4 ms·

What benefits has ipv6 beside that ipv4 addresses for public servers are in short supply?

mlyle 2y ago
Really easy prefix delegations on consumer/small business links without configuration. End-to-end connectivity, rather than having to think at all about what will one day be a "public server." Avoiding of crummy CGNAT. No more collisions between private addresses when a company is acquired or networks otherwise merge. Avoiding most of the annoyances of DHCP. There's more, but these are the ones that really resonate with me.
9x39 2y ago
Little for a typical web client, but p2p connection setup in theory should get better in a world with less NATs.
nijave 2y ago
On Spectrum and AT&T in the U.S. I tend to see a little better latency, on average, on IPv6 (2-4ms). Not sure the exact reason
jeroenhd 2y ago
If you live in a country rich enough that every ISP customer gets a dedicated IPv4 address you won't see many of the downsides of deploying IPv4 these days. If you don't, you'll get tired of Cloudflare's "checking if your connection is secure" becomes pretty tiring pretty quickly. Even in rich countries, CG-NAT is starting to get used more and more as prices for IP ranges go up. CGNAT also affects people trying to do something silly like "open a port" for a Minecraft server or a VPN back home, which is impossible without a public address. Outside of CGNAT, just about any protocol works better without standard IPv4 NAT. Xbox and PlayStation have invented their own terminology (what the fuck is a "type 2 NAT" anyway) and have written custom code to work around the different ways in which NAT fucks up your connection. Linux and BSD based routers will do deep packet inspection to figure out if you're trying to do FTP or SIP or H363 and rewrite traffic on the fly while opening holes in the firewall just so you can use basic internet functionality. This has also led to an attack dubbed "NAT slipstreaming" where generations of routers will allow Javascript running in your browser to open any port on your device to the outside, or even any port on any device in your network, despite what your router's firewall may say. For larger networks (with more than ±250 devices), you get a working connection without having to figure out what a DHCP pool is. And lastly, while this will probably differ by ISP, my experience is that IPv6 has significantly less latency than IPv4, on the order of 4ms versus 20ms.
- avhception 2y ago
  In Germany, the TV-cable based ISP all have started deploying CGNAT. If you live in a densely populated area with many Vodafone customers, their CGNAT gateways tend to be overloaded, so in peak hours you sometimes experience packet loss. Of course Vodafone won't admit that it's a structural problem instead of isolated cases. At one point, I was forced to use a shitty DSL provider, "e-on highspeed" (formerly "Innogy") because they had exclusive rights to the VDSL DSLAM in my area. For a while, they didn't even offer IPv6 alongside the CGNAT v4. And when they did, it broke randomly (remote gateway dead). By the way, does anybody have a clue on how to get SLAAC addresses into local DNS? I can't create static records because my current ISP keeps changing my assigned prefix. I'm still on v4 for my local fileservers and stuff like that because of this problem.
  - Arnavion 2y ago
    The easiest way is to use a ULA on the LAN side instead of the ISP-assigned prefix, and set up NAT66 at the router to convert delegated prefix <-> ULA. It sucks having to use NAT with IPv6, but at least it'll be stateless NAT. Then when your delegated prefix changes you will only need to update the NAT rule, meanwhile everything within your LAN that was using ULA-prefixed addresses to talk to each other will continue working. For my own homelab, I give all my machines and VMs static IPs instead of using SLAAC, which also makes it straightforward to register them in DNS, and memorize them in the worst case.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      > The easiest way is to use a ULA on the LAN side instead of the ISP-assigned prefix, and set up NAT66 at the router to convert delegated prefix <-> ULA. You don't need to not use your ISP-assigned globally-routable prefixes. You can use both a ULA and a globally-routable prefix. In my years of experience with fully-functional IPv6 service, I've never noticed an address selection problem... machines always use the globally-routable address as the source for off-LAN communications and (because it's what's in my local DNS) the ULA address for on-LAN communications. The single pitfall I've seen is if your ISP ever "shuts down" [0] that globally-routable prefix, and your border router isn't configured to reject traffic from fc00::/7 going out through the WAN interface, your border router will happily pass traffic out the WAN interface from your not-globally-routable ULA range. > For my own homelab, I give all my machines and VMs static IPs instead of using SLAAC, which also makes it straightforward to register them in DNS... I just configure my machines to use either MAC-based or DUID-based SLAAC address generation, rather than that stupid "privacy addressing" stuff. [0] By this I mean by stopping advertising it, refusing to renew a DHCPv6-PD lease, or similar.
GoblinSlayer 2y ago
No need to pay Big Tech to do anything like videochat.
kalleboo 2y ago
Cost. IPv4 is so expensive to support that one ISP out there is literally giving people Apple TVs with IPv6 support to replace IPv4-only Roku devices https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/03/06/roku-apple-tv https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/03/06/roku-apple-tv
throw0101d 2y ago
> What benefits has ipv6 beside that ipv4 addresses for public servers are in short supply? What more benefits do you need? It's a major issue for many folks, especially if you (a) didn't manage to get in early on the IPv4 land rush, or (b) aren't a mega-corp with money to buy a whole bunch of addresses: > Our [American Indian] tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic. > We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices. * https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s-2022-and-still-no-IPv6/m-p/854673/highlight/true#M35732 https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 Do you think we'd have as much mobile/smartphone connectivity without IPv6? T-Mobile US went to IPv6-only on handsets because of exhaustion, and they're only one carrier (in the US).

