29 ms·

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world

• PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  should be just about done by 2050 at that rate
• Dwedit 10mo ago
  Aren't all the smartphones IPV6?
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• bell-cot 10mo ago
  The article itself is fairly short & fluffy. Vs. real meat is in the comments on the Register's site.
• yakattak 10mo ago
  I remember 10+ years ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses and it was the next Y2K unless you adopted IPv6. I was able to get IPv6 for my servers and home, and I thought I was safe! > "In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success." Apparently it turns out IPv6 wasn't for me any way!
• runjake 10mo ago
  > still hasn't taken over the world Maybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has. In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure. The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.
  • einpoklum 10mo ago
    > In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running What about those without IPv6 running? Anyway, in the enterprises I've worked in the past decade - of course, another anecdote - not once has anyone ever specified an IPv6 address of anything. Inside the organization or outside of it.
    • 123pie123 10mo ago
      why would an enterprise turn to IPv6? everything fit's nicely in the 10.0.0.0/8 range in my many decades of enterprise infrastructure, no-one has ever mentioned IP6 either. why would they, whats the business case?
      • arccy 10mo ago
        one poorly made decision and oops you're out of 10/8 addresses if you've never run in to this, then sorry, you've not been in an enterprise, you're in a mom 'n pop shop cosplaying as enterprise.
      • baq 10mo ago
        you haven't had to set up intercompany vpns I see
        • einpoklum 10mo ago
          Indeed I have not. But I suspect most people, and most companies, have not either. I don't claim IPv6 isn't used anywhere, or even that it's not used a lot.
          • pixl97 10mo ago
            Pretty much every fortune 500 company does, which counts for millions of people on their networks every day. The troubleshooting calls for VPN routing vs internal LAN routing are fun endeavors of who is actually willing to take responsibility for things they don't understand.
• ruuda 10mo ago
  Everything I know about IPv6 comes from this one blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810. It’s from 2017, when IPv6 adoption was 17% according to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html; today it’s close to 50%.
  • pixl97 10mo ago
    I'd assume a lot of this is because of mobile devices of some type. Getting legacy network operators like cable providers to supply IPv6 has been hell.
    • patmorgan23 10mo ago
      Eyeball networks and cloud providers have been implementing IPv6. In the US all major phone carriers are v6 only with XLAT, the large residential ISP all have implemented v6 (Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity, altice/optimum). The lagging networks are smaller residential ISP and enterprise networks. In Asia they've implemented v6 everywhere pretty much because their v4 allocation is woefully insufficient. APNIC has like 4 billion people in it but less IP space than ARIN, with a population of less than 500 million.
      • krupan 10mo ago
        Just because the ISPs have implemented IPv6 doesn't mean anyone's home router is using it, let alone all the devices in the home WiFi
        • patmorgan23 10mo ago
          Well the data shows they are in fact using it. Most people use their ISP router which in these carriers would be setup by default to use v6, plus any router bought in the last 10 years would support v6 and probably use it by default.
          • pixl97 10mo ago
• przmk 10mo ago
  My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.
  • ToniCipriani 10mo ago
    Same here, I had a working IPv6 setup previously with my DSL provider, but now that I moved to a fibre connection, the new one refuses to support it.
  • sliken 10mo ago
    Do you have a static IPv4, presumably a single IP? I find it useful, mine does change periodically, but I just have a script that Updates DNS when it changes: nsupdate -v -y "${KEY_ALGO}:${KEY_NAME}:${KEY_SECRET}" <<EOF server $DNS_SERVER zone $ZONE update delete $RECORD AAAA update add $RECORD 300 AAAA $CURRENT_IP show send EOF Sure some services might notice for a bit, but it's plenty good for me.
    • przmk 10mo ago
      I don't have a static IPv4 address and I have to use a DDNS built into the Caddy plugin on my OPNSense router. From what I understand, you can't get a static "local" (I know, IPv6 has no direct equivalent) address to use for a reverse proxy — at least not in an easy manner. I might be completely wrong but that's why I don't bother with IPv6.
      • kstrauser 10mo ago
        You’re looking for a Unique Local Address there. It’s a non-externally-routable address that you can use for internal connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address
        • immibis 10mo ago
          Note that although the policy is that you choose a random prefix, nothing actually enforces this and nothing stops you using fd00::1, fd00::2, etc just like 10.0.0.1 etc.
• einpoklum 10mo ago
  > "IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking," Then it's failure is by design. I should not want to multiplex/bridge different versions of the network-layer protocol; and certainly not to avoid using the new protocol because the old one seems more usable and approachable.
  • wmf 10mo ago
    I think the original plan was definitely to turn IPv4 off. Obviously that's probably not practical in our lifetimes.
    • convolvatron 10mo ago
      it was an explicit non goal to ever schedule the end of ipv4
      • p_l 10mo ago
        The problem is that the scheduled end of ipv4 was reached in 1990. But attempts at providing replacement were stymied - IETF went not-invented-here finally getting v6, while USGOV went with CLNS, and meanwhile vendors hemmed and hewed to avoid spending any money on actually implementing changes and then allowed NAT availability to crush arguments and mandates.
• exabrial 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • kstrauser 10mo ago
    It’s ok to understand something and disagree with it. It’s another to proudly wear ignorance on one’s sleeve. That’s never a good look. There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4. An ISP issues your house an IPv4 address and an IPv6 /48 network. Both of those can be subpoenaed equally. The privacy extensions work as advertised. And in reality land, the big companies are the ones pushing for the upgrade because they’re the ones hardest hit by IPv4’s inherent limitations and increasing costs. Same rando in Tampa isn’t leading the charge because it doesn’t affect them much either way.
    • iso1631 10mo ago
      Google aren't subpoenaed Perhaps this is the difference, some people are concerned with being anonymous from companies like google, amazon, etc. Some don't mind that, as long as they are anonymous from a government. Your mention of subpoena suggests you don't care about google tracking you.
      • kstrauser 10mo ago
        I was directly replying to someone saying they could subpoena the temporal owner of an IPv6 address, as though that were somehow different than IPv4. The tracking is a moot point. You can be tracked using the same technologies whether you connect though v4 or v6, and neither stack has the advantage there.
        • willis936 10mo ago
          IPv6 eliminates the possibility of proxies / VPNs. Being tracked simply by IP becomes non-optional.
          • Dagger2 10mo ago
• mrjay42 10mo ago
  Contrary to some other comments: no, IPV6 hasn't taken over the world at all. In my case, I administrate a small server at home, where I self host many services that are made available to myself, friends and families, over the internet. In that context, IPv6, is SADLY (please note that I have NOTHING against IPv6), a limitation, even a nightmare to use. Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it, the one that I think about is: Arma 3. But there are many others In 2025 (and 2026 too?), 4G (5G?) operators do not all route over IPv6 -> which means that if your domain only has a AAAA record, some people using 4G will not be able to access ANY of your services. This issue forced me to beg my ISP to obtain an IPv4 "fullstack" as they call it. Without that IPv4 you have to go through some kind of tunneling (like Cloudflare) -> and guess what? Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users. Plus, it is EXTREMELY unsatisfying to rely on an external private-owned service for a selfhosting project. In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default. NEVER. Which means: more configuration, possibly more struggle.
  • dpark 10mo ago
    I have fiber to my house and no native IPv6 support. I did some research and it seems there is a way to enable IPv6, but it’s janky and just tunnels over IPv4 so what’s the point? I would love for IPv6 to actually take off but somehow it feels like we are still a decade away from ubiquitous adoption.
    • vardalab 10mo ago
      I have Verizon Fios and after they upgraded my network speed from 1G to 2.5G and ONT to some "next gen" one I lost IPv6 support because supposedly this newer ONT does not support it, lol. Verizon is going backwards.
  • miyuru 10mo ago
    >ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users Not all. I operate site with IPv6 only origins behind cloudflare. During the outage I manged to login to the dashboard after some time and remove cloudflare for nearly 2 hours, and traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period. Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.
• bhouston 10mo ago
  IPv6-only is the future for mobile phones, and mobile devices are the future of the internet. And it is consumer devices (and IoT devices) which are the most numerous and also the most price sensitive, and this is where IPv4 is disappearing first.
• sholladay 10mo ago
  I started looking at self-hosting many applications at home once I realized that IPv6 could enable me to do that securely without any complicated router/firewall configuration that would need to be maintained. The only wrinkle I ran into is that apparently ISPs are still reluctant to give out static IPv6 prefixes to residential customers. So you still need some kind of DDNS setup, which is lame.
• almosthere 10mo ago
  Is IPv6 going to see it's epitaph instead of it's takeover soon?
• scrame 10mo ago
  and it never will, because IPv4 has become a defacto reputation system for the exact same reason that IPv6 was created: a limited supply. It wouldn't surprise me to see the continued balkanization of the internet that there is a particular underclass of exclusively IPv6 traffic, but its not going to take over everything because once decentralized systems are now in the hands of a few decisionmakers in the case of, say, email.
• blibble 10mo ago
  reminder that in 2026 Microsoft GitHub(TM) still doesn't support ipv6 but if you need maximum AI slop, that's everywhere
  • crazysim 10mo ago
    As GitHub keeps Azureifying, it'll be interesting to see if this changes.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• RicoElectrico 10mo ago
  My "conspiracy theory" is IPv6's point to point connectivity is inconvenient to anyone except end users. And, rent-seekers can't extract money if the ranges aren't limited. American mind can't comprehend not rent-seeking any new invention.
  • cogman10 10mo ago
    Oh it's much more mundane. IPv4 "works" and ISPs are incredibly resistant to changing things that "work". Because support is needed basically end to end, it's going to take an ungodly amount of time for ISPs to figure this stuff out. It's pretty frustrating having all my hardware support v6 with the only barrier being my ISP who refuses to support it in my location (they support it in other locations).
