification. So this would require changing every router on the planet to support it. You're also focusing on how the IP address is written when that doesn't really matter. Changing the format isn't dragging out IP adoption.

chungy 3y ago
Changing the IP protocol to support more stuff has been considered... that's how we got IPv6 in the first place.

Twirrim 3y ago

Awful adoption rate? https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html It's sitting just shy of 45%, based on what Google sees, and growing at a steady pace. The main issue is not technical, it's need. Right now, everything is accessible over IPv4, and probably over IPv6. There's no negative consequences from not having IPv4, it really needs initiatives like this one, and the US federal government one to drive things forwards (US federal agencies have to be single-stack IPv6 within a couple of years, which is forcing every government dealing vendor to get their act together on IPv6)

wharvle 3y ago
A couple months ago I got a new router and some stuff didn’t work until I turned off ipv6 (I don’t recall what, exactly) I tried that solution early because when I first got Google Fiber the Amazon store website didn’t load, on any machine in our house, until I turned off ipv6. If stuff tries to route over ipv6, it doesn’t work, has been my entire experience with the protocol on the open internet (private networks seem Ok)
- denysvitali 3y ago
  Next time try: https://test-ipv6.com/ https://test-ipv6.com/ If you get 10/10 here everything should work. Most likely your issue was a firewall rule on the IPv6 part, or a misconfigured DNS server (only returning A records)
  - wharvle 3y ago
    My home connection fails because it’s disabled (of course). Kicked my phone over to my T-Mobile cell connection. Finds that I have an ipv6 address, but dies on one of the first tests. It’s 2024 and I have two major US ISPs available and neither will let me reliably use IPv6 unless I’m on a vpn and the addresses are all private ones that don’t (logically) route to the Internet.

viraptor 3y ago

> IPv6's awful adoption rate https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ~50% worldwide with lots of countries way over that is not what I'd call awful. > introduce IPv7 and just extend the IPv4 scheme? Every proposal like that requires changing all the routing hardware anyway, because we effectively ran out of bits in the IP packets to mark anything new. And once you need to change hardware, you may as well just go with a better designed protocol like ipv6. > This is probably naive, but it seems it would be easier for people to use vs. ... People don't use IP addresses anymore. DNS and local discovery covers this for anyone apart from geeks and IT people. If it doesn't, it's a bug at this point.

Alupis 3y ago
> https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ~50% worldwide with lots of countries way over that is not what I'd call awful. IPv6 was drafted in 1998, and ratified in 2017. 7 years after becoming "official" only 50% adoption rate world-wide is not what I would call stellar either. Also, looking at that chart it's closer to 40%...
- Macha 3y ago
  Industry doesn't adopt a thing until there is a need for it. In 1998, there really wasn't a need for it. Now there is. So now it gets adopted. News at 11.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Also, it's worth to keep in mind the delay on the hardware replacement. There were home routers which didn't support ipv6 even 7 years ago. And there many home routers deployed today which are over 7 years old. Also, my provider fully supports IPv6 and so does my hardware, but I have to click a button in the control panel to activate it explicitly. That's practically around a million of people who could be on IPv6 right now if they just opted in.
    - 3y ago

sylware 3y ago

In my country, rare are the ISPs which don't provide IPv6 (it has been the case for years, and that includes mobile internet). I think the lagging services about ipv6 are steam, github, HN, and a few smtp servers here and there.

Seb-C 3y ago
I think that Reddit and AWS are mostly non-ipv6 yet as well, that's a pretty big deal.
- sylware 3y ago
  Oh, I don't use reddit, but AWS... mmmmh... and that makes me think about akamai. It seems ipv6 is slowed down by big tech, the one with the bucks to move to ipv6, paradox, or they know IPv4 mechanically favor strongley centralized services? As it is toxic to clean and simple p2p protocols? mmmmmh....

