23 ms·
Tell HN: Hacker News now supports IPv6
My browser just started connecting to Hacker News over IPv6 today:
$ host news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com has address 209.216.230.207
news.ycombinator.com has IPv6 address 2606:7100:1:67::26
Both IP addresses share the same ASN (M5 Computer Security):
https://bgp.he.net/ip/209.216.230.207 https://bgp.he.net/ip/209.216.230.207
https://bgp.he.net/ip/2606:7100:1:67::26 https://bgp.he.net/ip/2606:7100:1:67::26
The raw IP address correctly redirects to HN: http://[2606:7100:1:67::26] http://[2606:7100:1:67::26]
Good job so far! Please don't pull a Reddit and turn it off again.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoTechnically the goal of enabling IPv6 can be done through Cloudflare as well, which they enabled a few days ago. I wonder why they turned it off and are back to directly serving traffic.
- tlivolsi 3y ago[flagged]
- SamuelAdams 3y agoCan you explain this more? Why are you so tied to ipv4? I recently enabled IPv6 on my home network, and roughly 30-40% of all internet traffic goes through IPv6. Things are noticeably faster, especially connection times to online games on Xbox Live. My only complaint is that my ISP keeps changing the prefix every quarter or so, so my static addresses need to be updated in the firewall and other places. I am looking into link local addresses but the cocktail of tech is tricky.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoWhy would things be faster over v6?
- danpalmer 3y agoIPv6 was a lot more than a numbering scheme, there are performance (and security?) improvements in a number of aspects of IP networking, like more compression in parts of the messages IIRC.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoGonna have to disagree with that. IPv6 was designed in the 90s and lots of it feels like it is. Icmpv6 is fundamental to the implementation and already responsible for multiple remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. Couple that with almost no one understanding it well besides a true handful of engineers and you have yourself a security nightmare. Proof of this is this very thread with the talk about “trying a local link address”. Everything about v6 is over engineered with sharp edges.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago> By reducing header complexity, IPv6 contributes to better overall network performance and efficiency. This is especially noticeable in applications sensitive to latency, such as real-time communication and online gaming. https://www.prefixbroker.com/news/is-ipv6-faster-than-ipv4-a-look-at-network-performance-and-efficiency/#:~:text=By%20reducing%20header%20complexity%2C%20IPv6,time%20communication%20and%20online%20gaming https://www.prefixbroker.com/news/is-ipv6-faster-than-ipv4-a....
- j16sdiz 3y agoThis is the theoretical benefit. These have never materialize in real life. See https://community.cisco.com/kxiwq67737/attachments/kxiwq67737/5991-discussions-wan-routing-switching/231814/2/15376194-IPv6perf_wp1f.pdf https://community.cisco.com/kxiwq67737/attachments/kxiwq6773...
- CSSer 3y agoThe next few months may be hard for you. AWS will start charging for ipv4 on February 1st, so it’s likely that either a mass migration is coming or prices for many services will increase accordingly to pass that cost along to customers.
- ipaddr 3y ago2024 is shaping up as the year people drop AWS
- al_borland 3y agoDropping AWS and VMWare at the same time. This should get interesting.
- acdha 3y agoGiven that this was AWS doing what their top two competitors were already doing, and that for most people it’s smaller than the price hikes GCP customers have had last year and coming February 1st, I’m skeptical that anyone significant is going to make this the issue they leave over.
- jowf8fa9sdf 3y ago
- mise_en_place 3y agoYou’ll get a lot of hate for it, but I think you’re speaking the truth. IPv6 is probably one of the worst modern standards (tied C++ templates). Nobody has ever made a convincing argument about the advantages of it over IPv4. Just another case of fools admiring complexity. PHB types love it even more, it’s filled with buzzwords like the “future” of networking.
- Dwedit 3y agoAdvantage: Not out of addresses.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoWe’ve been “running out of ipv4 space” since before i got a freakin us robotics modem.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y agoYes, and it's a pain in the butt for people who are trying to provision servers in 90% of the world
- IcePic 3y agoWell, in the 90s, you would be able to get a /24 by just filling out some paperwork. How is it today, how easy and cheap can I get a /24 now? Is it two forms and an email? The simple reason people have to start paying AWS for them is that it isn't easy or cheap for AWS to buy large ranges anymore. If it was just "fill out a form telling someone I need 4 million more IPs" then AWS would have some cheap junior technician doing that, but now they need to rake in money to cover the expenses to get IPs and customers that need v4 needs to pay for it. You can check the rate of handing out v4 ips in 2012* and see that it was never going to be sustainable. The solution to the known-in-advance problem of ipv4 running out was not to .. not hand them out and just leave internet as it looked in Jan-2011 when IANA ran out of networks to hand out. So while it may be fun to state "I heard this long long ago", it just means others had better vision than you. *) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media/File:Rir-rate.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#/media...