  • iknowstuff 10mo ago
    America has one of the highest IPv6 adoptions in the world.
    • WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago
      > America has one of the highest IPv6 adoptions in the world. Except for people. Specifically, wireline end users. Triply so if they're on Fiber. ex: T-Mobile fiber rollout is IPv4-only and CGNAT.
      • DANmode 10mo ago
        Conversely, their mobile network is the only 100% – or near 100% – IPv6.
        • WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago
          Yes. For a while now. Actually to my detriment because TM hotspot users are usually IPv6 only. Which is a real issue for me. When I'm on a hotspot, my customers are unreachable to me. I can't VPN into them because 5 of 6 wireline ISP here are IPv4 only.
• Tractor8626 10mo ago
  Is there yet answer to question "how to get random self-assigned addresses into dns records, firewall rules and switch acls?" ?
  • bigfatkitten 10mo ago
    "Build yourself an IPAM solution, at great operational cost and complexity."
  • patmorgan23 10mo ago
    Dynamic DNS, DHCP, and static assignment are all still part of IPv6. Putting single IPs in switch ACLs is an anti pattern. Consider zero trust or working with whole subnets(they're plentiful in v6) instead.
    • bigfatkitten 10mo ago
      > DHCP Not if you're on Android. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085
      • Avamander 10mo ago
        Bless them for not allowing it.
    • izacus 10mo ago
      Every IPv6 networker fan has rabidly torn me to pieces when I asked how to deploy DHCPv6. Apparently it's "not how it's done" and we're "doing it wrong". My SOHO equipment doesn't really support it either, so it's just as well, staying on IPv4 which does DHCP and solves that problem.
    • Tractor8626 10mo ago
      How do you setup dynamic dns in your network? Which software do you use?
  • ectospheno 10mo ago
• singularity2001 10mo ago
  sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi ; sudo networksetup -setv6off Ethernet to protect your privacy
• throwaway81523 10mo ago
  DJB understood the problem decades ago. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
  • kstrauser 10mo ago
    Not really. DJB’s clearly a very, very smart person, but he missed the mark on almost all of that. The problems he described which are real have been satisfactorily solved; they weren’t intractable. The rest turned out to be non-issues.
    • Sesse__ 10mo ago
      Also, his proposed alternative solution (essentially expecting someone to change all software and hardware in the world first, and then have a flag day with zero operational experience) was completely non-workable. Well, actually the document is so vague that you could interpret his “solution” in like three additional different ways, but none of them make much sense.
    • commandersaki 10mo ago
      Intriguing take that he "missed the mark", yet we are still utterly dependant and reliant on IPv4 30 years later since v6, the situation he essentially predicted. How much longer until IPv6 becomes the incumbent?
• ifh-hn 10mo ago
  I'm genuinely wondering if western governments (UK) will start issuing ipv6 addresses out to citizens as their digital id so they can track them online and offline. Only half joking, some UK MPs might actually consider this a reasonable thing considering how many ipv6s there are.
  • delusional 10mo ago
    Since ipv6 is just a 128-address, you could say any unique national ID is already an assigned ipv6. Heck, if you assign your services a UUID, you have also already assigned them an ipv6. What makes an ipv6 useful is that you can route to it. Since you will never be connected to the network. The network will never be able to route packets to you, making the whole thing a little pointless.
    • ifh-hn 10mo ago
      We're not routable yet. Fairly certain people are trying to create computer/brain interfaces... I'm thinking the gov issuing you an ipv6 address that you must use to connect to the internet. But it's also you're id too, since nearly all services are either online or getting pushed that way.
  • duskwuff 10mo ago
    That wouldn't work anyway. IPv6 addresses aren't routable on an address-by-address basis.
    • ifh-hn 10mo ago
      Whether it's workable or not it's besides the point when certainly the UK gov gets it in mind to implement.
    • cm2187 10mo ago
      Yeah but the digital ID could be the 64bit suffix of the IP. Kind of like that horrendous and moronic idea of using the MAC address as the suffix.
    • 10mo ago
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• immibis 10mo ago
  It kind of has. The majority of internet traffic is IPv6. The three biggest internet hub regions (USA, Europe, China) have IPv6 mandates. Most apps support IPv6. Google and Apple force them to, od they get kicked off the app store. Almost all mobile networks (which means almost all end devices) are IPv6-only, with slow inefficient tunneling for IPv4. The price of IPv4 addresses is declining. At what point will we be allowed to say IPv6 hasn't failed? When the IPv4 internet finally switches off for good? It feels like no achievement is high enough for those who don't like IPv6 to change their minds. I would've thought making up 50% of internet traffic and 50% of end devices being on IPv6-only networks would be good Schelling points, but evidently they're not!
  • simoncion 10mo ago
    > At what point will we be allowed to say IPv6 hasn't failed? "IPv6 ... still hasn't taken over the world [after thirty years of deployment]." is a very different statement than "IPv6 has failed.". Noone who has successfully extracted their head from their ass says that IPv6 has failed. It's widely deployed on the Internet, and on who knows how many corporate intranets and SOHO/home LANs. IMO, it's stupid to ever consider turning off IPv4. There surely exist useful systems out there that will never be updated to work with IPv6. I see IPv6 as an "IPv4 address pressure relief system". In the future, SOHO/home LANs can run servers on IPv6, datacenters can run servers mostly on IPv6 but also v4 if they really want, and SOHO/home networks can be behind an IPv4 CGN because all of their unsolicited inbound traffic will come over IPv6.
    • orangeboats 10mo ago
      >IPv6 ... still hasn't taken over the world [after thirty years of deployment]." is a very different statement than "IPv6 has failed.". It's incredibly likely that the GP was referring to comments in this thread, which were indeed claiming that IPv6 has failed, despite the fact that its deployment has been steadily climbing up worldwide. By the way... >In the future, SOHO/home LANs can run servers on IPv6 The future is now. My web server is IPv6 only precisely due to the same reason you mentioned: my ISP has put me under a CGNAT. People can still connect to my website through the Cloudflare reverse proxy though (which I have only enabled for IPv4, IPv6 users get to enjoy direct connection).
• hinkley 10mo ago
  I get so many Second System Syndrome vibes off of IPv6. Surely other people must be picking it up too. Future proofing it by jumping straight to 128 bits instead of 64. 64 would have been fine. Even with a load factor of 1:1000 by assigning semantics to ranges of IP addresses, 64 bit addressing is still enough addresses for 10 million devices per person. If we become a galactic empire, we will have to replace the Web anyway because every interaction will have to be a standalone app or edge networking that doesn’t need to hear back from the central office for minutes, hours, days anyway. We could NAT every planet and go on forever.
  • yuvadam 10mo ago
    how would you do SLAAC with 64 bits?
    • hinkley 10mo ago
      Was DHCP so bad? It carries information important to using such a device anyway.
      • DaSHacka 10mo ago
        +1, the majority of corporate networks I have seen used DHCPv6 or similar anyway
      • convolvatron 10mo ago
        well, its not without issues. the actual motivation was not that dhcp is the suxxors, but to promote a model where the assigned prefix was free and highly dynamic. the goal being to support a model where one could support multiple prefixes to handle the common case of multiple internet connections. more importantly to allow providers to shuffle the address space around without having to coordinate with the end organization. this was perceived to be necessary to prevent the v6 address space from accruing segmentation.
        • izacus 10mo ago
          Well that was a failed idea which has since been abandoned by anyone trying to remain half sane while deploying IPv6.
• hypeatei 10mo ago
  I love IPv6 but organizations seem to struggle with it. My ISP, for example, had issues routing it after a backend update so they decided to just turn it off. I'm now stuck on CGNAT IPv4 which results in constant captchas :/
  • greyb 10mo ago
    Meanwhile, there is a whole grey market built around this. People sell “CGNAT mobile proxies” that ride on carrier and ISP NAT, and the whole point is that they are a pain to block without nuking huge ISP ranges. So they get marketed as a convenient way to dodge shadowbans, spam filters, and basically any abuse defense that relies on IP reputation.
    • hypeatei 10mo ago
      > the whole point is that they are a pain to block What makes them a pain to block? Angry users or some central database that lists these addresses as "do not block"?
      • DANmode 10mo ago
        > What makes them a pain to block? Not wanting to cut off access to your users from, for example, every AT&T device (and their MVNOs).
      • marcthe12 10mo ago
        Since cgnat means NATing a huge number of legimate device to a single ip. So angry users is the answer. Also note mobile users are usually the cgnat.
    • pixl97 10mo ago
      It would be nice if we had a blackout CGNAT day where a bunch of major sites don't serve traffic to people behind CGNAT to give the ISPs a bit of a scare.
      • lyu07282 10mo ago
• fitzn 10mo ago
  The problem with IPv6 jokes is that very few people are making them.
• austin-cheney 10mo ago
  I have noticed that on my last Windows computer (Windows 10) and my current computer (Windows 11) IPv6 works great for a little while after a reboot, but then just seems to die. I have my house and all internal automation configured for IPv6 first and its great on all my Linux computers and phones.
• noahlt 10mo ago
  Yesterday I was required to turn on IPv6 on my router, while setting up some IoT things using Matter over Thread. Apparently that protocol uses IPv6 and doesn't work if your router is only routing IPv4.
  • kccqzy 10mo ago
    There is a rich history of IoT devices using IPv6 to communicate among themselves without relying on the cloud. I think Nest started this trend. One Nest device sends a specific RA to make itself the router of all other Nest devices. All other devices can configure themselves thanks to SLAAC. The benefit of v6 is that there are so many addresses out there that the Nest device can just pick an arbitrary ULA and there won’t be collisions. Don’t know about Matter though. If it requires the user to turn on IPv6 then it’s a user experience downgrade. It should just use IPv6 internally as an implementation detail.