Really easy prefix delegations on consumer/small business links without configuration. End-to-end connectivity, rather than having to think at all about what will one day be a "public server." Avoiding of crummy CGNAT. No more collisions between private addresses when a company is acquired or networks otherwise merge. Avoiding most of the annoyances of DHCP. There's more, but these are the ones that really resonate with me.

9x39 2y ago

Little for a typical web client, but p2p connection setup in theory should get better in a world with less NATs.

nijave 2y ago

On Spectrum and AT&T in the U.S. I tend to see a little better latency, on average, on IPv6 (2-4ms). Not sure the exact reason

jeroenhd 2y ago

If you live in a country rich enough that every ISP customer gets a dedicated IPv4 address you won't see many of the downsides of deploying IPv4 these days. If you don't, you'll get tired of Cloudflare's "checking if your connection is secure" becomes pretty tiring pretty quickly. Even in rich countries, CG-NAT is starting to get used more and more as prices for IP ranges go up. CGNAT also affects people trying to do something silly like "open a port" for a Minecraft server or a VPN back home, which is impossible without a public address. Outside of CGNAT, just about any protocol works better without standard IPv4 NAT. Xbox and PlayStation have invented their own terminology (what the fuck is a "type 2 NAT" anyway) and have written custom code to work around the different ways in which NAT fucks up your connection. Linux and BSD based routers will do deep packet inspection to figure out if you're trying to do FTP or SIP or H363 and rewrite traffic on the fly while opening holes in the firewall just so you can use basic internet functionality. This has also led to an attack dubbed "NAT slipstreaming" where generations of routers will allow Javascript running in your browser to open any port on your device to the outside, or even any port on any device in your network, despite what your router's firewall may say. For larger networks (with more than ±250 devices), you get a working connection without having to figure out what a DHCP pool is. And lastly, while this will probably differ by ISP, my experience is that IPv6 has significantly less latency than IPv4, on the order of 4ms versus 20ms.

avhception 2y ago
In Germany, the TV-cable based ISP all have started deploying CGNAT. If you live in a densely populated area with many Vodafone customers, their CGNAT gateways tend to be overloaded, so in peak hours you sometimes experience packet loss. Of course Vodafone won't admit that it's a structural problem instead of isolated cases. At one point, I was forced to use a shitty DSL provider, "e-on highspeed" (formerly "Innogy") because they had exclusive rights to the VDSL DSLAM in my area. For a while, they didn't even offer IPv6 alongside the CGNAT v4. And when they did, it broke randomly (remote gateway dead). By the way, does anybody have a clue on how to get SLAAC addresses into local DNS? I can't create static records because my current ISP keeps changing my assigned prefix. I'm still on v4 for my local fileservers and stuff like that because of this problem.
- Arnavion 2y ago
  The easiest way is to use a ULA on the LAN side instead of the ISP-assigned prefix, and set up NAT66 at the router to convert delegated prefix <-> ULA. It sucks having to use NAT with IPv6, but at least it'll be stateless NAT. Then when your delegated prefix changes you will only need to update the NAT rule, meanwhile everything within your LAN that was using ULA-prefixed addresses to talk to each other will continue working. For my own homelab, I give all my machines and VMs static IPs instead of using SLAAC, which also makes it straightforward to register them in DNS, and memorize them in the worst case.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    > The easiest way is to use a ULA on the LAN side instead of the ISP-assigned prefix, and set up NAT66 at the router to convert delegated prefix <-> ULA. You don't need to not use your ISP-assigned globally-routable prefixes. You can use both a ULA and a globally-routable prefix. In my years of experience with fully-functional IPv6 service, I've never noticed an address selection problem... machines always use the globally-routable address as the source for off-LAN communications and (because it's what's in my local DNS) the ULA address for on-LAN communications. The single pitfall I've seen is if your ISP ever "shuts down" [0] that globally-routable prefix, and your border router isn't configured to reject traffic from fc00::/7 going out through the WAN interface, your border router will happily pass traffic out the WAN interface from your not-globally-routable ULA range. > For my own homelab, I give all my machines and VMs static IPs instead of using SLAAC, which also makes it straightforward to register them in DNS... I just configure my machines to use either MAC-based or DUID-based SLAAC address generation, rather than that stupid "privacy addressing" stuff. [0] By this I mean by stopping advertising it, refusing to renew a DHCPv6-PD lease, or similar.

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

No need to pay Big Tech to do anything like videochat.

kalleboo 2y ago

Cost. IPv4 is so expensive to support that one ISP out there is literally giving people Apple TVs with IPv6 support to replace IPv4-only Roku devices https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/03/06/roku-apple-tv https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/03/06/roku-apple-tv

throw0101d 2y ago

> What benefits has ipv6 beside that ipv4 addresses for public servers are in short supply? What more benefits do you need? It's a major issue for many folks, especially if you (a) didn't manage to get in early on the IPv4 land rush, or (b) aren't a mega-corp with money to buy a whole bunch of addresses: > Our [American Indian] tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic. > We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices. * https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s-2022-and-still-no-IPv6/m-p/854673/highlight/true#M35732 https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624 Do you think we'd have as much mobile/smartphone connectivity without IPv6? T-Mobile US went to IPv6-only on handsets because of exhaustion, and they're only one carrier (in the US).