12 ms·

IPv6 is the only way forward

104 points by quaintdev 6mo ago

mono442 6mo ago
The main problem with IPv6 is that it is different from IPv4. There's SLAAC, there's no ARP and there're also some other differences. In the end, it's simpler to just not bother.
- dogleash 6mo ago
  Yup. People learn parts of v4 through osmosis because it's the default. Then when networking topics come up, it's easier to keep going with stuff that looks familiar rather than un-learning assumptions. Why bother with the weird other thing that's not even mandatory?
  - general1465 6mo ago
    Because IPv4 is logical and makes sense. First thing which IPv6 came up with? No NATs everything will have a public address. It turned out that this was hare brained idea so let's just cover it up with firewall. However misconfigured firewall means that everything is open... IPv6 has been designed by people who were unable to think further than what is going to be tomorrow for a lunch.
    - BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
      Isn't that the first thing that IPv4 came up with as well? One publicly routable address per device that wants to access the Internet (or the network of universities or military installations or whichever network you were on pre-Internet).
      - general1465 6mo ago
        You see and IPv6 was not able to learn from the failure - people does not want to have all computers in one network, same like people does not want to live in one skyscraper.
    - kalleboo 6mo ago
      IPv4 came out in 1982 and was designed for every device to have a unique public address. Protocols like FTP were designed to literally pass an IP address to connect directly to. As addresses started running out, the NAT RFC was published in 1994 and described NAT as a "short-term solution". NAT was never meant to be an integral part of IPv4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631 NAT broke a ton of things which required more and more hacks piled on, making it more complex to build services on top if it (e.g., a server in the middle to proxy all the traffic needed between peers is a 100% requirement, with all the maintenance and scaling headaches that come with it).
      - general1465 6mo ago
        So you actually agree with me, that making all addresses public was stupid to begin with. It was stupid on IPv4 and it remain stupid on IPv6, yet we already have experience from IPv4 that it was stupid.
        throw0101d 6mo ago
        > So you actually agree with me, that making all addresses public was stupid to begin with. If an address is not public how can you start an connection from it, or end a connection at it? A web server needs a public address if you want to have people reach it. And you, at some point, also have to have a public address if you want to connect to pubic services: either on your end-host, at your CPE/router's WAN interface, or on an interface of your ISP's CG-NAT box. But having a public address on your end-host also allows for much more functionality than if you were stuck behind CPE-NAT or CG-NAT. Now, you don't have to use this functionality—just like how I didn't when my printer gets an publicly addressable (but not publicly reachable) IPv6 address—but it opens up various possibilities.
        general1465 6mo ago
        So having all devices on public addresses was stupid to begin with on IPv4 and it was arrogantly stupid on IPv6.
    - juliangmp 6mo ago
      Are you really complaining about the fact that we need to deploy firewalls?
      - general1465 6mo ago
        I am complaining about the fact that deploying firewall wrong will open your network to everyone. Deploying NAT wrong wont.
- jcgl 6mo ago
  ARP-schmarp. That doesn't matter to almost anyone who doesn't need to go deep into the network. But yeah, SLAAC's paradigm of moving assignment logic into the node (away from network infra like in DHCP) is definitely a stumbling point.
- labcomputer 6mo ago
  IPv6 ND (and SND) serve the same purpose as ARP. It's like saying a fancy French restaurant doesn't have a cook because it has a chef.
lgunsch 6mo ago
If IPv6 was going to be successful, it would have been successful years ago. It seems, people are just more comfortable with layers of NAT than native IPv6 everywhere. I'd guess that it should have been more backwards compatible. Similar to UTF-8 and ASCII.
- BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
  My Verizon connection has a CGNAT IPv4 and a publicly routable IPv6 address. It's at least partly a success, if you're using a cell phone on Verizon in the US.
jdwithit 6mo ago
IPv4 has been "in crisis" for the entire 20 years I've worked in tech and we seem to be managing alright. Not to say things can't be better or we shouldn't try to improve. But I'll be surprised if v4 isn't still the default for most use cases in another 20 years.
- RiverCrochet 6mo ago
  That's because the Internet is basically broadcast TV 2.0 so no one cares about having public IPv4's at home as long as they can get to their memes and streaming. Great job, we took something that was meant to be a next frontier in humanity and let anyone connect with anyone else without gatekeepers/intermediaries and turned it 21st century brainrot troughs. Perhaps a society not in slow intellectual decline would have chosen otherwise.
  - ozim 6mo ago
    I do agree. But at the same time there is a quote by Stanisław Lem... "Until I used the Internet, I didn't know there were so many idiots in the world"
  - ux266478 6mo ago
    > Great job, we took something that was meant to be a next frontier in humanity and let anyone connect with anyone else without gatekeepers/intermediaries We already had that, it's called shortwave radio. The internet, especially as it's implemented and as it's used, is a terrible way to achieve this. It's service providers the whole way down.
    - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
      It would be funny if HAM radio came back because the social filter imposed by the limitations wound up being more important than the technological capability.
      - ozim 6mo ago
        Problem is that HAM radio also has social filters you broadcast to everyone and you don’t know who is listening. Encrypted communication is not allowed in HAM. You are not supposed to use it for „communication” as in Facebook. You are supposed to use spectrum to test your gear and keep transmissions short to leave space for others. I was in local HAM club and passed the exam for license but never got license to transmit mostly because you are not supposed to chat frivolously over the radio.
rectang 6mo ago
If UTF-8 represents the triumph of a design prioritizing backwards compatibility with an existing standard (ASCII) to facilitate a transition, then IPv6 is the cautionary tale of a design which could have made the transition simpler but did not.
- w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 6mo ago
  IPv6 cannot be backward-compatible with IPv4 in the way UTF-8 is with ASCII. Any argument built on that comparison reflects a misunderstanding of the protocols and leads to flawed conclusions.
  - AussieWog93 6mo ago
    Wait, why couldn't it? Just split the address into two 32-bit chunks (call the top word the "pool", bottom word "address") and assign the full IPV4 range to pool 0x00000000. Done.
    - eptcyka 6mo ago
      In what world does is such a protocol any more *”””compatible”””* with IPv4 than IPv6 already is? It is a different header after all.
    - kstrauser 6mo ago
      Until you upgrade every router between 2 hosts so that it understands the IPv4b addressing scheme, those 2 hosts can't talk. And if you're going to upgrade them all anyway, then might as well do it right.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      That doesn't change anything - until everyone adopts the new chunk nobody can use it (even one windows XP machine that you don't personally care about is enough to still kill it today). IPv6 is better because at least it can work side by side by IPv6.
      - 6mo ago
leosanchez 6mo ago
Author if you are reading comments, rss feed entries point to example.com
- haddr 6mo ago
  the link to the full table somehow doesn't work for me
  - quaintdev 6mo ago
    Fixed
- quaintdev 6mo ago
  Thanks! Check now.
diath 6mo ago
[flagged]
- bombcar 6mo ago
  “They’re out of IPs so they should self-genocide” is certainly something akin to an opinion, but not one I expected to see on this site today.
  - diath 6mo ago
    You're putting words in my mouth, genocide implies murdering existing people to reduce the population, not developing policies that would slow down the population growth and/or fix the issues with the country.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      It's not me, it's the UN: Article II, 4. https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
- themafia 6mo ago
  You literally missed the most important part: "A transition from IPv4 to IPv6 seems far more easier especially since we already have 77% of people on IPv6." So to the extent they're aware of the "issues" you bring up they're already on top of it.
  - diath 6mo ago
    ISPs providing IPv6 connectivity out of the box does not equal software and internal devices doing the same.
    - themafia 6mo ago
      You can route internal IPv4 networks over IPv6. There are several mapping strategies so this can even be transparent at your v6 gateway.
bombcar 6mo ago
I don’t know how you measure “metric tons of content” but I suspect in general there’s lots of US-available content on IPv4 that the countries like China and India want to access, and not much the other way around. But that should be a perfect playground for an IPv6-only network that has gateways to the IPv4 content; eventually the home-developed content will begin to drive demand elsewhere.
- nickserv 6mo ago
  Yes, there's lots of content on IPv4, and there is also a lot of traffic from India... If India were to turn off IPv4, it would be a great incentive for IPv4-only sites in the US and Europe to add an IPv6 address.
wmf 6mo ago
No mention of Indian ISPs just buying IPv4 addresses. Prices are even declining.
isodev 6mo ago
Someone should’ve thought about the UX of IPv6 before declaring it to be “the way”. It’s like having to learn Klingon just to setup your printer. IPvNext could sort that out… maybe it’s time to consider moving on.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  People claim this all the time, but every time I push I discover they have no clue how networks work and just handwave away as "easy" or "details" the very reasons people who understand networks say it can't work.