  • cyberax 10mo ago
    That's incorrect. Matter-over-Thread absolutely does NOT require IPv6 on your router. Even Matter-over-WiFi will happily work in IPv4-only networks, as long as your router does not filter the IPv6 announcements. Some routers can work as _relays_ between the Thread network and WiFi, but this is entirely optional.
    • tguvot 10mo ago
      iirc some of the matter devices want/need connection to the mothership outside. hence ipv6 on router
  • tguvot 10mo ago
    this is one of reasons why i stick to z-wave. totally self contained.
• 10000truths 10mo ago
  It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US. Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.
  • alt227 10mo ago
    IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.
    • MBCook 10mo ago
      It was? Isn’t it what all the cell phones networks use these days? And most ISP’s? They may hand the end user device a IPv4 address but don’t they actually use IPv6?
      • alt227 10mo ago
        Yes as I said in a sibling post the telcos are the only ones using it, and that is the only reason that graphs like the google client one exist. That is only because it already exists and is cheaper than using NAT when you have hundreds of millions of clients. IPv6 only ISPs will never leave the mobile space.
        • kstrauser 10mo ago
          “The largest ISPs are the only ones using it” is another way of describing it as ubiquitous.
• knorker 10mo ago
  For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet. Half. The. Internet. What a failure. /s
  • alt227 10mo ago
    This is mainly due to mobile devices only being issued ipv6 addresses by the telco 4g networks. They are the only ones using ipv6 on the millions of clients scale.
    • School-Cotton 10mo ago
      My current home ISP and my last one both support IPv6 just fine. It is not a mobile-only thing.
      • alt227 10mo ago
        Everything supports both. We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. Most mobile devices are only issued an IPv6 address and therefore when the masses do google searches it uses IPv6 and makes it look like there is huge adoption.
        • School-Cotton 10mo ago
          > We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff. You seem to be asserting that dual-stack machines use IPv4 by default, but that's not really true. If your machine has both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, browsers will in fact use IPv6 to connect to sites that support it, like Google. They prefer IPv6 by default and fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 is slower (Happy Eyeballs algorithm). Of course, random software can mostly use whichever it wants, so I'm not claiming every process on such a machine will use IPv6, but most common stuff does.
          • alt227 10mo ago
            In my use of Wireshark to check this, every device and software I have tested uses IPv4 by default expect mobile devices on 4g/5g networks. Not saying its like that everywhere, but Im not seeing IPv6 default usage on dual stack systems in my experience.
• mprovost 10mo ago
  I was in college when v6 was going through the RFC process. In my networking class we had to learn Netware (IPX) and v6, which have both turned out to be equally irrelevant, for different reasons. At this stage, I fully expect to retire having never deployed a single resource using v6.
• kyledrake 10mo ago
  I don't like to admit this, but at this point honestly I think ipv6 is largely a failure, and I say this as someone that wrote a blog post for APNIC on how to turn on ipv6. I'll get endless pushback for this, but the reality is that adoption isn't at 100%, it very closely needs to be, and there are still entire ISPs that only assign ipv4, to say nothing of routers people are buying and installing that don't have ipv6 enabled out of the box. A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative "written on a napkin" change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space. It still would have been difficult to adopt, but it would have the benefit of being a simple change to a system everyone already understands and on top of a stack that largely already exists. I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.
  • hypeatei 10mo ago
    > A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space "And what do you base this belief on? Fact is you'd run into exactly the same problems as with IPv6. Sure, network-enabled software might be easier to rewrite to support 40-bit IPv4+, but any hardware-accelerated products (routers, switches, network cards, etc.) would still need replacement (just as with IPv6), and you'd still need everyone to be assigned unique IPv4+ addresses in order to communicate with each other (just as with IPv6)."[0] 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120422
    • redox99 10mo ago
      Hardware would catch up. And IPv4 would never go away. If you connect to 1.1.1.1 it would still be good ole IPv4. You would only have in addition the option to connect to 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.2 if the entire chain supports it. And if not, it could still be worked around through software with proxies and NAT.
      • hypeatei 10mo ago
• redox99 10mo ago
  It was doomed the moment you had to maintain two separate stacks, each with its own address, firewall rules and so on. It should have been ipv4 with extra optional bits, so you could have the same rules and everything for both stacks. I turn it off because it's a risk having one of either stacks malconfigured. IPv6 should've been a superset of IPv4, as in addresses are shared, not that you have a separate IPv4 and IPv6 address for your server.
  • kccqzy 10mo ago
    That’s why my home network is IPv6 only. NAT64 and DNS64 and 464XLAT work very well, and you only need to configure IPv4 once: in your router, where you need special configuration anyways.
    • apearson 10mo ago
      What do you do about IoT devices?
      • torginus 10mo ago
        Why would that be a desirable quality? Wifi devices (using Matter or not) live on the same network as my PC - meaning a compromised lightbulb (or one that hasn't been updated) can be used to infiltrate and attack my home computers. Thread+ Matter, despite using a different radio, suffers from the same issue, since a border router is on the Wifi network, a smart bulb using Thread can theoretically access my PC. Yes, I'm sure there are ways to fix this, but why have the problem in the first place? Zigbee is entirely incompatible networking standard, and doesn't have this problem.
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    • miyuru 10mo ago
      for me, I don't need to even setup NAT64. My ISP provides it for me free.
  • 10mo ago
• shmerl 10mo ago
  It's reaching around 50% adoption according to Google stats? Steady growth, though still annoyingly slow. It will need a few more decades at this rate.
  • commandersaki 10mo ago
    My criteria for success, which is the goals that were set forth for IPng was to no longer depend or rely on IP. It didn't even achieve the goal of averting the issue of impending address exhaustion.
• Ericson2314 10mo ago
  https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html it's still going up (we are in some sort of cyclic downturn right now that I don't understand). Next year that chart will finally cross 50%. It was a mere 30% in 2030. Developing country mobile phone networks will continue to push it higher. All we need to do is start having rich governments mandate IPv6, and also mandate IPv4 downtime as a punishment for those that don't comply / chaos engineering for the system as a whole. Then we can quickly finish the job.
  • zokier 10mo ago
    > we are in some sort of cyclic downturn right now that I don't understand consumer networks have significantly higher adoption rates compared to corporate/edu, and people are on vacations during summer
    • Ericson2314 10mo ago
      Ah OK, there are workday/weekend and vacation/no-vacation cycles. Gotcha. Well, to the extent the rich country laggards are institutional, then regulation should be more effective!
• sedatk 10mo ago
  IPv6 has already won on mobile and been gaining fast traction in IoT space with Matter. The reason IPv4 is still around everywhere else is because we came up with ingeniuous techniques that squeezed the heck out of IPv4 address space. Also, IPv4 addresses are easier to type. That's pretty much it. I had mentioned some of that in my post: https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-af214dd06aa7/ https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-af214dd06aa...
  • krupan 10mo ago
    Yes, they are easier to type, and to remember, and it turns out, that's actually a big deal! When you are troubleshooting network problems, it's really nice to take everything but simple raw addresses out of the picture. It's really nice to be able to look at an address and instantly recognize if it's on the same (V)LAN as you are expecting, if it's unique, if it changed from what it was last time you checked, if it's an address for a VPN interface, if the packet you are sniffing is for this host or that host, if DNS is resolving correctly, etc., etc.
    • sedatk 10mo ago
      I agree that it's a big deal. IPv6 has some "well-known short addresses" to alleviate this issue like accesing well-known broadcast addresses etc with `fe80::` prefix, but it's sad that they don't have one for the gateway (something like `fe80::1`). I know that there's a reason for that like supporting multiple network connections, but just have a shortcut for the "first gateway" at least which is the most common.
    • reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
      You can do the exact same thing in V6 if you want, there are so many extra bits you can have DHCPv6 or assigned addresses pack all kinds of things in there. With ULAs there are 16-bits for network ID, which is so sparse you can type the VLAN ID in decimal and ignore that you're losing the overhead. People will often put in joke address like deadbeef that can be fit into hex (the 40-bit global ID should be random but for hobbyist purposes most people are willing to suffer re-numbering it in the unlikely event their homelab is bought out by IBM). If you'd rather eat into the interface id portion, you can technically do whatever you want in there although packing too much in may locally cause problems in some routers if you try to treat it like additional network id bits. It's the equivalent to have both middle bytes of 10.x.y.z available for whatever while still having a few hundred billion available subnets. Just as an example google's public DNS is 2001:4860:4860::8888 because their v4 dns is 8.8.8.8.
• Animats 10mo ago
  IPv6 continues to rumble along, gaining market share, because China. Increasing IPv6 adoption was in the 14th Five Year Plan, and about 75% of mobile in China is now IPv6.
• j45 10mo ago
  IPv6 might not have taken over the world, but it sure seems to be getting forced on the world. Even more than IPv4, not knowing enough about IPv6 can introduce a lot of unintended issue, consequence and even security gaps in your assumptions. Maybe there was an IPv7 or 8 that will be more palatable.
• halyconWays 10mo ago
  IPv6 addresses are ugly and hard to memorize. IPv4 addresses are pretty and easier to memorize. That's about the end of the discussion as to why it's basically a failure.
  • lyu07282 10mo ago
    I don't remember ipv4 addresses either, that's what dns is for!
    • halyconWays 10mo ago
      It's so ingrained in you you don't even consider it a use of ipv4. 192.168.1.x is natural and pretty. ipv6 is a horror show and incompatible with the way that we think and remember things. "Ah, crap, avahi isn't working, but fortunately I remember that that computer is blablabla.34." The IPv6 equivalent of that is like "fd12:3456:7891::1". Absolute non-starter.