- supriyo-biswas 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Eschew flamebait. Omit internet tropes.
- xyst 3y agoNext is TLS 1.3 support, hopefully :) # openssl s_client -connect news.ycombinator .com:443 -tls1_3 CONNECTED(00000003) 4160736388:error:1409442E:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert protocol version:ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1562:SSL alert number 70 --- no peer certificate available --- No client certificate CA names sent --- SSL handshake has read 7 bytes and written 244 bytes Verification: OK --- New, (NONE), Cipher is (NONE) Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported No ALPN negotiated Early data was not sent Verify return code: 0 (ok)
- supertrope 3y agoIt was briefly turned on years ago and then turned off. I guess it broke the website for those behind corporate MITM boxes.
- kiwijamo 3y agoThere's a lot of websites out there that does TLS 1.3. Surely not an issue for MITM boxes? Otherwise they wouldn't be able to access much...
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoMaybe that wasn't true years ago?
- xyst 3y agoShould be able to support both. Client can negotiate between either TLS v1.2 and TLS v1.3. Server has to support 1.3 though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baby_souffle 3y agoHa! Beat me to it! For anybody that's curious, the IP-Foo [0] browser extension puts a little 4/6 icon in the address bar to make it clear at a glance which dialect you're speaking for $currentWebPage [0]: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
- notatoad 3y agocool, but "read and change your data on all websites" is imho not worth the functionality. that seems ripe for takeover by some scammer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- p1mrx 3y agoIPvFoo author here. The problem is that there's no way to obtain the (hostname, ip) stream from Chrome/Firefox without requesting the "all websites" permission. In theory, browser vendors could define a narrowly-scoped permission that only reports (hostname, ip), or roll this functionality into the browser UI, but neither seems likely to happen. I made IPvFoo to promote IPv6 adoption, and wouldn't consider selling it for less than $10M USD. It probably won't ever be worth that much because it's an easily-cloned utility without a "moat", but it's more rational to set a price than refuse to sell under any circumstances.
- janardanyri 3y agoJust wondering, do you expect non-scammers to have the $10m?
- p1mrx 3y agoNo. I expect that I won't sell it because it's worth more to me than anyone else.
- mkl 3y ago
- ceroxylon 3y agoAs someone who grew up on IPv4, i will miss it, but the leap to 340 undecillion unique addresses is exciting in many ways so i think i can learn to live with this transition. If we ever need more than that, i can't even imagine what that future would look like.
- p-e-w 3y agoThe last time I looked into this (which was a few years ago), ISPs were allocating blocks containing billions of IPv6 addresses to anyone who paid a nominal sum. So that vast address space might not last as long as it would seem...
- internetter 3y agoWe never learn
- greyface- 3y agoThat sure sounds like a lot. But "billions" is less than a /64. Try "sextillions" (/56) or "septillions" (/48). Of course, when the denominator is "undecillions", it becomes clear that this is actually a non-issue.
- joering2 3y agoI'd even go out of my way and say that undecillion of IP addresses ought to be enough for anybody.
- dns_snek 3y agoBold prediction! Let's see if it holds true in 200 years when every cybernetic cell in your body is individually addressable from the public internet.
- ale42 3y agoThis is almost IPv9 (RFC1606)! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1606 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1606 The up to 42 deep hierarchy of routing levels built into IPv9 must have been one of the key features for its wide deployment. [...] As yet, no requirement has been found for levels 40-42, with level 39 still being used for experimental interrogation of atomic structure of components where required. Of course, it's a 1st April RFC. For those who don't know them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_C...: they include thinks like terminals with subliminal messages, IP over pigeons...
- bhaney 3y agoMy concern is that this is an accidental part of an unrelated migration and will quickly be disabled because of some internal IP filtering/banning tool that was only ever written to work with IPv4.
- whatshisface 3y agoHey, my account works again... >:)
- p-e-w 3y ago> My browser just started connecting to Hacker News over IPv6 today If you don't mind me asking, how did you notice that?
- p1mrx 3y agoIPvFoo turned green.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- rumdz 3y agoDoes ipv6 result in higher latencies? I could see larger addresses increasing latency, but then again I could also see a more efficient protocol resulting in lower net latency. I should probably read a book describing the differences.