  - isodev 6mo ago
    I think you’re making my point - someone decided to surface a very low level concept “as is” (without a suitable abstraction) on a level where people also need it for use cases that don’t justify knowledge of the arcane. Or dealing with gatekeepers for that matter.
    - bluGill 6mo ago
      For most people there is no UX. Most US houses are IPv6 and use it without knowing anything about networking at all (most cable internet is IPv6, as the big cell networks). The people who have to make networks work need to know how IPv6 works - but there is no getting around that - they know how IPv4 works too.
    - orangeboats 6mo ago
      There are already abstractions that allows you to deal with IPv6 without actually typing in the addresses. It's the DNS, but every time this topic pops up, someone rejects DNS and proceeds to continue sprouting something about how IPv6 is unusable because you can't memorize the addresses.
      - wpm 6mo ago
        What happens when DNS is down
azalemeth 6mo ago
I am behind cgnat but have a native ipv6 /64 at home. I've got a great fibre connection (2G5) and everything "just works". I can host on ipv6 native machines and see them from anywhere in the world that has native ipv6 access. The trouble is that 1) my employers do not have native ipv6 access; 2) neither does my mobile connection; and 3) really nor do a lot of my friends. Moreover, 4) if you browse a website from a native world-reachable ipv6 address, you're fingerprinted by it and it's overwhelmingly unique to you. So, it doesn't really work for hosting, and I don't get any direct benefits from it. Instead I have a vps with a public ipv4 address and have a router that creates a wireguard tunnel to it. The reverse proxy works great over ipv6 and I am now in a position where I can forward ports and have direct connections -- albeit with hugely increased technical complexity. Ipv6 has many great ideas in it. If it's universally used it might just catch on...
- BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
  I'm curious - which mobile provider? I thought they were the ones that use IPv6 most, some even using 464XLAT so your device only has a v6 address.
- vimredo 6mo ago
  > 4) if you browse a website from a native world-reachable ipv6 address, you're fingerprinted by it and it's overwhelmingly unique to you. IPv6 privacy extensions exist & are enabled by default in most (if not all) operating systems today, which (this is my understanding; take it with a grain of salt) create what essentially are extra IPv6 addresses, used for outbound traffic, that aren't generated via your MAC address.
bluGill 6mo ago
The US doesn't have excessive IPv4 Addresses. We have a real shortage and big pain because we don't have anywhere near enough. Sure we have 40% of them all - but that has no indication of what enough is.
- blinded 6mo ago
  100% this, my college had 2 /16s for no reason. The printers were all public, was a mess.
  - miladyincontrol 6mo ago
    I mean having a public address doesnt mean it has to be publicly routable. Same thing applies to ipv6. I speak as someone who worked at an institute that had similar abundance of address space.
    - fulafel 6mo ago
      Indeed, the tragedy of the IPv4+NAT stockholm syndrome is that people view having to use ambiguous addresses as access control and can't distinguish reachability vs addressing.
    - blinded 6mo ago
      In my case it was publicly routable. The ips and ports of key infra were on https://www.shodan.io/ https://www.shodan.io/.
  - wpm 6mo ago
    My workstation used to have a public address system it was awesome.
- sassymuffinz 6mo ago
  I worked at an ISP way back in the dark ages of 2008 and we were all worried about IP exhaustion then. It's now 17 years later and what do you know, IPv4 is still trucking.
- 6mo ago
tonymet 6mo ago
> There are countless threads online on forums like Hacker News, Reddit where people who never really got comfortable with idea of IPv6 It’s clumsier than ipv4. It’s unnecessary since NAT was invented. In practice IPv6 requires dual stack, which means twice as many firewalls, names and routes to manage — so 4x the debugging because you have 2 dimensions that can either be working or failing. Addresses are too long to remember, too clumsy to write, and after 30 years still don’t have consistent representation (how many colons and brackets?). Look, IPv6 has some benefits, but until the usability is fixed, it will be another 30 years before it’s close to 95% adoption.
- apearson 6mo ago
  To reduce doing things twice there is NAT64/646XLAT. How many v4 addresses have you memorized, I normally use DNS or mDNS.
  - tonymet 6mo ago
    that reduces part of the scope for some of the customers
- Chu4eeno 6mo ago
  ... and annoying casting from `sockaddr` to either `sockaddr_in` or `sockaddr_in6*` while you pass around a socklen_t. 10 years ago I was all gung-ho about IPv6, but it's annoying at every level.
  - tonymet 6mo ago
    Having 2 sockets for loopback or multiple interfaces is a huge pain
    - BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
      Bind to '::' and you can get v4 and v6 traffic on one socket.
oconnore 6mo ago
I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. I have done essentially zero home networking work and I just ran this successfully. It just works! ``` > ping6 google.com PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2605:59c0:236f:3a08:7883:9d04:c26d:5fa1 --> 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=0 hlim=117 time=22.262 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=1 hlim=117 time=26.124 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=2 hlim=117 time=26.807 ms ^C --- google.com ping6 statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 22.262/25.064/26.807/2.001 ms ```
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  That's literally impossible, to hear some people tell it. "And also, look how hard it'd be to memorize that address", say the people who remember like 2 IPv4 addresses, one of them being 127.0.0.1.
  - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
    I remember like 10 different IPv4 addresses, 6 of which are DNS servers where each octet is a single number, 1 is my router, 1 is my home network switch, 1 is my home server and the last one localhost. The main thing all those have in common is they are either something I frequently use (all mentioned local IPs) or just stupid easy to remember (DNS servers), neither of which isn't possible for IPv6. From memory isn't localhost for IPv6 not shorter than for IPv4? The answer is yes, it is ::1 and I was thinking of the Multicast and Link-local address prefixes which are ff00:: and fe80:: respectively.
    - boredatoms 6mo ago
      Telling people to use ULA subnet fddd:: with dhcpv6 is my way. fddd::7 is easier to type than 10.0.0.7
      - opan 6mo ago
        "ten oh oh 7" (how I'd say it or remember it) still seems simpler than "eff dee dee dee colon colon 7". While with ipv4 the dots can be assumed for pauses, v6 doesn't put colons as often, also I could easily see myself forgetting the amount of "d"s. I don't wanna seem too anti-v6, though, I am in favor of everyone adopting the more modern thing. edit: Well, you said easier to type. I guess I probably agree with that.
thomasdziedzic 6mo ago
IPv6 feels like we just can't admit to ourselves that it has been a failed transition. What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.
- apearson 6mo ago
  What changes to IPv6 would you make to make it easier to transition?
  - general1465 6mo ago
    Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6. If IPv6 and IPv4 would be essentially the same from the get go, IPv4 would be a niche 20 years. Sure everything above IPv6 have, but it took years and years of screaming to get it.
    - throw0101c 6mo ago
      > Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6. All of those things exist in IPv6. And it is physically impossible for DNS to be the same, as you have to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.
      - general1465 6mo ago
        > All of those things exist in IPv6. And it has not existed at the start of the IPv6 and is one of the many reasons why after all those years we are having a poor penetration of IPv6.
globular-toast 6mo ago
IPv6 is totally an equality issue. If a sizeable proportion of this forum had to share an IP address we would've had IPv6 done years ago.
- tcaxle 6mo ago
  I agree. If you click through to the original Wikipedia table that's cited in this article you can see a pretty clear correlation between countries with more IPv4 addresses than people vs. wealth/hegemonic clout of the country. In the UK, US, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, etc. there are way more than enough IPv4s to go around. Some ISPs here in the UK will even lease you bundles of four or eight IPv4s for very little additional cost.
ux266478 6mo ago
The way forward for what though? It remains to be seen if this level of infrastructure and complexity has any kind of resilience. I seriously doubt it does, looking back on history. I think it's far more likely that the post-industrial population contraction (which hasn't even really begun) as well as climate change (anthropogenic or not) will make it far more likely that this model of "everybody uses a computer" ends up in the junk bin of history. Can't say I'd be sad to see it go. Somebody who has no interest in computers shouldn't ever have to touch one.
jmyeet 6mo ago