• cydonian_monk 10mo ago
  I've been native IPv6 at home for a few years now. That worked flawlessly until a recent Windows 11 update somehow broke IPv6 in ways that I don't entirely understand. All the other Linux and Apple and et cetera things in my house are fine, but the Win11 laptop just refuses to handle certain IPv6 ranges (specifically including the address that the host interface for one of my web servers falls in). 100% contained within the Win11 device and TBH I can't be bothered to dig into it further so I just proxy through some other device that does work. (Guessing it'll get fixed a month/year/decade or so from now.) I agree it's not a failure, but after 3 decades it's still frustratingly annoying to use at times.
  • ectospheno 10mo ago
    I had a much less annoying time with ipv6 on windows after I explicitly disabled all ipv6 tunnel interfaces. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/configure-ipv6-in-windows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...
  • izacus 10mo ago
    > I agree it's not a failure, but after 3 decades it's still frustratingly annoying to use at times. Anyone sane would call a standard that remains annoying to use after 30 years a failure.
    • onraglanroad 10mo ago
      I agree. Windows is a failure.
• dannyobrien 10mo ago
  I was expecting Google's IPv6 availability monitor[1] to show a crossover to a (slim) majority of their users accessing their services over IPv6 sometime soon, though it's sort of fascinating how close it gets to 50% recently without ever actually crossing over: [1] - https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
  • eqvinox 10mo ago
    Heh, 49.84% on Aug 2nd. Pretty sure it'll cross 50% in 2026, even if only for a few peaks.
• GalaxyNova 10mo ago
  btw it's only been getting seriously deployed since 2010
• spullara 10mo ago
  they should have made it backwards compatible. they were forever doomed by not make it a superset of IPv4.
  • yabones 10mo ago
    I agree in theory, but doing so would have been very difficult practically. The IPv4 header structure is very rigid, and it wouldn't have been possible to just add more bits to the src/dst fields without breaking things. The only reasonable route I've seen would have been to add an "area code" or "country code" to the Options fields and have huge border routers to translate packets between different locales. It would have solved one problem, only by creating an arguably much worse one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Header https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Header https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Options https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Options https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#/media/File:IPv4_Packet-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#/media/File:IPv4_Packet-e...
    • izacus 10mo ago
      Sure, but there was also no need to reinvent address assignment, routing and bunch of other stuff that now causes a massive headache due to mismatch of architectures on dual-stack deployments.
  • p_l 10mo ago
    It was not possible to make a "superset" of IPv4, if only because one of the early major blockers was that BSD Sockets suck by leaking low-level details of addressing so you'd have exactly the same argument of "why should I bother writing entire second copy of connection code in my application" for any superset you want to imagine. Similarly, we have 30 years of experience that vendors will happily break optional headers or flags.
    • tedk-42 10mo ago
      I don't think this is how it would have played out at all. I'm no expert on IPv4 or IPv6, but if they had designed IPv6 to be able to route fine to IPv4, we'd be OK. It would at least give people an upgrade path where their old stuff that couldn't be patched / updated and were stuck on IPv4 could be slowly killed off in the path of least resistance down the dependency line. This 'dual stack' approach doubled up on everything up front and meant we all had to do both during the transition (which has taken 30 years).
• nashashmi 10mo ago
  IPv4 should have been converted directly to IPv6. Every IPv4 address should have been given an equivalent IPv6 address. 192.168.1.1 becomes 2001:00C0:00A8:0000:0000:0000:0001:0001 or 2001:00C0:00A8::0001:0001.
  • sgjohnson 10mo ago
    that exists - ::ffff:0:0/96 space. It even supports dots. ::ffff:192.168.1.1 == 192.168.1.1 (as far as the linux kernel is concerned, in most contexts)
  • apearson 10mo ago
    So NAT64? https://www.nat64.net https://www.nat64.net
  • Sesse__ 10mo ago
    You mean, like 6to4? We did that.
• singpolyma3 10mo ago
  Except it has
  • commandersaki 10mo ago
    Has it? Why are we still utterly dependant and reliant on IPv4 addresses?
    • Dagger2 10mo ago
      We aren't. There's a variety of reasons people choose to use v4 (some good, some bad), but you don't have to. The network my desktop is on doesn't use v4. It works. v4 isn't a required dependency.
      • commandersaki 10mo ago
        How do you get to github? How do you connect to news.ycombinator.com? Why is an IP address more valuable than an IPv6 address? Why is IPv4 the incumbent 30 years after IPv6?
        • WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago
          > How do you connect to news.ycombinator.com? PSA that news.ycombinator.com is 2606:7100:1:67::26 now. That is all. Except for the part where it doesn't help us on IPv6-Never ISPs.
        • Dagger2 10mo ago
          > How do you get to github? $ wget https://github.com/ Resolving github.com (github.com)... 64:ff9b::8c52:7204, 140.82.114.4 Connecting to github.com (github.com)|64:ff9b::8c52:7204|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK > How do you connect to news.ycombinator.com? $ wgetnull 'https://news.ycombinator.com/ Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 2606:7100:1:67::26, 209.216.230.207 Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|2606:7100:1:67::26|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK > Why is an IP address more valuable than an IPv6 address? Because there's such an incredible amount of v6 addresses. You could pay a trillion dollars per second for a /64 and still only pay $1.70/year for each address. > Why is IPv4 the incumbent 30 years after IPv6? Because IPv4 was the only choice until IPv6, and replacing the Internet's L3 protocol is hard and takes a long time.
• nojs 10mo ago
  I question the premise that it’s not taking over. Our logs are at least 50% ipv6 now. A few years ago I feel like a barely saw it.
• jmyeet 10mo ago
  IPv6 is the poster child for the second system effect (or solution) [1]. IPv4 really only had 3 problems that anybody cared about: 1. Address space size; 2. Roaming; and 3. Reliable connectionless delivery; and 4. The problems created by the at most once delivery under TCP when what we really needed was at least once delivery in many, many cases. Even the address space size problem is less of an issue than originally predicted because of improvements in NAT, up to and including cgNAT for cellular network providers (which also somewhat addressed (2) in a limited way). Interestingly, some of the larger companies have networks simply too large for the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. By "roaming" I mean maintaining a consistent connection while moving between networks. (4) has kinda fallen on QUIC (now HTTP3) but this should really be core TCP/IP Layer 3. You could also say that TCP congestion control is pretty outdated. It's not surprising. It was designed at a time before megabit (let alone gigabit) networks. And, more importantly, latency kills throughput. Some efforts have been made on this, such as Google's BBR [2], but other problems remain like MTU windows being too small for modern networks. So what did IPv6 do? It only solved one problem, address space, and it did it in a way that kinda created new problems. First, the address space is too large (128 bits) and the last 64 bits are kinda reserved for the job that a 16 port used to do. And why was that? Originally, it was intended that the lower 64 bits were derived from a 48 bit MAC address (as used by Ethernet and later Wifi) but they realized this was a huge privacy problem so it never happened. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect [2]: https://github.com/google/bbr https://github.com/google/bbr [2]: https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/understanding-ipv6-eui-64-bit-address/ta-p/3116953 https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/und...
• gweinberg 10mo ago
  Can't we just leapfrog to IPv7? or 8 for that matter?
  • Sesse__ 10mo ago
    The first thing I do whenever I see a discussion about IPv6 is to search for the jokers who talk about IPv5 or IPv7.
• wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
  Good enough beats better.
• p0w3n3d 10mo ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't it make you leak your IP outside local network? I'd say this is a great turn off especially nowadays when it will be used for sure for tracking
  • jandrese 10mo ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "leak your IP" since IP address is always how you communicate. I guess you mean you no longer have a 192.168 or a 10. address that is "hidden" from the Internet for whatever value that has? One nice thing about IPv6 is your local client can continually change their address if they so want (and this is actually a common feature) to disrupt tracking. Sure you have the same prefix, but that's exactly the same boat you were in with IPv4 and NAT.
    • krater23 10mo ago
      So this 'feature' is just a fix for the issue with tracking that would not be there with ipv4 beside that my internal ip's are changing every day to bring more confusion into my internal net. nice!
      • jandrese 10mo ago
        You are being tracked on IPv4 via the gateway address. It's no different. Changing your local IPv4 address does absolutely nothing, while changing the local IPv6 address does almost nothing. Hooray.
        • hypfer 10mo ago
          Oh but it is different. It for example doesn't leak how many unique devices there are on your network. This might be very useful in a world that is moving towards authoritarian tech dystopia at mind-boggling speeds. Yes, yes, we have privacy extensions, but you can still group those through higher-level fingerprinting. You don't get mixed traffic.
      • chippiewill 10mo ago
• mark_h 10mo ago
  Not a counter-point, but: the other day I rebuilt my personal server, finishing by pointing the reserved IP at the new box. I then had a period of confusion because I was still seeing old content, because my browser (etc) was obviously querying the AAA record first, which I hadn't updated. (a while ago I needed to contact support to get an IPv6 allocation at home, but that was a very quick interaction at the time)
  • Dylan16807 10mo ago
    Browsers add an additional layer of fun where they can cache an IP address long past the TTL as long as the old IP keeps responding correctly.
• anal_reactor 10mo ago
  Evolution is the survival of good enough. IPv4 is good enough. > but IPv6 is better It doesn't solve any life-changing problem.
• mmbleh 10mo ago
  Maybe a different take, but as someone that manages a large public API that allows anonymous access, IPv6 has been a nightmare to try and enforce rate limits on. We've found different ISPs assign IPv6 addresses differently - some give a /64 to every server, some give /64 to an entire data center. It seems there is no standard and everyone just makes up what they think will work. This puts us in an awkward place where we need abuse protections, but have to invest into more complicated solutions that were needed for IPv4. Or we give up and just say if you want to use IPv6, you have to authenticate. Does anyone have any success stories from the server side handling a situation like this? Looks like cloudflare switched to some kind of custom dynamic rate limiting based on like addresses, but it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to do such a thing.