- imoverclocked 3y agoThe address space has very little effect in the real world. Other latencies far outweigh anything measurable by having slightly more bits in the address. Eg: Sometimes IPv6 is faster due to routing differences.
- rumdz 3y agoThat makes sense. I'm very curious about real-world studies. As a gamer, I'm especially interested in the affect ipv6 has on UDP for real time gaming applications. That's an area where even 5ms can have an enormous affect on the experience.
- tsimionescu 3y agoThat's a very interesting case, as UDP is very reliant on MTU. If the IPv6 headers take out more space from the ethernet frame, that leaves less space for the UDP payload. Which means that a UDP payload which was at the limit for IPv4 on the typical MTU needs to be fragmented into two IPv6 packets, which will likely increase latency quite significantly. However, this will depend on each specific game, if they are using all the available space or not. If they're sending 200 byte datagrams, they shouldn't see any difference. On the flipside, IPv6 has a larger minimum MTU than IPv4, so it could happen that your maximum UDP payload actually goes up when switching to IPv6. So, if the game previously had to send 5 packets to do an update, it might be able to send only 3 when it can rely on IPv6, so maybe latency actually significantly improves.
- IcePic 3y agoIf you try "ping" and "ping6" towards a multi-protocol host, you see both send 64 bytes each, so while v6 source and destination addresses take up lots of extra space, the v6 IP packets have less of the "this part could be useful for tcp" which means icmp pings can be of the same size, even though the two addresses eat up lots more bytes. Not sure if the same goes for game UDP packets, but the optional header stuff in v6 IP packets means more of it goes to the useful parts of the payload and less to "the sum of all protocol bits and flags that is not used by all traffic".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nikita14 3y agoFinally.
- apapapa 3y agoIPv6 is still pretty useless to most people... Actually for me it complicates my firewall rules and don't bring any benefits (yeah down-vote me and don't reply ...)
- johnklos 3y agoI'll downvote you AND I'll reply. It complicates firewall rules? How about pass everything out, keeping state, and block everything in, for all of your fragile devices that can't help but run services you can't turn off? There. Your IPv6 firewalling is done. Is that complicated? You can't see any benefits? Ok. So what does that have to do with HN being available over IPv6?
- apapapa 3y agoBecause you can access a website on both ipv4 and IPv6 doesn't really make IPv6 all that useful because you could disable it and still be able to access the same resource using ipv4...
- orangeboats 3y ago>IPv6 is still pretty useless to most people My, the luxury of not being put under a CGNAT.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI don't understand what you mean by complicating firewall rules,except maybe that you now need to use IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4 addresses in some of the rules. It's not like NAT without a firewall gave any security in 2024.
- geraldhh 3y agothere is no nat w/o a "firewall" and yes, it will be more secure
- 3y ago
- johnklos 3y agoWelcome to 2001, HN!
- mogeko 3y agoI'm surprised it just got implemented! Since IPv6 is so popular and common nowadays.
- mobilemidget 3y agoMy previous provider, I think largest in The Netherlands, ziggo rolled it out quite okay. Now I moved and switched providers, to much faster 1 Gbit (can go up to 8gbit but I dont know what to do with that yet until I have a 32K tv maybe) symmetric, but no idea when they will plan to roll out IPv6 on this network. I cannot say I really miss it, but have to admit my internet feels a bit incomplete :) so I wish it was even more popular than you state. :D
- bobse 3y ago[dead]
- kuon 3y agoI am so surprised by the hate for IPv6 in this thread. I have been deploying IPv6 for more than ten years and it really improve many situations (beside larger addresses). I have to admit, there is a learning curve. But I want to encourage everybody involved in configuring computers to learn. Also I want to rent about Cisco not using /64 for link local by default, thus being incompatible with BSD systems. Link local must be /64.
- orangeboats 3y ago>I am so surprised by the hate for IPv6 in this thread. I find that HN views IPv6 noticeably more harshly than many other communities I have been a part of (e.g. networking subreddits and gaming communities). I am curious of the reason behind this.
- iknowstuff 3y agoDevelopers who don’t care to learn how/why things work, have gone by without it, and are upset that they gotta learn more now because it works differently.
- orangeboats 3y agoI just hope that people won't repeat the same "I wish IPv6 were just IPv4 with extra octets" viewpoint again... The use of hex is very helpful when you're calculating subnets. You want a /48 prefix? Just take the first 3 hextets. /56? First 3 and a half hextets. /64? First 4 hextets.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoThis is an excellent point because entire tools exist with ipv4 to calculate subnets and unless you do base math all the time you’re usually using them to figure out stuff like CIDR overlaps
- wut42 3y agoThe thread posted yesterday about Czech Republic's IPv4 deprecation plans had at least a comment about IPv4 with extras octets. I am pretty sure that even once IPv4 will be fully dead and replaced by v6, people will still rant about that.