I find it fascinating how these key technologies handle upgrades and breaking changes. For example, Python eschewed breaking changes through 2.7.x but the dam has burst since 3.0 and every point release (it seems?) makes breaking changes, sometimes reversing itself (eg the whole s/u string prefix thing). Many here will be familiar with the second system effect [1]. Usually people want to avoid making breaking changes but once they do, they can go a little nuts. My personal opinion is only major versions should make breaking changes and a lot of thought should go into making them as painless as possible. IPv6 is fascinating for these reasons but also that it's a product of its time in two main ways: 1. It doesn't do anything about roaming because that wasn't an issue in the 1990s but it certainly is now; 2. A 64 bit address space would've basically been infinite addresses but instead they went with 128 bit addresses (rolling in ports) but then giving individual users a /64 address range. For some reason people deny it now or simply weren't aware but that too is a historical artifact because it was intended to put a 48 bit MAC address into that space but later we realized that's a huge PII and tracking issue; and 3. History has shown that upgrading network backbone hardware (in particular) is incredibly difficult through a process that's been described as "ossification", which is a nice description. Basically, network relays and routers wanted to avoid security issues and decided to discard things they didn't understand. That's interesting because it violates Postel's Law [2], which basically says be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. But this shows up in all sorts of interesting ways, like it's practically impossible to reliably use MTUs larger than about 1536. When IPv4 was designed, that wasn't an issue. With 1-100G+ networks it is. There are RFCs about using large MTUs but you're dependent on backbone hardware you have no control over. Even Linux struggles with this, to the point where you need to do some configuration for high-bandwidth networks (eg RPS [3]). Just handling all those interrupts presents a bunch of problems beyond the original scope. And again, it's hard to fix through no fault of Linux's. I'm old enough to remember the talk about us running out of IPv4 addresses back in the 1990s. It's been interesting to watch how this has consistently been kicked down the street (eg cgNAT). What is funny though is large companies (eg Facebook) actualy ran out of internal addresses on a 10/8 network and there's no good solution for that (with IPv4 at least). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle [3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/362339/ https://lwn.net/Articles/362339/
Yizahi 6mo ago
I honestly don't understand why IPv6 is not actively deployed in 2026. Every piece of networking hardware over past decade supports IPv6 and often dual stack too. And to switch between both often takes a few clicks if DHCPv6 server is up and reachable. Absolutely transparent, free, zero performance hit. But no, so many persist at doing v4. PS: I'm talking about MSO hardware. But client hardware should be at the same level of compatibility for years too.
- thomasdziedzic 6mo ago
  2026: $ ping6 github.com ping6: github.com: Address family for hostname not supported
  - Yizahi 6mo ago
    Yeah, that's the problem. And I bet they could enable it, they just don't want to for some reason.
  - Hikikomori 6mo ago
    Azure has very poor V6 support last I tried it.
- commandersaki 6mo ago
  Support nightmare for ISPs.
gmuslera 6mo ago
It is the only way forward, but the reason for that is not the correlation between population and IP addresses. After all, most of the use of internet today is not by people, but by bots, crawlers, AI agents, b2b and more, and that is far more than the human population, and then you have the virtual networks built over IP like VPNs, Tor and more. It is more related to privacy, bidirectional communication and protocols, security, identity and possibilities.
Bender 6mo ago
The only place I have utilized an IPv6 address publicly is on my authoritative name servers only because some DNS testing tools assume it is there. It's not really needed however. My home firewall does have one but I have never used it. I can't think of a use for it. I have multiple static IPv4 addresses and they have suited me just fine for decades. I suppose I could bind a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy to it in case a site blocks me but I would probably leave it off most of the time. I never use them on my web, chat, voice, IRC and other servers as I personally find blocking shenanigans on IPv4 and not having to implement the same checks on IPv6 is just easier for a lazy person like me. IPv6 just feels like an after-thought bolt on to me. Clunky, not well thought out. Some privacy gotchas that can be disabled but some will not. That's just my take. I doubt anyone will have the same take. I think IPv4 will be fine for another 100 years even if we have to re-purpose some DoD/MoD ranges given they don't use them and maybe annex some /8's from a few greedy companies. But that's a problem for Gen Delta. Gen Foxtrot can deal with repurposing some multicast ranges.
- kalleboo 6mo ago
  > I have multiple static IPv4 addresses and they have suited me just fine for decades IPv6 is for the people (countries, continents) who did not get in early on the IPv4 address gold rush. Your take is basically "got mine, F you".
  - Bender 6mo ago
    Or ... people can use the DoD/Mod and assorted other space to get their IPv4 allocations. There is a ton of unused space in IPv4. Reserved, allocated but entirely unused. Also take back some /8's from greedy companies that don't need all that space. stares at HP When I say take I mean take as in a forceful annex and a timeline.
    - lmm 6mo ago
      > Or ... people can use the DoD/Mod and assorted other space to get their IPv4 allocations. There is a ton of unused space in IPv4. Reserved, allocated but entirely unused. Also take back some /8's from greedy companies that don't need all that space. In our exponentially growing world that wouldn't help. By the time we ran out of Class As we were allocating a new one every month. Reclaiming all the unused addresses would barely make a dent in demand.
flumpcakes 6mo ago
One of the biggest, I would assume in the current year, blockers to an IPv6 only world would be the fact that the major "cloud" vendors do not support it.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  The companies that rent you IPv4 addresses don’t support v6 well or at all? Do tell. I wonder why.
  - matttttttttttt 6mo ago
    AWS supports IPv6 and it's free, whereas IPv4 is not.
- lern_too_spel 6mo ago
  https://isgithubipv6.live/ https://isgithubipv6.live/
tsoukase 6mo ago
If IPv6 doesn't dominate in the next, let's say, 10 years, they might publish the IPv8 which will be an 64bit space, backwards compatible with IPv4. It will be the only case where a newer version of software comes back closer to an older one.
- p1mrx 6mo ago
  > the only case where a newer version of software comes back closer to an older one Winamp 3 -> Winamp 5 was closer to Winamp 2. Windows 8 -> Windows 10 was closer to Windows 7. Though I don't expect this to happen with IP.
- BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
  How do you plan to let IPv4 (32 bit address space) actually address and communicate with an IPv8 (64 bit address space) host? You don't have enough bits to identify the v8 host.
  - tsoukase 6mo ago
    Something like 1:2:3:4:a:b:c:d where the most significant 32bits are a valid IPv4. The kernel figures out and keep all others the same (NAT etc). We extend the address space, not invent a new stack. The IPv6 critics shout out that this would be a viable solution.
    - Dagger2 6mo ago
      Okay, so you've figured out how to make v4 addressable from v8. Good job. That lets v8 hosts address a v4 host via a v8 address. How are you going to make v8 addressable from v4? Because you need to do this too for communication to work. Also, you've made v4 addressable from v8, and you're about to explain how you make v8 addressable from v4... but that's just addressing, i.e. identifying the right host. How are you going to actually send packets from v8 to v4, and also from v4 to v8? > The IPv6 critics shout out that this would be a viable solution. But they never bother to understand enough of the problem to contribute anything useful. Either they can't come up with something that works, or they come up with something that they didn't realize v6 already did.
journal 6mo ago
Will IPV6 become a type in sql databases?
- landgenoot 6mo ago
  > The INET6 data type is intended for storage of IPv6 addresses, as well as IPv4 addresses assuming conventional mapping of IPv4 addresses into IPv6 addresses.
- throw0101d 6mo ago
  > Will IPV6 become a type in sql databases? Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are 'just' u_ints: one is 2^32 and the other is 2^128. The fact that we display them in a particular format (10.11.12.13; ff:ee::bb:aa) is only for human UX purposes. Strictly speaking everything in a computer is 'just' a number represented in base-2 (binary digits: bits) that we affix certain labels to (char, int, float, struct).
rickcarlino 6mo ago
Imagine being able to connect two computers over the internet using sockets. WebRTC is a marvel, but I miss the whimsical days of running something on a port at home and connecting to it without thinking about NAT.
- kalleboo 6mo ago
  Imagine being able to make a voice call to a friend without paying for a middle-man to proxy the traffic completely unnecessarily.
  - vsgherzi 6mo ago
    You can still do this! It’s just very hard and needs hole punching and maybe a stun server
sidcool 6mo ago
What dictates the allocation per country?
- orangeboats 6mo ago
  IPv4 - first come first served, with a 24 karat FU to the 3rd world countries. It is their fault that they are poor. IPv6 - still the same, but the space is large enough that any first-mover advantage is minuscule.
  - labcomputer 6mo ago
    I think that's a bit uncharitable. 32 bits seemed practically infinite at the time IPv4 was created, and the whole thing started as a way for the American military-industrial-research complex to communicate with itself anyway. Why would you even want to assign addresses on your defense network to foreign adversaries? Now that it's a commercial thing, a more equitable distribution would have, with hindsight, been a good thing.
rkagerer 6mo ago