  • jcgl 10mo ago
    Common practice is to block no finer than /64s. If you treat an IPv6 /64 like an IPv4 /32, you should be off to the races.
  • patmorgan23 10mo ago
    The ISPs assigning only /64s to whole data centers are not following the standards and best practices. For rate limiting I would block at the /64 level. Just like if someone is behind a CG-NAT they might run into ip reputation issues. They need to complain to their carrier about the poor service/configuration or switch providers.
• SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Is there an obvious reason why it would not have worked to just say that all ipv4 addresses are ipv6 addresses with an implicit leading 96 zero bits?
  • MagicMoonlight 10mo ago
    I’ve asked both ChatGPT and other users and the consensus is “NO YOU CAN’T BECAUSE YOU’D HAVE TO REWRITE THE SOFTWARE” As if IPv6 doesn’t require a full rewrite too. So basically, no there’s no reason. They just wanted to be edgy and use hexadecimal and they’ve ruined everything.
    • Dylan16807 10mo ago
      It's hard to believe there are people that think letters in an IP have a meaningful impact. "edgy"? Come on. And if they used decimal I bet the complaints they didn't use hex would be just as loud and just as certain, since an IP address in dotted decimal is 50% longer than in hex. On top of that, hex would make IPv4 a lot easier to use because of how subnets get optimized. Instead of constantly rounding to weird multiples of 8 or 16 or 32 you'd only have to deal with one hex digit at a time. And in most deployments you could skip the address math entirely by sizing your subnets 4 bits at a time: /16, /20, /24, /28.
  • welterde 10mo ago
    This is already a thing in IPv6 pretty much. You can write applications IPv6-only and support IPv4 via IPv4-mapped addresses (::ffff:1.2.3.4 for the IPv4 1.2.3.4). The host still needs to be dualstacked for that to work though. In case the host is IPv6-only you can use NAT64 (or similar technologies), where the IPv4-space is embedded behind some other prefix, but the application just talks plain IPv6 and doesn't have to care too much what happens in the background.
  • reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
    That's in there. ::ffff:0:0/96 and 2002::/16 are for v4 addresses in different circumstances, but that doesn't address the issue of routing so there are capabilities like NAT64 that allow network operators to map their IPv4 networks via routers and it mostly works. There were exceptions, software that cares about lower level network functionality tend to break. NAT64 works much better for 6->4 connection scenarios than vice versa, but 4->6 with specific connection pairs and careful split DNS is possible.
• willis936 10mo ago
  I used to like the idea of an IPv4 replacement, but I've come around. A large number of my devices and websites I visit use IPv6. Its success has highlighted the fact that I don't want it. Just today I disabled IPv6 on my router because I suspect it as a vector for tracking. IPv6 offers nothing of value to the user. It might as well be shelved forever.
• srwx 10mo ago
  I run an IPv6 only VPS as a side project to keep an eye on what doesn't work. My most recent discovery: I tried moving from `lego` to the new native ACME `nginx` support. `nginx` refuses to talk to letsencrypt on IPv6; it's not a letsencrypt flaw because it works perfectly on the same server with `lego`.
• pif 10mo ago
  I think 30 years should be much more than enough to realise the idiocy of proposing a non-backward-compatible standard to the general public.
  • Arainach 10mo ago
    It's often impossible to make backwards-compatible changes to a format which wasn't designed to allow for future changes and which is designed to be as space-efficient as possible. That doesn't mean that the limits of the old design won't hit anyway and force a switch off it.
    • krater23 10mo ago
      IPv4 allows future changes. There are some reserved bits in the header that could change a big part of it.
      • Dagger2 10mo ago
        v4 supports extension headers and over a thousand bytes of arbitrary payload so if the only thing you needed was a couple of bits in the packet, there was never any issue with finding them. The problem is that you can't use those bits to expand v4's address space, without taking all of the same steps v6 needed to do. v4 has no mechanism to get v4 hosts to understand extra address bits, wherever you put them. Oh, that and the fact that IP addresses are stored in many more places than just the v4 packet header. Consider DNS, DHCP, ARP, gethostbyname(), struct sockaddr_in, databases using VARCHAR(15), etc etc etc. The packet header is only a tiny part of the story.
  • Dagger2 10mo ago
    You'd think it would be long enough for people to realize that v6 is backwards compatible! Yet no, here we are, constantly dealing with people making the same damn claim that it isn't every single time a v6 story is posted. v6 is about as backwards compatible with v4 as it's possible to be. If you have a way to make it more backwards compatible then I'd love to hear it, but when I ask this all I ever get are things that don't work, or things that v6 already does.
• israrkhan 10mo ago
  NAT is the reason for IPV6 not taking over. Also it acts as a nice security perimeter. If all IoT devices in a home were exposed to internet, It would be absolute mess.
  • Dagger2 10mo ago
    NAT doesn't act as a security perimeter, and not having NAT doesn't mean that your devices are exposed to the Internet. NAT is about dealing with address space shortages, not security.
    • izacus 10mo ago
      This gaslighting keeps being repeated, but fact of the matter is that any consumer/home network will be exposed to the internet if they're using SOHO equipment via IPv6 and won't be via IPv4. And huge % of SOHO routers won't even allow configuring IPv6 firewall which makes security a disaster.
      • Dagger2 10mo ago
        It keeps getting repeated precisely because it isn't gaslighting. And yet we still see people claiming that NAT is security. The only reason those networks aren't exposed to the whole Internet on v4 is because they're using RFC1918, not because of NAT -- but that still leaves them exposed to some outside networks, so routers come with firewalls, which act as an actual security boundary. And they won't be exposed on v6, because those exact same firewalls work their magic on v6 too. NAT doesn't provide and isn't needed for security. Its main security contribution is to confuse people about how secure their network is.
        • sedawkgrep 10mo ago
          NAT effectively stops inbound connectivity at the NAT edge. A system could be a dozen hops beyond that and no inbound traffic can reach it. IPv6 (without any NAT) means that the source and destination are fully routable. How folks DON'T see this as a functional component of security is beyond me.
• thayne 10mo ago
  > IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4 I don't think there is any way it could have been.
• NelsonMinar 10mo ago
  Roughly 40% of the Internet is IPv6. That's not taken over, and disappointing for a 30 year old standard, but it's not nothing. https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2024-10/ipv6-transition.html https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2024-10/ipv6-transition.html I've been using IPv6 via Starlink for months now and it was a big ho-hum when I deployed it. It just works.
• kwar13 10mo ago
  Nothing have given me more issues than ipv6. Every time I've tried to use it, it gives me so much headache I just give up. I'm not even sure my ISP supports it. My router doesn't get an ipv6, and called my IPS. After going through 3 different people over 2 hours I just gave up. I just hope I get put behind CGNAT...
• foobarian 10mo ago
  Only 30? It feels like it's been ages!
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• PeterCorless 10mo ago
  The reason being? IP proxy gateways. They obviated the need to move away from the limited address space of IPv4. Which was 90% of the reason to do IPv6.
• cryptonector 10mo ago
  IMO we need to rethink routing for IPv6 so we can finally reduce pressure on router tables and finally cause pressure to ditch IPv4. Here are some of my thoughts on that elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471898 But here's a more thought-out design: - register a well-known IPv6 prefix with 20 bits reserved for AS number - so we'd have ${well_known_prefix}:${AS_number}:${customer_prefix}:${end_entity} (not necessarily that format for display, but just for the purpose of getting the idea across here) - have DNS servers return AAAA RRs with the AS number filled in - DNS servers should either have the correct AS numbers filled in their zones, or possibly could subscribe to the RPKI and use the RPKI for mapping ${well_known_prefix}:${all_zero_AS}:${customer_prefix}:* to AS numbers, then fill them in (this would require live signing if using DNSSEC, which is f-i-n-e fine) - if there are multiple AS numbers for a $customer_prefix, then return multiple AAAA RRs, or if EDNS0 indicates client support for it, one AAAA RR and N RRs of a new type that carry only the AS numbers - update core routers to route these prefixes based on the AS number in the address - update edge routers to replace the sender's AS number in its address if its address is below the $well_known_prefix -- this takes care of the return path - update internal routers to use only the $customer_prefix and the $end_entity for routing for this $well_known_prefix - end entities should ignore the AS number when receiving packets, thus allowing multi-homing (i.e., let source and destination IPv6 addresses match ${well_known_prefix}:*:${customer_prefix}:${end_entity} for socket 5-tuples) - for backwards compatibility end entities should map these addresses back to whatever the application used in its calls to bind() and connect() (i.e., if the app found an AAAA with the AS number filled in and used it for connect(), but the ${customer_prefix} is multi-homed, then accept packets from all those homes) (apps should make sure to use TLS / QUIC for security, naturally) - when an end-entity sees a change in AS number for a peer's address matching a socket 5-tuple then update the peer's AS number / address in the 5-tuple -- this allows for migration and better path finding I think something like this could be deployed with relatively little effort.
• BloodyIron 10mo ago
  I have yet to encounter a situation where I _NEED_ IPv6, or there's a very substantial benefit of using IPv6 over IPv4 beyond just "academic arguments on the internet". And I work with IP networks all the time, as well as run LAN Parties as a business. You'd think I would have encountered at least ONE reason to give a crap about IPv6 by now. But nope, not one reason. IPv4 gets work done. IPv6 is just a topic that we can wax poetic about, but nothing else.
• ajnin 10mo ago
  I don't use IPv6 because it solves a problem that I don't have and it provides functionality that I don't want. And also because I don't understand it very well. My points : - I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with. - Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden. - Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much. - It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful. - My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways? - What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea. In short, so far, ignorance is bliss.
