6 ms·

This and the comments highlight how bad many ISPs in North America and Western Europe are at IPv6, still, in 2025, and the lengths to which people will go to tr

by JdeBP 1y ago

This and the comments highlight how bad many ISPs in North America and Western Europe are at IPv6, still, in 2025, and the lengths to which people will go to treat that as damage and literally route around it. One of the biggest ISPs in my country has been promising IPv6 since 2016. Another, smaller, competitor, advertised on "World IPv6 Day" in 2011 that it was way ahead of the competition on supplying IPv6; but in fact does not supply it today. One of the answers I see given a lot over the years is: Yes, I know that I could do this simply with IPv6. But ISPs around here don't route IPv6, or even formally provide statically-assigned IPv4 to non-business customers. So I have had to build this Heath Robinson contraption instead.

mjg59 1y ago
Pretty much! My ISP was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker and is somewhat cheap and delightful and happily routes me a good amount of IPv6, and every 48 hours or so it RAs me an entirely different range even though I still have validity on the lease for the old one and everything breaks, so I've had to turn IPv6 off entirely (I sent dumps of the relevant lease traffic to support, they said they'd look into it, and then the ticket auto closed after being inactive for two years). I spent a while trying to make things work with IPv6 but the combination of it being broken at my end and also there still being enough people I want to provide access to who don't have it means it just wasn't a good option.
- anonymousiam 1y ago
  One of my places uses Frontier FiOS (soon to become Verizon again). They have zero support for IPv6, and it isn't even on their roadmap. I use a static HE (Hurricane Electric) IPv6 tunnel there, and it works great. The only issue is that YouTube thinks the IPv6 block is commercial or an AI dev scraping their content, so I can't look at videos unless I'm logged in to YouTube.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    I’m also on FiOS, and despite repeated statements to the effect I’d never get IPv6 on my (20 year) old ONT, I’ve got a nice little /56 block assigned on my kit via DHCPv6. Problem is that, as it’s a DHCP block, it changes, and Namecheap presently does not offer any sort of Dynamic DNS for IPv6 addresses. Still, it let me tear down the HE IPv6 tunnel I was also running, since the sole reason I needed IPv6 was so our household game consoles could all play online without cursed firewall rules and IP reservations. I’m pretty chuffed with the present status quo, even if it’s far from perfect. One other thing I’d note about OPs article (for folks considering it as a way to work around shitty ISP policies) is that once you have this up and running, you also have a perfect setup for a reverse proxy deployment for your public services. Just make sure you’re watching your bandwidth so you don’t get a surprise bill.
jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
> Heath Robinson contraption Ah, I see you also watched that video yesterday on manufacturing a tiny electric rotor.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  I actually learned the expression when I was a child, via the Professor Branestawm books.
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
    Ok so this is genuinely a case of I see an expression for the first time, learn an expression it, and then see it again immediately after. Fun.
    - 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y ago
      The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon strikes again!
      - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
        I just learned about this yesterday.
  - grndn 1y ago
    Fellow Branestawm enthusiast here. That is the first time anyone has ever mentioned Professor Branestawm on HN, as far as I can tell! It's triggering deep memories.
- Joeboy 1y ago
  "Heath Robinson" is British English for "Rube Goldberg".
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
    TIL
jeroenhd 1y ago
I'm in western Europe and every ISP but the ultra cheap ones and the niche use case ones have stable IPv6 prefixes. Some do /48, others /56. IPv4 is getting CGNAT'd more and more, on the other hand. One national ISP basically lets you pick between IPv4 CGNAT and IPv6 support (with IPv6 being the default). Another has been rolling out CGNAT IPv4 for new customers (at first without even offering IPv6, took them a few months to correct that). This isn't even an "America and Western Europe" thing. It's a "whatever batshit insane approach the local ISP took" thing. And it's not just affecting IPv6 either.
PaulKeeble 1y ago
Mine officially supports it. However having configured the Prefix as they define and using SLAAC etc all my devices get their IPv6 addresses and can access the internet, I can even connect from outside the network so it all "works", but I have a bunch of issues. Neither of my ISPs defined DNS servers is available, I can't route one of the OpenDNS routers but the other works fine and then I have these periods where the entirity of IPv6 routing breaks for about a minute and then restores. Having done this with two different routers on completely different firmware now I can't help but think my official support from my ISP is garbage and they have major problems with it. I had to turn it off because it causes all sorts of problems.
emilfihlman 1y ago
Once again I voice the only sane option: Skip IPv6 and the insanity that it is, and do IPv8 and simply double (or quadruple) the address space without introducing other new things.
- acdha 1y ago
  This is a pipe dream in the current century. IPv6 adoption has been slow but it’s approaching 50% and absolutely nobody is going to go through the trouble of implementing a new protocol; updating every operating system, network, and security tool; and waiting a decade for users to upgrade without a big advantage. “I don’t want to learn IPv6” is nowhere near that level of advantage.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  That is not a sane option. IPv6 isn't actually that hard, companies are just lazy and refuse to implement it (or implement it correctly).
- drdaeman 1y ago
  It'll be objectively worse. IPv6 is at least sort of supported by a non-negligible number of devices, software and organizations. This IPv8 would be a whole new protocol, that no one out there supports. The fact that version 8 was already defined in [an obsolete] RFC1621 doesn't help either. Even if you decide to try to make it a Frankenstein's monster of a protocol, making it a two IPv4 packets wrapped in each other to create a v4+v4=v8 address space, you'll need a whole new routing solution for the Internet, as those encapsulations would have issues with NATs. And that'll be way more error prone (and thus, less secure), because it'll be theoretically possible to accidentally mix up v4 and inner-half-of-v8 traffic. Nah, if we can't get enough people to adopt IPv6, there's no chance we'll get even more people to adopt some other IPvX (unless something truly extraordinary happens that would trigger such adoption, of course).
  - MintPaw 1y ago
    Are you saying you believe it's truly impossible to create a new backwards compatible standard that expands the address space and doesn't require everyone to upgrade for it to work?
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
For a long time, I operated from home with a auction-purchased IPv4 /24 just so I could get around all this BS and have my own AS. There's nothing nicer than being able to BGP peer and just handle everything yourself. I really miss old Level 3 (before the Lumen/CenturyLink buyout). Kind of kicking myself for selling my netblock but it was a decent amount of money ($6000).
- icedchai 1y ago
  I'm doing exactly this. I got my netblock for free in 1993, back in the Internic days before ARIN existed. I have a couple of VPSes running BGP and tunnel traffic back to my home over wireguard.
  - b112 1y ago
    Hey! What if I you will your netblock to me? I'll will you my camaro and my collection of amiga parts. (I really want your netblock)
    - icedchai 1y ago
      hah! If I wasn't actively using it, I'd consider renting it out. I bet you could find some early Internet dude that has a /24 they're not using
jekwoooooe 1y ago
I feel like it’s malicious. They don’t want to support it because it means they can’t charge high prices for static IPs