The main complaint I have against IPv6 is the addresses are so unwieldy. When I look at them I have the same reaction as when I look at some kind of complex scientific formula comprised of operators and symbols that are unfamiliar. It also takes extra mental effort to expand the compressed zeros and interpret what I'm viewing. Even after reading about them many times and using them in (an albeit limited) fashion, they still just don't feel human friendly. Not like the more straightforward IPv4 addresses do. (Or even like a hypothetical "IPv5" that simply prefixes one extra octet). Whenever I bring this up I'm told something like "Don't bother memorizing IPv6 addresses. Use DNS instead."[1] That take completely overlooks the fact that if the numbers exist, you will inevitably wind up needing to deal with them at various points along the way. Eg. Debugging logs, sniffing network traffic, ruling out if DNS is down, etc. I'm a big fan of ergonomics to make things intuitive and reduce unnccessary cognitive overhead, and the new scheme is a regression in that regard. If anyone has tips on how they became more fluent with IPv6 I'd love to hear. [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossible-memorizing-ipv6-addresses.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossib...
- rkagerer 6mo ago
  This is without even getting into learning the new (old?) paradigm of "exposing" all addresses to the whole internet. I realize "NAT" is not equivalent to "firewall", but placing them at the same boundary made things simple to understand conceptually. I for one never had trouble opening/forwarding ports (and liked the control it provided over what goes in and out, especially in the days before it all just became HTTP) but I sympathize with the major headaches the NAT "workaround" caused.
  - lunar_rover 6mo ago
    NAT also solves the dynamic address issue. With GUA I need to deal with both dynamic prefix and randomised suffix that can be changed by seemingly unrelated things when opening ports to the internet.
    - preisschild 6mo ago
preisschild 6mo ago
I love IPv6, SLAAC, mDNS, Thread, Matter and the other cool stuff in the ecosystem. I have wasted too much time setting manual DHCP static assignments. Now I just use SLAAC and mDNS with basically no manual config.
nesarkvechnep 6mo ago
Reading the comments, it looks like some people dismiss IPv6 just because they need to sit down and learn a couple of new things.
- MaKey 6mo ago
  Yeah, it's always the same with IPv6 discussions. The main points being: 1. IPv6 addresses are too long to remember 2. IPv6 doesn't need NAT and people are uncomfortable with their devices having a public address as they see NAT as an additional layer of security
  - redserk 6mo ago
    If someone is still using the “remembering IP addresses” argument in 2026 (or at any point in the 21st century), I question their technical competence in configuring a network correctly.
    - WorldMaker 6mo ago
      It also seems to be a learning curve thing because IPv6 addresses have their own versions of memorable mnemonics. If you are in a LAN space manually configuring LAN addresses, you just need to remember one of the local address (ULA) prefixes like fc00 and then start numbering your devices as ::1 and incrementing (fc::1, fc::2, fc::3, etc). But also in LAN spaces you could just rely on mDNS (devicename.local), it's gotten quite good in most OSes today. If you need to remember random WAN IPv6 addresses without being able to use DNS or at least a hosts file you've probably got a bunch of other more pressing problems.
- wao0uuno 6mo ago
  I dismiss IPv6 because my ISP doesn't support it.
  - voxadam 6mo ago
    I dismiss ISPs that don't support IPv6.
bdeol22 6mo ago
We've had enough address space for ages—the recurring pain is incentives at org boundaries: whoever owns the legacy peerings pays the migration tax.
everdrive 6mo ago
Here comes the flood of IPv6 evangelists who thinks everyone is confused about NAT and firewalls. I don't know where they get their talking points, but they descend onto these threads with their sanctimony. "Oh, you must be confused about how NAT works, allow me to educate you." It's very tiresome.
- wpm 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - orangeboats 6mo ago
    Pretending that 0-9A-Z is somehow comparable to 行 or ∮ is quite daring, I will give you that. And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead. - In the grand scheme of things, the IP address itself is of very little importance. It was given undue attention because of how IPv4 was inherently limited in address space. - If you simply needed a way to name your machines, what are you doing not using the (m)DNS? You know, services literally with the word "Name" inside their name?
    - everdrive 6mo ago
      >And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead. I spent some good time trying to learn IPv6. I was pretty open to it, but it was just awful. There were parts of it that were bad due to other reasons -- my router, my ISP. But it was unworkable, produced a number of problems and provided me no benefit. I learn new things all the time. I learn things I like, learn about things I dislike. I find it really rude that people suggest "I just don't want to learn things."
      - orangeboats 6mo ago
        If bad routers etc. makes you think IPv6 is bad... then man, I think for me IPv4 is a mountain of shite. But my comment was not directed at you, more so towards those people who looked at IPv6 very superficially (i.e. the ipV6 AddRESs iS UgLY!!1! people), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
artooro 6mo ago
I'm surprised how few people are talking about ULAs. For any home network where you don't have a reserved global address space from your ISP, it makes sense to configure a ULA on your router and use it for all internal hosts, and the ISP assigned address is only used for Internet access. This does not require NAT/Npt and you have the best of both worlds.
- skybrian 6mo ago
  First I heard of it. Apparently they are private Ipv6 addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address If your intranet has no IPv4 addresses, this is better than a NAT somehow?
- fulafel 6mo ago
  If you want to have an airgapped network, sure. For most people it doesn't make sense. You'll just get the worst of of both worlds.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    It’s pretty sweet. By using ULA addresses for everything, all internal networking keeps working as-is if my ISP allocation changes. Every host can talk to its neighbors using internal addresses, and still connect to remote hosts without NAT breakage.
    - fulafel 6mo ago
      You also get this if you use mDNS, but without the ULA hassle and you get to use DNS names instead of hardcoding IP addresses.
      - kstrauser 6mo ago
        You can use both. I do. I do want some hardcoded addresses. In particular, some of the daemons I run get twitchy when the remote address changes unexpectedly.
gosub100 6mo ago
Can someone pity me enough to explain how to do DNS on ipv6 while using slaac? All I want to do is give every machine on my network a friendly hostname like storage.lan, timsPhone.lan, etc without having to run BIND (if possible), or dhcpd. I have heard of zeroconf for ipv4, but the catch is I want this to work across several different platforms like Windows , freebsd, Linux, etc. I also don't want to use static addresses, but I feel like that's asking too much.
- WorldMaker 6mo ago
  You are looking for mDNS which is the modern name for zeroconf/Bonjour/etc. The URL suffix is .local (storage.local, myphone.local, myprinter.local). Most modern OSes support it out of the box, but also don't advertise their names on mDNS until you ask them nicely (travel through a maze of Settings and Firewall options). mDNS supports IPv6 just fine/works on IPv6 only LANs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
  - gosub100 6mo ago
    Thank you. I may have tried this previously, but I think my router was blocking traffic between WiFi and wired. I will try this again. Appreciate it
ebiederm 6mo ago
For everyone getting into the details about how all of this should work please look at RFC7084: Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7084 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7084 It describes in detail what a home router needs to be doing to make all of this work seamlessly. Things work so well that half the world has working IPv6 already. Openwrt pretty much implements all of this out of the box. If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss. Personally I have moved several times changing ISPs in the process and my IPv6 setup involving multiple LANs on my home network has just continued to work. IPv6 renumbering events just work seamlessly and completely automatically. Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers.
- esbranson 6mo ago
  And I know the homenet WG has concluded but I found RFC 7368 IPv6 Home Networking Architecture Principles[1] interesting as well, including its discussion of reachability and RFC 6092 Recommended Simple Security Capabilities in Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) for Providing Residential IPv6 Internet Service.[2] IPv6 still occasionally seem more flaky than IPv4 with some set ups though. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7368.html#section-3.6.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7368.html#section-3... [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6092 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6092
- throw0101d 6mo ago
  > Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers. And corporate networks: in Google's stats you'll see IPv6 usage jumps on weekends as people do stuff not using their work computer.
- lee_ars 6mo ago
  > If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss. > ... > Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers. Yep, that's where I am. Frontier FTTH, IPv4 only. Because....I have no idea why. Because Frontier sucks, basically? They have at least started their rollout: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS5650?c=US&p=1&v=1&w=30&x=1 https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS5650?c=US&p=1&v=1&w=30&x... ...but it's going to be slow going. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather cut off my fingers than go back to Comcast, but at least Comcast gave me a /56.
anikom15 6mo ago
NAT is good enough.
ottah 6mo ago
Ipv6 is a theoretical benefit to the commons but as an individual it's an increase in complexity and a new abstraction for nearly the same result as your existing ipv4 network. There's just not enough incentive to invest in the switch.
cybercatgurrl 6mo ago
The same annoying and trite IPv6 haters come out of the woodworks with every article posted.