  • MindSpunk 10mo ago
    > - I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with. What happens when multiple devices in your /8 want to listen on port 80 and 443 on the public address? Only one of them can. Now you're running a proxy. > - Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden. It's called a firewall. You want a firewall. IPv6 also has a firewall. NAT is not a firewall. NAT is usually configured as part of your firewall, but is not a firewall. > - Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much. DHCPv6 > - My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways? What are you supposed to do with a /8? Do you have several million computers? > - What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea. What happens if your ISP changes your IPv4 address?
• troad 10mo ago
  > For many, the decision of which protocol to use was easy because IPv6 didn't add features that represented major improvements. This is the obvious and only key to this puzzle. We tech nerds have this mad idea that everyone will want to spend time and money adapting to new standards because they're technically better in some abstract way, and so we do absolutely no work to create incentives for anyone to switch. Often, the new standard is not (yet) even functionally equivalent to the old one (e.g. Wayland), just to make doubly sure the switch will be as difficult and undesirable for end users as possible. And when the absolutely inevitable consequences occur - stakeholders do not want to invest in switching to or developing for new standards that give them zero incentive to do so - there's a silly finger pointing game, as though everyone was supposed to switch, and they've failed to do so. Which is, of course, absurd. People don't owe us compliance. Do not expect to be able to successfully shift behaviour unless you give people incentives - reasons they would want to switch, not just reasons you want them to switch.
  • seydor 10mo ago
    If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Life is short
• compounding_it 10mo ago
  I think this is the same as : we are a big company that does banking and payment processing for decades. We were planning to switch to golang/rust/C/python whatever for a long time but we still use age old java that has been patched several times with known security risks and no longer supported. Unless we have a huge problem we don’t see the need to fix something that is broken but not fallen apart yet.
• brian_cunnie 10mo ago
  My work has IPv6, and my home has IPv6. If I need to connect to my home Fedora machine from work, a simple "ssh fed.nono.io" works just fine — I don't need to activate my Wireguard VPN; I don't need to worry about address space collisions.
  • benjiro 10mo ago
    That is because your provider is nice and gives you a static pre-fix. Around here, all the providers give dynamic IPv6 pre-fixes to prevent people from running servers. This is partially why some see Ipv6 as a advantage, and others see it as nothing but trouble. We still have the whole Ipv4 CGNAT disadvantage, with the added complexity of Ipv6 on top.
• alex1138 10mo ago
  ipv6's::syntax::is::weird
• snvzz 10mo ago
  Google's ipv6 stats[0] are stuck in Dec 17. However, extrapolation suggests the 50% mark might have finally been crossed around year end. 0. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
• perdomon 10mo ago
  Every day I thank NAT that I don't have to memorize IPv6 addresses. I can barely manage my IPv4 numbers.
• Emjayen 10mo ago
  IPv6 was obsolete by the mid-2000s, majorly due to the advent of roaming. It was designed on the rather fanciful assumption that its deployment would simply supersede IPv4, that every software/hardware vendor would cooperate, and we'd have a pure v6 network which would also replace the traditional L2/L3 layers. Ofcourse legacy compatibility trumps all, along with the ubiquity of NATs and roaming and we're now just in the sunk-cost phase, being left saddled with a horribly bloated protocol (128-bit addresses was a marketing choice; not engineering) that solves no problems.
• alex_young 10mo ago
  IPv6 means no more NAT. Your home computer can have the same kind of network connection to the rest of the internet as the server at the AWS data center. ISPs do not want this. That is all you need to know about why you can’t have IPv6.
  • alex_young 10mo ago
    In lieu of complaining about the downvotes, I’ll just quote George Santayana: “ Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
• Brett_Riverboat 10mo ago
  I don't know about anyone else's reasoning but personally IPV4 works just fine for 100% of my use cases. I don't have anything against it per-say but I have no reason to use it either.
• djha-skin 10mo ago
  IPv6 seems to be a great fit for 1) mobile devices, 2) massive data centers and 3) literally nothing else. I have met zero network engineers who wanted to put IP version 6 in their network. It causes all sorts of problems and presents all sorts of security risks without much benefit other than the obvious one. In the data center, NAT is a feature, not a bug. Instead, they provision IPv6-enabled load balancers and pass traffic back to load bearing servers using ipv4 instead. It's a classic example of "this is the next best thing everyone should use it" which achieves some adoption but it's not really the next best thing. It's not the be all end all it purports to be. We should just admit to ourselves that we need one kind of ip stack in some situations and another in another.
  • favflam 10mo ago
    20 years ago there were a lot of peer to peer applications. For example, Skype used to bounce calls across peers. Now, all calls gets routed through big-brother Microsoft. NAT and American assymmetric bandwidth ISPs both killed this business model and now we are stuck with tech monopolies like Cloudflare. I see this ipv4-only strategy as another monopoly tactic to kill competition. And in Asia, it is getting more difficult not to get stuffed behind a double NAT (CGNAT), which means you can't even play games without using big-brother rent-seeker services (no port-forwarding/upnp). But at least here you get ipv6 for free and everything just works.
• phs318u 10mo ago
  The fact that this comments section indicates such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge (much less, understanding) - in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy than most - is exactly why IPv6 is still not widely adopted. There is confusion about the less obvious benefits, confusion about how it works, confusion about the dangers (how do I adjust my well honed IPv4 spidey senses?), and confusion about how I transition my current private network. An epic failure of change management. Here’s a prediction. Linux on the desktop will have >50% penetration well before IPv6 does.
  • djha-skin 10mo ago
    No. It's not adopted everywhere because it's awful. At least on the data center side.
  • n_u 10mo ago
    > There is confusion about the less obvious benefits, confusion about how it works, confusion about the dangers (how do I adjust my well honed IPv4 spidey senses?), and confusion about how I transition my current private network Could you be specific about what the misconceptions are?
    • phs318u 10mo ago
      I had Copilot produce this for you based on the comments in this discussion (as at just before the timestamp of this comment). https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/656dEMHWyFye5cCeicgGv https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/656dEMHWyFye5cCeicgGv
      • phs318u 10mo ago
        Interesting that this is getting downvoted. I truly wonder why. One of the things LLMs are good at is summarising and extracting key points. Or should I have gone to the trouble to do this myself - read the entire comment thread and manually summarise - when the person I was replying to hadn’t done that? My comment was meant in good faith: “here’s the info you wanted and how you can easily get them yourself next time”.
• drewfax 10mo ago
  Well if you think IPv6 adoption is a problem, wait until you hear ISPs offering IPv6 are providing a /64 prefix. IPv6 rollout is a mess.
• mrsssnake 10mo ago
  What's up with those comments? Am I still on HackerNews or did I visit Reddit with some HackerNews theme applied? Internet engineers pre-2000 had some idealistic, heavly mathematically proven ideas that still seem revolutionary today. Due to human nature, not everything got through, but IPv6 is the best of what we have and creating another standard would be XKCD 927. Under every IPv6 discussion people all of sudden have the urge to manually assign numbers, need to remember their cousin's phone IP and MAC address, forget firewalls exists, argue that ISP fiddling with TCP+UDP selling it as "Internet" is a good thing or that "sender" field on the envelope is a huge privacy issue.
• amarant 10mo ago
  I really don't get why people hate on IPv6. I'm sure someone will fuck this up for us, but IPv6 should at least in theory enable us to be rid of NAT. Anyone who has ever done NAT traversal for peer discovery is having wet dreams about that future!
  • speedgoose 10mo ago
    I prefer NAT over IPv6. Mostly because NAT is more reliable over time. Sure NAT traversal for peer discovery doesn’t sound pleasant, but routing issues that no one understands or care about is worse.
• bradley13 10mo ago
  Simple reason it didn't take over: the lack of backwards compatibility with ipv4. Yes, it would have marred the beauty of the new specification. But we will continue paying the price for another 30 years.
• gck1 10mo ago
  I use multiple Google accounts to segregate the data that gets collected on each one - as I don't like having, say, TV logged in to the same account where I send my emails from. One of them, which I use exclusively for Gemini, was banned today (I violated no policies, Google just doesn't like the way I try to sanitize its access I guess). Now, I can simply restart my router (or cycle airplane mode on mobile) and get a new IPv4 that probably was used by bazillion people before me, or even along with me, and get a new account. So Google has to be very careful here, with IP-linked bans in order to not just ban the whole load of unconnected people just because they used the same IPv4 as me. With IPv6, they could just ban my entire family and any guests that might have connected to my WiFi, forever. I like the limitations of IPv4, thank you.
  • fruitworks 10mo ago
    The problem is google
    • gck1 10mo ago
      Yes, it is. But it's not just Google. User fingerprinting is already a massive market and is growingly user hostile. There's at least one HN post each month of someone losing access to their account for no real reason and no way to get it back. I don't want internet infrastructure to support this behavior. On contrary, I want it to resist it, and IPv4 does, to some extent, while IPv6 makes it much easier.
  • piekvorst 10mo ago
    Doesn’t IPv6 have random, anonymous addresses (RFC 4941)? Further, user fingerprinting flourishes without IP addresses.
    • gck1 10mo ago
      > Doesn’t IPv6 have random, anonymous addresses Only for the device identifier part of the address. Prefix that the ISP will allocate will remain static, unless ISP does rotate the prefix too, which they don't really have a need to, unless for privacy reasons. And knowing ISPs and demand for privacy, it's highly unlikely to happen. > Further, user fingerprinting flourishes without IP addresses. It does, but is still hard to do. Static IP prefix is going to make the heuristics much, much better. Besides, evading most of the fingerprinting techniques is not that complicated - most of it is in the hands of the client. IPv6 adds something out of the hands of the client.
• lmm 10mo ago
  IPv6 is already here if you're not in the US. I moved house last month and consumer ISPs don't offer a (real) IPv4 connection in my country any more; you get an IPv6 connection and your router does MAP-E if you want to send data over IPv4.