by JdeBP 1y ago

mjg59 1y ago

Pretty much! My ISP was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker and is somewhat cheap and delightful and happily routes me a good amount of IPv6, and every 48 hours or so it RAs me an entirely different range even though I still have validity on the lease for the old one and everything breaks, so I've had to turn IPv6 off entirely (I sent dumps of the relevant lease traffic to support, they said they'd look into it, and then the ticket auto closed after being inactive for two years). I spent a while trying to make things work with IPv6 but the combination of it being broken at my end and also there still being enough people I want to provide access to who don't have it means it just wasn't a good option.

anonymousiam 1y ago
One of my places uses Frontier FiOS (soon to become Verizon again). They have zero support for IPv6, and it isn't even on their roadmap. I use a static HE (Hurricane Electric) IPv6 tunnel there, and it works great. The only issue is that YouTube thinks the IPv6 block is commercial or an AI dev scraping their content, so I can't look at videos unless I'm logged in to YouTube.
- stego-tech 1y ago
  I’m also on FiOS, and despite repeated statements to the effect I’d never get IPv6 on my (20 year) old ONT, I’ve got a nice little /56 block assigned on my kit via DHCPv6. Problem is that, as it’s a DHCP block, it changes, and Namecheap presently does not offer any sort of Dynamic DNS for IPv6 addresses. Still, it let me tear down the HE IPv6 tunnel I was also running, since the sole reason I needed IPv6 was so our household game consoles could all play online without cursed firewall rules and IP reservations. I’m pretty chuffed with the present status quo, even if it’s far from perfect. One other thing I’d note about OPs article (for folks considering it as a way to work around shitty ISP policies) is that once you have this up and running, you also have a perfect setup for a reverse proxy deployment for your public services. Just make sure you’re watching your bandwidth so you don’t get a surprise bill.