104 points by quaintdev 6mo ago

The main problem with IPv6 is that it is different from IPv4. There's SLAAC, there's no ARP and there're also some other differences. In the end, it's simpler to just not bother.

dogleash 6mo ago
Yup. People learn parts of v4 through osmosis because it's the default. Then when networking topics come up, it's easier to keep going with stuff that looks familiar rather than un-learning assumptions. Why bother with the weird other thing that's not even mandatory?
- general1465 6mo ago
  Because IPv4 is logical and makes sense. First thing which IPv6 came up with? No NATs everything will have a public address. It turned out that this was hare brained idea so let's just cover it up with firewall. However misconfigured firewall means that everything is open... IPv6 has been designed by people who were unable to think further than what is going to be tomorrow for a lunch.
  - BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
    Isn't that the first thing that IPv4 came up with as well? One publicly routable address per device that wants to access the Internet (or the network of universities or military installations or whichever network you were on pre-Internet).
    - general1465 6mo ago
      You see and IPv6 was not able to learn from the failure - people does not want to have all computers in one network, same like people does not want to live in one skyscraper.
  - kalleboo 6mo ago
    IPv4 came out in 1982 and was designed for every device to have a unique public address. Protocols like FTP were designed to literally pass an IP address to connect directly to. As addresses started running out, the NAT RFC was published in 1994 and described NAT as a "short-term solution". NAT was never meant to be an integral part of IPv4. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631 NAT broke a ton of things which required more and more hacks piled on, making it more complex to build services on top if it (e.g., a server in the middle to proxy all the traffic needed between peers is a 100% requirement, with all the maintenance and scaling headaches that come with it).
    - general1465 6mo ago
      So you actually agree with me, that making all addresses public was stupid to begin with. It was stupid on IPv4 and it remain stupid on IPv6, yet we already have experience from IPv4 that it was stupid.
      - throw0101d 6mo ago
        > So you actually agree with me, that making all addresses public was stupid to begin with. If an address is not public how can you start an connection from it, or end a connection at it? A web server needs a public address if you want to have people reach it. And you, at some point, also have to have a public address if you want to connect to pubic services: either on your end-host, at your CPE/router's WAN interface, or on an interface of your ISP's CG-NAT box. But having a public address on your end-host also allows for much more functionality than if you were stuck behind CPE-NAT or CG-NAT. Now, you don't have to use this functionality—just like how I didn't when my printer gets an publicly addressable (but not publicly reachable) IPv6 address—but it opens up various possibilities.
        general1465 6mo ago
        So having all devices on public addresses was stupid to begin with on IPv4 and it was arrogantly stupid on IPv6.
  - juliangmp 6mo ago
    Are you really complaining about the fact that we need to deploy firewalls?
    - general1465 6mo ago
      I am complaining about the fact that deploying firewall wrong will open your network to everyone. Deploying NAT wrong wont.
jcgl 6mo ago
ARP-schmarp. That doesn't matter to almost anyone who doesn't need to go deep into the network. But yeah, SLAAC's paradigm of moving assignment logic into the node (away from network infra like in DHCP) is definitely a stumbling point.
labcomputer 6mo ago
IPv6 ND (and SND) serve the same purpose as ARP. It's like saying a fancy French restaurant doesn't have a cook because it has a chef.