  • favflam 10mo ago
    I want to echo this comment. I am on Map-e in Asia and it is very difficult to get an exclusive ipv4 address without paying extra money. And I want to connect to my machines without some stupid vpn or crappy cloud reverse tunneling service. Not everyone in the world wants to subscribe to some stupid SaaS service just to get functionality that comes by default with ipv6. I think Silicon Valley is in a thought bubble and for people there ipv4 is plentiful and cheap. So good for them. However, the more these SaaS services delay ipv6 support, the more I pray to any deity out there I can move off these services permanently.
• gafferongames 10mo ago
  Second system effect.
• globular-toast 10mo ago
  IPv6 is an inequality issue. Far too many luddites refuse to learn it because IPv4 works well enough for them. I think it would be a totally different story if the majority of US/European people ended up with CGNAT.
• df0b9f169d54 10mo ago
  what is ipv6, btw?
• moyezr 10mo ago
  true. I am CSE student in third year, and just started learning about networking. We just take the sheer amount of engineering that went to designing network protocols for granted.
• kachapopopow 10mo ago
  people don't understand how expensive it is to support ipv6, tcam is limited and having to split it in half to support ipv6 is just not an option for a lot of businesses. Route caches exist with software routing - but for larger networks it is not an option
• sylware 10mo ago
  In my country, the last big _mobile_ internet provider finished its move to IPv6. Land lines internet have been IPv6 for more than a decade. While developping custom IPv6 internet software I am not blocked by NAT anymore, real p2p fiesta, everything works as intended. The real challenge now is IPv6 with fixed mobile internet address (not random as it is is now, it should be device uniq). That to replace for good the phone numbers (the challenge of international roaming... which is already done for phone numbers). The idea would be to avoid a third party centralized internet account->ipv6 mapping.
• shevy-java 10mo ago
  I just want things to work.
• torginus 10mo ago
  I will fully and honestly admit I don't understand much about IPv6 - however, I have a question - why didn't they just add 8-32 bits to IPv4 and call it a day? Legacy IPv4 would be trivial to support via NAT, and we wouldn't have to deal with address shortages either globally or locally. I'm sure every sysadmin/cloud person dealt with having to arrange subnets by hand, or the fallout when you just ran out of addresses and had to tear down multiple layers of routing just to make more address space. Computers default to 64 bit integers, I don't see why this couldn't be done on the network.
  • neilalexander 10mo ago
    Because there isn't "empty space" in the IPv4 packet header (or even the pseudoheader format from which TCP or UDP checksums etc are derived) to expand your new bits into. By breaking the packet format, you just invented a new network protocol that all of the routers, firewalls and middleware of the world don't know how to handle.
    • db48x 10mo ago
      Yes, it’s true that any change they made would be incompatible with the existing software and routers and such. But nowadays everything can handle IPv6 just fine. All the upgrades and new software came out between 20 and 30 years ago, and is ubiquitous now.
  • Dagger2 10mo ago
    They pretty much did. "Just add N bits to v4" is far more work than you're thinking it is, and most of what v6 does is a direct consequence of taking v4 and adding more bits to it. The amount of work doesn't depend on the number of bits either, so adding fewer bits is a false economy. Deploying a new version of IP is so hard that you only want to be doing it once, not once every time you need an extra few bits.
• thevinchi 10mo ago
  It’s all fun and games until your ISP changes your prefix and breaks all your firewall/routing rules. I tried to adopt IP6 with Spectrum internet, but every time the cable modem reboots, my prefix changes and breaks everything. No thanks.
• ryzvonusef 10mo ago
  Haven't we been crying about the IPv4 apocalypse and the need to adopt IPv6 since the slashdot days? It's like fetch, it's not happening.
• bertili 10mo ago
  It's not a failure of IP6 but a failure of society. We all thought the internet would become decentralized and that everyone should have an IP and a funky website. But instead social media took over, big tech and a few big discussion sites where we all must fit in a digital life and watch ads and share our data to become a good product for all the others to consume.
• stiray 10mo ago
  All those discussions are making it harder than it need to be. I have ONE static external IPv4 for my network. I can handle everything I want with it. And block everything I dont want my network to be. So I just disable IPv6 on router (Mikrotik). Not interested, not wanting it. That is it. If someone needs it, feel free to use it. I wont support double configurations on my router because of it.
• IgorPartola 10mo ago
  It is so disappointing to have people who allegedly work with networks and technology act like IPv6 is too much for their delicate sensibilities. From thinking it is more complex than IPv4 (it is in fact simpler), to thinking that NAT is a security measure (the firewall is and routers have an IPv6 firewall on by default), to thinking there are no benefits (the benefits are clearly there), to thinking nobody uses it (loads of mobile devices access the web via IPv6 and lots of enterprise networks are IPv6), and so on, it is anti-curiosity and anti-hacker ethos. Go ask your favorite LLM how it works if you can’t be bothered to Google it but if you start your comment with “it has no use cases” or “it is too complicated” you are just outing yourself as ignorant on this subject.
• lkglglgllm 10mo ago
  IPv6 is the protocol of the future. And will be.
• lkglglgllm 10mo ago
  Goes hand in hand with dnssec.
• arthurfirst 10mo ago
  Solution looking for a problem is why. No value is why. Breaks NAT privacy and the extensions do not do enough. Top down pushed solution NOBODY WANTS.
• freetime2 10mo ago
  For anyone who thinks IPv6 is without merit, I recommend reading up on the various challenges of NAT traversal [1]. In cases where CGNAT is deployed in particular, there are scenarios where the only way to make everyday P2P connections work is to route traffic through a 3rd party - which can impact latency and bandwidth. While IPv6 doesn’t make establishing a P2P connection trivial (there are still firewalls to contend with) - it does simplify things dramatically. And as someone who is behind CGNAT, I am very grateful for the existence of IPv6. [1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works
• deknos 10mo ago
  IMHO: And it will not be, as long as * (S|D)NAT are not first class citizen in IPV6 Standards and Implementation * there's no mapping of the IPv4 Adresspace into the v6 space, so people can reroute stuff which is needed. because only then, we can a) migrate b) rebuild the same structures. because people will never let go of something.
  • ninkendo 10mo ago
    > as long as [...] (S|D)NAT are not first class citizen in IPV6 Standards and Implementation Yeah, I mostly agree... IMO, a ULA (equivalent to RFC1918, so 192.168.x.x and so forth) is the only sane way to set up your IPv6 network at home, unless you're one of the wizards who owns their own prefix. Dynamic prefix delegation just breaks too many things when the prefix changes, and I really wish NPTv6 was more supported and ubiquitous, because it solves the problem in the most elegant way IMO. > there's no mapping of the IPv4 Adresspace into the v6 space Uh, what? What do you think ::ffff:1.2.3.4 is? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4291#section-2.5.5.2 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4291#section-2.5.5.... https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4038#section-4.2 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4038#section-4.2
    • deknos 10mo ago
      huh, i was NOT aware of that. NICE! now applications (including DNS/NAT) have to support it i also forgot something (but not against your comment): * there needs to be guidelines how applications should differentiate between used ipadresses (link, site, global and so on)
    • Dagger2 10mo ago
      You don't need NPTv6 to use ULA. Just use both ULA and the dynamic prefix from your ISP. The latter is handled automatically by DHCPv6-PD, and if you're only using it for outbound connections then it changing isn't going to break anything. I'd say this is actually elegant, compared to NPTv6 which is a kludge and will break things (and isn't well-supported anyway).
      • 10mo ago
• steebo 10mo ago
  This feels a lot like the arguing that went on during the transition to Python 3. The Python 2.7 hangers-on were so preoccupied with themselves that they didn't notice that the pool of people interested in having the argument at all was getting smaller and smaller. Until somebody turned off the lights, that is. It is not much fun arguing with yourself in the dark. I think that's what needed and needs to be done here. I will agree with the IPv4 advocates on one thing: IPv6 adoption has been slow in part because it doesn't work like IPv4 + kludges. That is the point. Clinging to IPv4 standard practices while you switch is just going to make you miserable. In 2006, the hesitation to go to IPv6 made sense. Support was spotty. In 2026 it does not. IPv6 support is now more than adequate, and a clean cut will force the stragglers to get their asses in gear in a hurry ("fix your IPv6 support RFN or enjoy nobody using your product"). Change is painful, learning new stuff when you were getting by just fine on the old stuff is painful, I get it. But it will happen whether you like it or not. Why not just get it over with? I finally made the switch to IPv6 last year, and I wouldn't go back. The pain of change is real, but mercifully, it doesn't last. Within a year this debate will seem quaint.
  • j16sdiz 10mo ago
    > In 2026 it does not. There are no ISP providing ipv6 for home and mobile users here in hong kong
    • lillecarl 10mo ago
      The hardware support is very likely already there.
    • avianlyric 10mo ago
      That is an unusual luxury, especially mobile providers still using IPv4. Mobile providers have been the first and most aggressive to migrate to IPv6. Probably helped along by the cost and difficulty of running CGNATs when your network clients are constantly moving around. At least in the UK all the mobile providers are IPv6, and I think a handful are IPv6 only.