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

> Heath Robinson contraption Ah, I see you also watched that video yesterday on manufacturing a tiny electric rotor.

JdeBP 1y ago
I actually learned the expression when I was a child, via the Professor Branestawm books.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
  Ok so this is genuinely a case of I see an expression for the first time, learn an expression it, and then see it again immediately after. Fun.
  - 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y ago
    The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon strikes again!
    - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
      I just learned about this yesterday.
- grndn 1y ago
  Fellow Branestawm enthusiast here. That is the first time anyone has ever mentioned Professor Branestawm on HN, as far as I can tell! It's triggering deep memories.
Joeboy 1y ago
"Heath Robinson" is British English for "Rube Goldberg".
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
  TIL

jeroenhd 1y ago

I'm in western Europe and every ISP but the ultra cheap ones and the niche use case ones have stable IPv6 prefixes. Some do /48, others /56. IPv4 is getting CGNAT'd more and more, on the other hand. One national ISP basically lets you pick between IPv4 CGNAT and IPv6 support (with IPv6 being the default). Another has been rolling out CGNAT IPv4 for new customers (at first without even offering IPv6, took them a few months to correct that). This isn't even an "America and Western Europe" thing. It's a "whatever batshit insane approach the local ISP took" thing. And it's not just affecting IPv6 either.

PaulKeeble 1y ago

Mine officially supports it. However having configured the Prefix as they define and using SLAAC etc all my devices get their IPv6 addresses and can access the internet, I can even connect from outside the network so it all "works", but I have a bunch of issues. Neither of my ISPs defined DNS servers is available, I can't route one of the OpenDNS routers but the other works fine and then I have these periods where the entirity of IPv6 routing breaks for about a minute and then restores. Having done this with two different routers on completely different firmware now I can't help but think my official support from my ISP is garbage and they have major problems with it. I had to turn it off because it causes all sorts of problems.

emilfihlman 1y ago

Once again I voice the only sane option: Skip IPv6 and the insanity that it is, and do IPv8 and simply double (or quadruple) the address space without introducing other new things.

acdha 1y ago
This is a pipe dream in the current century. IPv6 adoption has been slow but it’s approaching 50% and absolutely nobody is going to go through the trouble of implementing a new protocol; updating every operating system, network, and security tool; and waiting a decade for users to upgrade without a big advantage. “I don’t want to learn IPv6” is nowhere near that level of advantage.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
That is not a sane option. IPv6 isn't actually that hard, companies are just lazy and refuse to implement it (or implement it correctly).
drdaeman 1y ago
It'll be objectively worse. IPv6 is at least sort of supported by a non-negligible number of devices, software and organizations. This IPv8 would be a whole new protocol, that no one out there supports. The fact that version 8 was already defined in [an obsolete] RFC1621 doesn't help either. Even if you decide to try to make it a Frankenstein's monster of a protocol, making it a two IPv4 packets wrapped in each other to create a v4+v4=v8 address space, you'll need a whole new routing solution for the Internet, as those encapsulations would have issues with NATs. And that'll be way more error prone (and thus, less secure), because it'll be theoretically possible to accidentally mix up v4 and inner-half-of-v8 traffic. Nah, if we can't get enough people to adopt IPv6, there's no chance we'll get even more people to adopt some other IPvX (unless something truly extraordinary happens that would trigger such adoption, of course).
- MintPaw 1y ago
  Are you saying you believe it's truly impossible to create a new backwards compatible standard that expands the address space and doesn't require everyone to upgrade for it to work?

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

For a long time, I operated from home with a auction-purchased IPv4 /24 just so I could get around all this BS and have my own AS. There's nothing nicer than being able to BGP peer and just handle everything yourself. I really miss old Level 3 (before the Lumen/CenturyLink buyout). Kind of kicking myself for selling my netblock but it was a decent amount of money ($6000).

icedchai 1y ago
I'm doing exactly this. I got my netblock for free in 1993, back in the Internic days before ARIN existed. I have a couple of VPSes running BGP and tunnel traffic back to my home over wireguard.
- b112 1y ago
  Hey! What if I you will your netblock to me? I'll will you my camaro and my collection of amiga parts. (I really want your netblock)
  - icedchai 1y ago
    hah! If I wasn't actively using it, I'd consider renting it out. I bet you could find some early Internet dude that has a /24 they're not using

jekwoooooe 1y ago

I feel like it’s malicious. They don’t want to support it because it means they can’t charge high prices for static IPs