lgunsch 6mo ago

If IPv6 was going to be successful, it would have been successful years ago. It seems, people are just more comfortable with layers of NAT than native IPv6 everywhere. I'd guess that it should have been more backwards compatible. Similar to UTF-8 and ASCII.

BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
My Verizon connection has a CGNAT IPv4 and a publicly routable IPv6 address. It's at least partly a success, if you're using a cell phone on Verizon in the US.

jdwithit 6mo ago

IPv4 has been "in crisis" for the entire 20 years I've worked in tech and we seem to be managing alright. Not to say things can't be better or we shouldn't try to improve. But I'll be surprised if v4 isn't still the default for most use cases in another 20 years.

RiverCrochet 6mo ago
That's because the Internet is basically broadcast TV 2.0 so no one cares about having public IPv4's at home as long as they can get to their memes and streaming. Great job, we took something that was meant to be a next frontier in humanity and let anyone connect with anyone else without gatekeepers/intermediaries and turned it 21st century brainrot troughs. Perhaps a society not in slow intellectual decline would have chosen otherwise.
- ozim 6mo ago
  I do agree. But at the same time there is a quote by Stanisław Lem... "Until I used the Internet, I didn't know there were so many idiots in the world"
- ux266478 6mo ago
  > Great job, we took something that was meant to be a next frontier in humanity and let anyone connect with anyone else without gatekeepers/intermediaries We already had that, it's called shortwave radio. The internet, especially as it's implemented and as it's used, is a terrible way to achieve this. It's service providers the whole way down.
  - smallmancontrov 6mo ago
    It would be funny if HAM radio came back because the social filter imposed by the limitations wound up being more important than the technological capability.
    - ozim 6mo ago
      Problem is that HAM radio also has social filters you broadcast to everyone and you don’t know who is listening. Encrypted communication is not allowed in HAM. You are not supposed to use it for „communication” as in Facebook. You are supposed to use spectrum to test your gear and keep transmissions short to leave space for others. I was in local HAM club and passed the exam for license but never got license to transmit mostly because you are not supposed to chat frivolously over the radio.

rectang 6mo ago

If UTF-8 represents the triumph of a design prioritizing backwards compatibility with an existing standard (ASCII) to facilitate a transition, then IPv6 is the cautionary tale of a design which could have made the transition simpler but did not.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 6mo ago
IPv6 cannot be backward-compatible with IPv4 in the way UTF-8 is with ASCII. Any argument built on that comparison reflects a misunderstanding of the protocols and leads to flawed conclusions.
- AussieWog93 6mo ago
  Wait, why couldn't it? Just split the address into two 32-bit chunks (call the top word the "pool", bottom word "address") and assign the full IPV4 range to pool 0x00000000. Done.
  - eptcyka 6mo ago
    In what world does is such a protocol any more *”””compatible”””* with IPv4 than IPv6 already is? It is a different header after all.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Until you upgrade every router between 2 hosts so that it understands the IPv4b addressing scheme, those 2 hosts can't talk. And if you're going to upgrade them all anyway, then might as well do it right.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    That doesn't change anything - until everyone adopts the new chunk nobody can use it (even one windows XP machine that you don't personally care about is enough to still kill it today). IPv6 is better because at least it can work side by side by IPv6.
    - 6mo ago

leosanchez 6mo ago

Author if you are reading comments, rss feed entries point to example.com

haddr 6mo ago
the link to the full table somehow doesn't work for me
- quaintdev 6mo ago
  Fixed
quaintdev 6mo ago
Thanks! Check now.

diath 6mo ago

[flagged]

bombcar 6mo ago
“They’re out of IPs so they should self-genocide” is certainly something akin to an opinion, but not one I expected to see on this site today.
- diath 6mo ago
  You're putting words in my mouth, genocide implies murdering existing people to reduce the population, not developing policies that would slow down the population growth and/or fix the issues with the country.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    It's not me, it's the UN: Article II, 4. https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
themafia 6mo ago
You literally missed the most important part: "A transition from IPv4 to IPv6 seems far more easier especially since we already have 77% of people on IPv6." So to the extent they're aware of the "issues" you bring up they're already on top of it.
- diath 6mo ago
  ISPs providing IPv6 connectivity out of the box does not equal software and internal devices doing the same.
  - themafia 6mo ago
    You can route internal IPv4 networks over IPv6. There are several mapping strategies so this can even be transparent at your v6 gateway.

bombcar 6mo ago

I don’t know how you measure “metric tons of content” but I suspect in general there’s lots of US-available content on IPv4 that the countries like China and India want to access, and not much the other way around. But that should be a perfect playground for an IPv6-only network that has gateways to the IPv4 content; eventually the home-developed content will begin to drive demand elsewhere.

nickserv 6mo ago
Yes, there's lots of content on IPv4, and there is also a lot of traffic from India... If India were to turn off IPv4, it would be a great incentive for IPv4-only sites in the US and Europe to add an IPv6 address.

wmf 6mo ago

No mention of Indian ISPs just buying IPv4 addresses. Prices are even declining.

isodev 6mo ago

Someone should’ve thought about the UX of IPv6 before declaring it to be “the way”. It’s like having to learn Klingon just to setup your printer. IPvNext could sort that out… maybe it’s time to consider moving on.

bluGill 6mo ago
People claim this all the time, but every time I push I discover they have no clue how networks work and just handwave away as "easy" or "details" the very reasons people who understand networks say it can't work.
- isodev 6mo ago
  I think you’re making my point - someone decided to surface a very low level concept “as is” (without a suitable abstraction) on a level where people also need it for use cases that don’t justify knowledge of the arcane. Or dealing with gatekeepers for that matter.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    For most people there is no UX. Most US houses are IPv6 and use it without knowing anything about networking at all (most cable internet is IPv6, as the big cell networks). The people who have to make networks work need to know how IPv6 works - but there is no getting around that - they know how IPv4 works too.
  - orangeboats 6mo ago
    There are already abstractions that allows you to deal with IPv6 without actually typing in the addresses. It's the DNS, but every time this topic pops up, someone rejects DNS and proceeds to continue sprouting something about how IPv6 is unusable because you can't memorize the addresses.
    - wpm 6mo ago
      What happens when DNS is down

azalemeth 6mo ago

I am behind cgnat but have a native ipv6 /64 at home. I've got a great fibre connection (2G5) and everything "just works". I can host on ipv6 native machines and see them from anywhere in the world that has native ipv6 access. The trouble is that 1) my employers do not have native ipv6 access; 2) neither does my mobile connection; and 3) really nor do a lot of my friends. Moreover, 4) if you browse a website from a native world-reachable ipv6 address, you're fingerprinted by it and it's overwhelmingly unique to you. So, it doesn't really work for hosting, and I don't get any direct benefits from it. Instead I have a vps with a public ipv4 address and have a router that creates a wireguard tunnel to it. The reverse proxy works great over ipv6 and I am now in a position where I can forward ports and have direct connections -- albeit with hugely increased technical complexity. Ipv6 has many great ideas in it. If it's universally used it might just catch on...

BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
I'm curious - which mobile provider? I thought they were the ones that use IPv6 most, some even using 464XLAT so your device only has a v6 address.
vimredo 6mo ago
> 4) if you browse a website from a native world-reachable ipv6 address, you're fingerprinted by it and it's overwhelmingly unique to you. IPv6 privacy extensions exist & are enabled by default in most (if not all) operating systems today, which (this is my understanding; take it with a grain of salt) create what essentially are extra IPv6 addresses, used for outbound traffic, that aren't generated via your MAC address.

bluGill 6mo ago

The US doesn't have excessive IPv4 Addresses. We have a real shortage and big pain because we don't have anywhere near enough. Sure we have 40% of them all - but that has no indication of what enough is.

blinded 6mo ago
100% this, my college had 2 /16s for no reason. The printers were all public, was a mess.
- miladyincontrol 6mo ago
  I mean having a public address doesnt mean it has to be publicly routable. Same thing applies to ipv6. I speak as someone who worked at an institute that had similar abundance of address space.
  - fulafel 6mo ago
    Indeed, the tragedy of the IPv4+NAT stockholm syndrome is that people view having to use ambiguous addresses as access control and can't distinguish reachability vs addressing.
  - blinded 6mo ago
    In my case it was publicly routable. The ips and ports of key infra were on https://www.shodan.io/ https://www.shodan.io/.
- wpm 6mo ago
  My workstation used to have a public address system it was awesome.
sassymuffinz 6mo ago
I worked at an ISP way back in the dark ages of 2008 and we were all worried about IP exhaustion then. It's now 17 years later and what do you know, IPv4 is still trucking.
6mo ago

tonymet 6mo ago

> There are countless threads online on forums like Hacker News, Reddit where people who never really got comfortable with idea of IPv6 It’s clumsier than ipv4. It’s unnecessary since NAT was invented. In practice IPv6 requires dual stack, which means twice as many firewalls, names and routes to manage — so 4x the debugging because you have 2 dimensions that can either be working or failing. Addresses are too long to remember, too clumsy to write, and after 30 years still don’t have consistent representation (how many colons and brackets?). Look, IPv6 has some benefits, but until the usability is fixed, it will be another 30 years before it’s close to 95% adoption.

apearson 6mo ago
To reduce doing things twice there is NAT64/646XLAT. How many v4 addresses have you memorized, I normally use DNS or mDNS.
- tonymet 6mo ago
  that reduces part of the scope for some of the customers
Chu4eeno 6mo ago
... and annoying casting from `sockaddr` to either `sockaddr_in` or `sockaddr_in6*` while you pass around a socklen_t. 10 years ago I was all gung-ho about IPv6, but it's annoying at every level.
- tonymet 6mo ago
  Having 2 sockets for loopback or multiple interfaces is a huge pain
  - BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
    Bind to '::' and you can get v4 and v6 traffic on one socket.

oconnore 6mo ago

I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. I have done essentially zero home networking work and I just ran this successfully. It just works! ``` > ping6 google.com PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2605:59c0:236f:3a08:7883:9d04:c26d:5fa1 --> 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=0 hlim=117 time=22.262 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=1 hlim=117 time=26.124 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=2 hlim=117 time=26.807 ms ^C --- google.com ping6 statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 22.262/25.064/26.807/2.001 ms ```

kstrauser 6mo ago
That's literally impossible, to hear some people tell it. "And also, look how hard it'd be to memorize that address", say the people who remember like 2 IPv4 addresses, one of them being 127.0.0.1.
- NekkoDroid 6mo ago
  I remember like 10 different IPv4 addresses, 6 of which are DNS servers where each octet is a single number, 1 is my router, 1 is my home network switch, 1 is my home server and the last one localhost. The main thing all those have in common is they are either something I frequently use (all mentioned local IPs) or just stupid easy to remember (DNS servers), neither of which isn't possible for IPv6. From memory isn't localhost for IPv6 not shorter than for IPv4? The answer is yes, it is ::1 and I was thinking of the Multicast and Link-local address prefixes which are ff00:: and fe80:: respectively.
  - boredatoms 6mo ago
    Telling people to use ULA subnet fddd:: with dhcpv6 is my way. fddd::7 is easier to type than 10.0.0.7
    - opan 6mo ago
      "ten oh oh 7" (how I'd say it or remember it) still seems simpler than "eff dee dee dee colon colon 7". While with ipv4 the dots can be assumed for pauses, v6 doesn't put colons as often, also I could easily see myself forgetting the amount of "d"s. I don't wanna seem too anti-v6, though, I am in favor of everyone adopting the more modern thing. edit: Well, you said easier to type. I guess I probably agree with that.

thomasdziedzic 6mo ago

IPv6 feels like we just can't admit to ourselves that it has been a failed transition. What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.

apearson 6mo ago
What changes to IPv6 would you make to make it easier to transition?
- general1465 6mo ago
  Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6. If IPv6 and IPv4 would be essentially the same from the get go, IPv4 would be a niche 20 years. Sure everything above IPv6 have, but it took years and years of screaming to get it.
  - throw0101c 6mo ago
    > Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6. All of those things exist in IPv6. And it is physically impossible for DNS to be the same, as you have to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.
    - general1465 6mo ago
      > All of those things exist in IPv6. And it has not existed at the start of the IPv6 and is one of the many reasons why after all those years we are having a poor penetration of IPv6.

globular-toast 6mo ago

IPv6 is totally an equality issue. If a sizeable proportion of this forum had to share an IP address we would've had IPv6 done years ago.

tcaxle 6mo ago
I agree. If you click through to the original Wikipedia table that's cited in this article you can see a pretty clear correlation between countries with more IPv4 addresses than people vs. wealth/hegemonic clout of the country. In the UK, US, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, etc. there are way more than enough IPv4s to go around. Some ISPs here in the UK will even lease you bundles of four or eight IPv4s for very little additional cost.

ux266478 6mo ago

The way forward for what though? It remains to be seen if this level of infrastructure and complexity has any kind of resilience. I seriously doubt it does, looking back on history. I think it's far more likely that the post-industrial population contraction (which hasn't even really begun) as well as climate change (anthropogenic or not) will make it far more likely that this model of "everybody uses a computer" ends up in the junk bin of history. Can't say I'd be sad to see it go. Somebody who has no interest in computers shouldn't ever have to touch one.