    • petabyt 10mo ago
• ninkendo 10mo ago
  My prediction [0]: It will take roughly 100 years for IPv6 to be ubiquitous enough to shut off IPv4. That's not intended as hyperbole, if anything it's an understatement. Because, it's not going away: You can talk all you want about how IPv6 should have been a more straightforward expansion of the address size, but this is all in the rear-view mirror at this point. IPv6 is going to be with us forever, you may as well get used to it. It's already everywhere in 5G deployments, ISP's like Comcast use it for 100% of their out-of-band management, China is making huge progress moving to it as part of their 5-year plan, India is progressing nicely in their transition, the list goes on. We're already way too far along in the transition to abandon it in favor of something else. But it's not going to happen any quicker than we've seen, either: There's no urgency (no "must-have" use case) except for what organizations are imposing on themselves. Yeah, IPv4 addresses are more expensive, but you don't really need many of them as a business (you can get by with a small handful of public ones, and just using L7 load balancers and SNI for everything) nor as an ISP (CGNAT can get you a long way.) So we have a situation where things are migrating very slowly, mainly only in places where it makes sense (mobile deployments, home ISP's where the users don't actually administer the network), and generally mostly for new deployments. This is a recipe for IPv4 to be around for a very, very long time. We're used to technology moving at breakneck pace, but that's only the case for the higher-level stuff. The core infrastructure like the internet protocol is likely the textbook example of slow-and-steady, and a case where it's actually not crazy to think of centuries-long timeframes for things. [0] Barring any unforeseen black-swan events like a world war destroying all technology and having to rebuild from scratch or something. Or a competent international agreement to aggressively migrate to it (I don't know which is more likely.)
  • solarkraft 10mo ago
    I’m honestly a bit surprised that the move to v6 has even been this strong considering the arguably-small-but-clearly-significant-enough downsides. The world could pretty easily run on heavily NATed v4 for a long, long time.
• tonymet 10mo ago
  Dual stack is a hack and binding to an interface like localhost or a single interface does not support dual stack . So your L6 code has to be modified and re tested to support L3 changes . Even if ipv6 was just as simple , the cost of rebuild , retest and re-deploy is enough of a barrier against migration
  • Dagger2 10mo ago
    Dual stack is a natural part of migrating between two protocols, because it's the most compatible way of handling both of them. You don't need to use dual stack to use both v4 and v6, but you'll probably choose to the instant you hit even the most minor incompatibility. Your L6 code should work perfectly fine if you wrote it properly in the first place. If you pass "localhost" to getaddrinfo() with flags=AI_PASSIVE, it returns a list of socket addresses to listen on, and all you need to do is pass those to socket(). You don't need to look inside the sockaddrs and they might as well be opaque data to you, so it doesn't matter what L3 protocol they represent.
    • tonymet 10mo ago
      Most listeners I’ve seen assume a single FD. It’s IPv6 snobbery to say “you should have written your code to expect IPv6 upgrade 20 years ago”
      • Dagger2 10mo ago
        That's kind of my point though: it didn't need to be written to expect a v6 upgrade, because the socket API is family-agnostic. 20 years ago, getaddrinfo() was 7 years old. You should have been using it already by then.
• irusensei 10mo ago
  I'd love to have ipv6. The idea every device in my network can have its own unique worldwide address is awesome. Having said that I still want to have a router with routing rules and firewalls and a network range I can divide into separate protected networks but in reality your home ISP will most likely give you a router with a /64 address.
  • simoncion 10mo ago
    You're aware of DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation? The two US-based ISPs I've used in the past ~twenty years (Comcast and Monkeybrains) use it to provide IPv6 service and permit your DHCPv6 client to request a /60 prefix to use as you see fit. It's not a /56, but it's also very much not a /64. I'd expect "Give home users a /60 via DHCPv6-PD" to be considered "best current practice" in the ISP "community"... so if I switched to another ISP that claimed to provide IPv6 addresses, "ask for a PD-assigned /60" would be the first thing I'd try.
• charlesbarbier 10mo ago
  Matter iot devices are IPv6 only. Apple TV, Amazon Echo/eero, Google Nest are all Thread/Matter hub. Ikea just started to selling cheap Thread devices. It will soon be mainstream to have IPv6 devices in your home network.
• VimEscapeArtist 10mo ago
  cuz it sucks
• mmoustafa 10mo ago
  the other day I had to change my node server to prefer ipv4 dns records because fly.io doesn’t support outbound ipv6 connections but defaults to a dns server that returns them
  • patmorgan23 10mo ago
    Their document states they support v6, and given how much of their stack involves v6 I would be shocked if they didn't support v6 outbound. > Outbound IP addresses > Fly Machines have IPv6 addresses from which they make requests to the wider internet without going through the Fly Proxy. https://fly.io/docs/networking/services/ https://fly.io/docs/networking/services/
• tcfhgj 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, TIL that Linux doesn't use DNSv6 if DNSv4 is available ;( https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/16322 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/16322
  • Novosell 10mo ago
    That seems to be about resolved, part of systemd, not Linux?
    • tcfhgj 10mo ago
      it's resolved in the sense of "won't fix". systemd is part of Linux Distros?
      • Novosell 10mo ago
        I didn't say it was resolved, I said it's about a piece of software which is called "resolved" which is one of many programs belonging to "systemd". It's a program which handles DHCP and DNS I believe. And systemd is part of some Linux distros, yes. But not all. And Linux, the kernel, is agnostic towards IPv4 vs. IPv6 as far as I know. So saying "Linux prefers IPv4 DNS" and linking to a github issue about "resolved" doesn't make much sense.
• thundergolfer 10mo ago
  You and me both, IPv6.
• Bender 10mo ago
  How many people here have put IPv6 addresses into the root DNS servers for their glue records? Curious how this [1] set of charts has evolved. For some reason I have only ever used IPv4 root glue records and never really gave it much thought otherwise. [1] - https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/publications/ipv6/v6rootglue.pdf https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/publications/ipv6/v6rootglue....
• lisbbb 10mo ago
  I spent an excruciating 3 months or so learning about IPV6 in a college networking class circa 1994 so that I could be "current" in order to land a job right out of college.
• DominoTree 10mo ago
  I still don't have IPv6 at home in the middle of San Francisco with Google Fiber / Webpass and have to egress through an HE.net tunnel like it's 2002 again
• jedberg 10mo ago
  Every few months I turn on IPv6 at my house. I try to use it. I find random sites just not working, random delays accessing sites, and so on. Then I switch back to IPv4 and everything works. I used to be a network admin, so I know how to configure networks. IPv6 zealots accuse me of incorrect config, doing it wrong, etc. Maybe that is the case, but if I, a sophisticated user, can't get it working well, what chance does a non-technical person have? My assumption is they just deal with the issues and chalk it up to "technology sucks". But I know better. I've experienced the internet when it works, and I know when it isn't working right. I think IPv6 is better in theory, and I look forward to the day that it is in practice. But today is not that day.
  • Dagger2 10mo ago
    I suspect you forgot to implement a workaround for servers with broken pMTUd. The quickest test for that is probably to run `ip link set mtu 1280 dev eth0` on a client machine and see if it helps. You'll encounter the same problem on v4, where it's just as difficult to fix as it is on v6. Why single out the latter?
    • jedberg 10mo ago
      Because I don't have the problem on v4 (and it's not the MTU, I checked that).
• OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
  Meh. IPv4 is used to deliver Netflix to the masses and act as a tunnel for your IPv6 network. It's not how I would have set things up, but since content delivery is the primary use case for most ISPs, they're unlikely to support v6. Contrary to the "Comcast is shit" narrative, I had a GREAT experience a couple living situations ago where I got dual stack from Comcast. It just sort of worked out of the gate and whenever I had to call the support line, I was immediately transferred to someone who knew what they were talking about because I had this exotic / non-standard service. It's sort of interesting dude says Security and Plug-and-Play weren't available in v6 since SLAAC and IPSec are mandatory parts of the spec. But sure, AH and ESP options are never as simple as they should have been and it's not impossible to pick options for your organization that don't match what a remote organization supports. I still prefer it to the crap-shoot that is TLS ChangeCipherSpec. (Though 1.2 and 1.3 aren't as bad as the old days.) Contrary to the narrative about your parents not being able to cope with anything technical, my mom was able to configure her mac to speak to the family VPN with no problem. Of course, my mom taught me code in Lisp in the 70s and used a Sun 3/60 as her daily driver in the late 80s, so maybe that's not the best example. Sure. V6 didn't take over the world, but neither did SNA or IPX/SPX, though I would argue v6 is MUCH more common these days than either IBM or Novell protocols. V6 is used in the corner of the internet by people who want to use V6. Maybe there's a "those who know don't tell, those who tell don't know" narrative here. I've sort of stopped evangelizing. If the main thing you worry about is watching Netflix, MMORPGing and commenting on Reddit, you don't need V6 and it does require a different bit of knowledge than setting up V4. #OldManYellsAtClouds
• jrm4 10mo ago
  My gut is that this is for the best; I haven't fully fleshed it out but it feels like the practical goal of "decentralizing power" and e.g. ISPs and other powerful entities exploiting end users is easier in an IPv6 regime, and has been practically thwarted somewhat by IPv4. I'm reminded of way back in the day when they wanted charge per user or per device in households.
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  Because NAT and VPNs are a permanent temporary fix. Before you get a global flat Internet, you have to make NAT illegal just like we did with VPNs. Good luck with that.
• gunalx 10mo ago
  Well, my ISP dosent support ipv6, and i get a non shared public ipv4, so no ipv6 here.
• thescriptkiddie 10mo ago
  i was using ipv6 at home for years but then one day at&t broke it and never fixed it
• voidmain 10mo ago
  I can't help but think that numbering all the devices was the wrong idea from the beginning. You don't want to talk to devices, you want to talk to (and offer) services. You probably need something like an AS number to make global routing efficient, but 32 bits would be plenty for that. A packet could be (destination AS, stream ID, encrypted( payload )) and DNS would give you a capability (destination AS, stream ID, keys) for a service. You send a packet to that stream asking to open a connection and providing a capability to reply (with a capability for the specific stream). Your network up to the AS level should have an opportunity to augment the stream IDs in whatever way is convenient for its routing. No one reveals any topology information, network neutrality and a degree of privacy is guaranteed at the protocol level, only really serious multipeer networks need to assign addresses above layer 2, and I think it would be reasonably easy to come up with an edges first incentive compatible transition plan (which is where ipv6 went wrong). (This is of course an incomplete and poorly thought out proposal, you don't need to dogpile me about that.)