orangeboats 3y ago

>IPv6's awful adoption rate 40+% adoption rate since the World IPv6 Launch Day in 2012 is not what I would call awful [0]. >extend the IPv4 scheme with additional octets? To clarify, IPv6 and IPv4 addresses are effectively just a number. On Linux, you can even do `ping 16843009` and see the tool actually pinging the address 1.1.1.1! The octets you see in typical IPv4 addresses, or the hextets in IPv6 ones, are just a way to represent those addresses. If you think the address representation is the main thing holding IPv6 back, you are thinking it wrong. The most likely reason is actually software & hardware support, and the industry's general sentiment of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" keeping NATs alive. >seems it would be easier for people to use The ship has already sailed. If IPv4 addresses are really that easy to remember, DNS would not have been invented. Furthermore, when it comes to memorization of IPv6 addresses it's very helpful to split them into two halves. The second half can change rather arbitrarily (to maintain privacy by preventing address tracking), but the first half often won't because it is assigned to you by the ISP. [0]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Dylan16807 3y ago

If you mostly dislike the long addresses, you can cut out the second half. You can make your device be 2661:919a:023e:9100::1. If you want a near-exact equivalent of 192.168.0.1, then you can use fec0::1 or fd00::1. That's even shorter than IPv4! You kind of shouldn't, but it'll work fine for a tiny network. But as other people have explained, the compatibility will be just as bad. And IPv6 does have address ranges like that. Nobody talks about them because not much can be done with them.

Macha 3y ago
And the reason it's recommended against is that you might later decide to join your local network to another one and then you'll have to renumber them. Which is exactly the same problem with IPv4 local addresses. Except unlike IPv4, there is a mechanism to prevent that ahead of time
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Which is absolutely important once you're a business with a bunch of subnets, the kind of network that would be on 10. in IPv4. If you're on 192.168 and you just want the convenient addresses, go for it.

patmorgan23 3y ago

If you're typing out IP addresses your doing it wrong. We've had DNS for checks watch 40 years. IPv6 isn't THAT different from IPv4. It's a 128 bit number instead of a 32 bit number. When righting it out we use hex (because it's shorter). We use multicast instead of broadcast so your Subnets can be bigger The smallest subnet is /64 so vendors can do optimization hardware. Routers announce the prefix they route (and a DNS server) and let endpoints autoconfigure(with built in IP conflict detection!). Instead of a stateful DHCP server(which is still an option). And we let nodes have local and global addresses so issues with the router don't necessarily break local communication. (And they're easy to tell apart, if starts with an f it's a local adress, if it starts with 2 it's a global address) That's pretty much all that's different. 80% of what's different is the address space.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Having done basic tech support, sometimes typing out addresses is necessary. You'd think mDNS would help computers find your modem when you're first setting up your internet connection, but the super "helpful" modern browsers all try to go to google.com/search?q=myrouter.localnet even if mDNS is providing various IP addresses to try first. That's not IPv6's fault, but it is a pain. Especially considering that local networks differ from router to router, making it impossible to write a manual to access a router's settings for when the thing needs to be configured before it can connect to the internet. Of course, in those cases there's nothing preventing manufacturers from providing some 192.168/16 IPv4 addresses for those specific use cases (and not route them to the internet). I've even seen one manufacturer listen on a bunch of 169.254/16 addresses for when DHCP fails somehow, and I think that'd solve the problem perfectly without even needing a DHCPv4 server.
- nijave 3y ago
  169.254 is IPv4 link local range like IPv6 fe80 Windows will try to auto configure with a 169.254 link local if DHCP is unavailable. Not sure if anyone is actually using them for LAN. They come up sometimes in point to point or for other shenanigans (commonly on cloud or virtualized networks for special services) Afaik for Firefox and Chrome you can add a trailing / to prevent it from doing a web search and attempt to do a DNS lookup instead

p_l 3y ago

Because that would be starting from scratch the migration with all the warts and less of the benefits. About the only part that would be easier is that more people use less broken APIs compared to BSD Sockets, with getaddrinfo and similar solutions ported from XTI/Plan9 finally becoming the norm. So no more "you need to duplicate code to add support for new IP version". But that's still worse than migrating to v6, which has widespread hardware support in switching equipment, considerable preference in mobile networks and not only (TL;Dr it's cheaper to use v6 to carry v4 traffic using 464 stateless translation rather than other forms of CGNAT), and some IOT systems (industrial, not home stuff) are v6-only if they have IP connectivity on the embedded side at all.