- billpg 3y agoThat's great news, but I'd only say that IPv6 has actually made it when HN switches off their IPv4 address.
- miyuru 3y agoDoes anyone know why the TTL is set to 1 on both A and AAAA?
- mike_hearn 3y agoThe usual reason for that is DNS load balancing.
- miyuru 3y agoHN seem to be served from a single IPv4 and IPv6, so it might not be the case.
- psz 3y agoMaybe they like paying AWS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- fredgrott 3y agoSurprising hate about IPv6 here despite most of us using commercial internet services where the last leg to our routers is in fact IPv6 including comcast wifi routers.... It's about like a back end geek not knowing how to do loopbacks with their router....sheesh!
- zamadatix 3y agoWhat a fun bit of news, thanks to whoever manages the site infrastructure!
- m3kw9 3y agoHow does website support ipv6 without an isp and routers supporting it? You mean hacker news allows IPV6?
- dtaht 3y agoI often wish that there had been a way to politically make 240/4 and 0/8 commonly available. But in part I drove those projects to annoy the IPv6 crowd into action.
- zamadatix 3y agoI think the IPv6 crowd is already decently in action, hence vast swaths of the internet and mobile network already migrated (some on the mobile even without dual stack). What's needed for more IPv6 adoption is continued annoyance felt by the IPv4 crowd to want to bother migrating to any other long term solution. That's required a lot more time than most probably expected but it has been happening, IPv4 has become more and more difficult to use. Throwing in things like "Look IPv4 crowd, there are ways to extend IPv4 for some more years again without the pain of going to multi-layered NAT" is about the exact opposite of the kind of call to action needed. Either way though, the inherent value in the technology is what has to drive the adoption and the value is already there it's just a matter of IPv4's value still holding well enough for now. As such I don't inherently mind 0/8 being available on Linux these days and wouldn't inherently mind 240/4 either but a completely separate set of "yes, you can configure that address but the problem is with getting between there and here not accepting it" is a bit disappointing for just another short term response to the problem. Unrelated but kickass work on packet scheduling btw.
- p1mrx 3y agoI'm still a bit miffed about the Linux kernel change that broke my unit test expecting connect(0.0.0.1) to fail fast.
- sitzkrieg 3y agobrowsers cant even open ipv6 ips in the address bar. this makes debugging local services annoying sometimes
- tristan957 3y agoFirefox will open this. http://[2606:7100:1:67::26]/ http://[2606:7100:1:67::26]/
- sitzkrieg 3y agoi stand corrected, this is good news thank you
- tristan957 3y agoI'm curious why we need the square brackets.
- Dagger2 3y agoURLs use : to separate the IP and port. There needs to be some way to disambiguate that from the colons in the address.
- tristan957 3y agoBut if a URL has more than one colon, can't you assume is an IPv6 address?
- Dagger2 3y agoYou can't tell if there's a port or not, e.g. http://2001:db8::1:8080/ http://2001:db8::1:8080/. Is that 2001:db8::1 or 2001:db8::1:8080?
- patmorgan23 3y agoTo disambiguate between the IP and port numbers
- wvh 3y agoI think I created my first IPv6 tunnel in 1998 or 1999. Not holding my breath. For as fast as everything technology seems to move, the basic building blocks of TCP and DNS evolve very, very slowly, if at all. I wonder if there's a genuine lack of interest all around or if there are business interests at stake to prevent people from having their own routable IP addresses and facilitate peer-to-peer networking.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWell, this exactly explains why HN's site has become so unreliable for me. As soon as this post appeared, I began receiving timeouts. 90% of the time, the front page won't load, the host won't respond. I have no troubles with any other IPv4 or IPv6 sites. My home network has been running IPv6 for about 8 years, since my ISP enabled it and I worked out some good router settings. I routinely verify that all 3 of my devices are preferring IPv6. These timeouts are not occurring on my Android 11 phone, only on my Chromebook for now. Windows 10 Pro, not tested.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoOkay, I'm looking into this, and my router was stuck in a "6to4 tunnel" configuration with local address assignment 2002:* This is undesirable for several reasons, but that's what it picked up with "Auto Detect" and "Auto Config". I toggled settings a few times and regained a 2600:* "real IPv6" delegation.
- janvdberg 3y agoAlmost ten years after I asked! :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847368 Awesome!