jmyeet 6mo ago

I find it fascinating how these key technologies handle upgrades and breaking changes. For example, Python eschewed breaking changes through 2.7.x but the dam has burst since 3.0 and every point release (it seems?) makes breaking changes, sometimes reversing itself (eg the whole s/u string prefix thing). Many here will be familiar with the second system effect [1]. Usually people want to avoid making breaking changes but once they do, they can go a little nuts. My personal opinion is only major versions should make breaking changes and a lot of thought should go into making them as painless as possible. IPv6 is fascinating for these reasons but also that it's a product of its time in two main ways: 1. It doesn't do anything about roaming because that wasn't an issue in the 1990s but it certainly is now; 2. A 64 bit address space would've basically been infinite addresses but instead they went with 128 bit addresses (rolling in ports) but then giving individual users a /64 address range. For some reason people deny it now or simply weren't aware but that too is a historical artifact because it was intended to put a 48 bit MAC address into that space but later we realized that's a huge PII and tracking issue; and 3. History has shown that upgrading network backbone hardware (in particular) is incredibly difficult through a process that's been described as "ossification", which is a nice description. Basically, network relays and routers wanted to avoid security issues and decided to discard things they didn't understand. That's interesting because it violates Postel's Law [2], which basically says be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. But this shows up in all sorts of interesting ways, like it's practically impossible to reliably use MTUs larger than about 1536. When IPv4 was designed, that wasn't an issue. With 1-100G+ networks it is. There are RFCs about using large MTUs but you're dependent on backbone hardware you have no control over. Even Linux struggles with this, to the point where you need to do some configuration for high-bandwidth networks (eg RPS [3]). Just handling all those interrupts presents a bunch of problems beyond the original scope. And again, it's hard to fix through no fault of Linux's. I'm old enough to remember the talk about us running out of IPv4 addresses back in the 1990s. It's been interesting to watch how this has consistently been kicked down the street (eg cgNAT). What is funny though is large companies (eg Facebook) actualy ran out of internal addresses on a 10/8 network and there's no good solution for that (with IPv4 at least). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle [3]: https://lwn.net/Articles/362339/ https://lwn.net/Articles/362339/

Yizahi 6mo ago

I honestly don't understand why IPv6 is not actively deployed in 2026. Every piece of networking hardware over past decade supports IPv6 and often dual stack too. And to switch between both often takes a few clicks if DHCPv6 server is up and reachable. Absolutely transparent, free, zero performance hit. But no, so many persist at doing v4. PS: I'm talking about MSO hardware. But client hardware should be at the same level of compatibility for years too.

thomasdziedzic 6mo ago
2026: $ ping6 github.com ping6: github.com: Address family for hostname not supported
- Yizahi 6mo ago
  Yeah, that's the problem. And I bet they could enable it, they just don't want to for some reason.
- Hikikomori 6mo ago
  Azure has very poor V6 support last I tried it.
commandersaki 6mo ago
Support nightmare for ISPs.

gmuslera 6mo ago

It is the only way forward, but the reason for that is not the correlation between population and IP addresses. After all, most of the use of internet today is not by people, but by bots, crawlers, AI agents, b2b and more, and that is far more than the human population, and then you have the virtual networks built over IP like VPNs, Tor and more. It is more related to privacy, bidirectional communication and protocols, security, identity and possibilities.

Bender 6mo ago

The only place I have utilized an IPv6 address publicly is on my authoritative name servers only because some DNS testing tools assume it is there. It's not really needed however. My home firewall does have one but I have never used it. I can't think of a use for it. I have multiple static IPv4 addresses and they have suited me just fine for decades. I suppose I could bind a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy to it in case a site blocks me but I would probably leave it off most of the time. I never use them on my web, chat, voice, IRC and other servers as I personally find blocking shenanigans on IPv4 and not having to implement the same checks on IPv6 is just easier for a lazy person like me. IPv6 just feels like an after-thought bolt on to me. Clunky, not well thought out. Some privacy gotchas that can be disabled but some will not. That's just my take. I doubt anyone will have the same take. I think IPv4 will be fine for another 100 years even if we have to re-purpose some DoD/MoD ranges given they don't use them and maybe annex some /8's from a few greedy companies. But that's a problem for Gen Delta. Gen Foxtrot can deal with repurposing some multicast ranges.

kalleboo 6mo ago
> I have multiple static IPv4 addresses and they have suited me just fine for decades IPv6 is for the people (countries, continents) who did not get in early on the IPv4 address gold rush. Your take is basically "got mine, F you".
- Bender 6mo ago
  Or ... people can use the DoD/Mod and assorted other space to get their IPv4 allocations. There is a ton of unused space in IPv4. Reserved, allocated but entirely unused. Also take back some /8's from greedy companies that don't need all that space. stares at HP When I say take I mean take as in a forceful annex and a timeline.
  - lmm 6mo ago
    > Or ... people can use the DoD/Mod and assorted other space to get their IPv4 allocations. There is a ton of unused space in IPv4. Reserved, allocated but entirely unused. Also take back some /8's from greedy companies that don't need all that space. In our exponentially growing world that wouldn't help. By the time we ran out of Class As we were allocating a new one every month. Reclaiming all the unused addresses would barely make a dent in demand.

flumpcakes 6mo ago

One of the biggest, I would assume in the current year, blockers to an IPv6 only world would be the fact that the major "cloud" vendors do not support it.

bombcar 6mo ago
The companies that rent you IPv4 addresses don’t support v6 well or at all? Do tell. I wonder why.
- matttttttttttt 6mo ago
  AWS supports IPv6 and it's free, whereas IPv4 is not.
lern_too_spel 6mo ago
https://isgithubipv6.live/ https://isgithubipv6.live/

tsoukase 6mo ago

If IPv6 doesn't dominate in the next, let's say, 10 years, they might publish the IPv8 which will be an 64bit space, backwards compatible with IPv4. It will be the only case where a newer version of software comes back closer to an older one.

p1mrx 6mo ago
> the only case where a newer version of software comes back closer to an older one Winamp 3 -> Winamp 5 was closer to Winamp 2. Windows 8 -> Windows 10 was closer to Windows 7. Though I don't expect this to happen with IP.
BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
How do you plan to let IPv4 (32 bit address space) actually address and communicate with an IPv8 (64 bit address space) host? You don't have enough bits to identify the v8 host.
- tsoukase 6mo ago
  Something like 1:2:3:4:a:b:c:d where the most significant 32bits are a valid IPv4. The kernel figures out and keep all others the same (NAT etc). We extend the address space, not invent a new stack. The IPv6 critics shout out that this would be a viable solution.
  - Dagger2 6mo ago
    Okay, so you've figured out how to make v4 addressable from v8. Good job. That lets v8 hosts address a v4 host via a v8 address. How are you going to make v8 addressable from v4? Because you need to do this too for communication to work. Also, you've made v4 addressable from v8, and you're about to explain how you make v8 addressable from v4... but that's just addressing, i.e. identifying the right host. How are you going to actually send packets from v8 to v4, and also from v4 to v8? > The IPv6 critics shout out that this would be a viable solution. But they never bother to understand enough of the problem to contribute anything useful. Either they can't come up with something that works, or they come up with something that they didn't realize v6 already did.

journal 6mo ago

Will IPV6 become a type in sql databases?

landgenoot 6mo ago
> The INET6 data type is intended for storage of IPv6 addresses, as well as IPv4 addresses assuming conventional mapping of IPv4 addresses into IPv6 addresses.
throw0101d 6mo ago
> Will IPV6 become a type in sql databases? Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are 'just' u_ints: one is 2^32 and the other is 2^128. The fact that we display them in a particular format (10.11.12.13; ff:ee::bb:aa) is only for human UX purposes. Strictly speaking everything in a computer is 'just' a number represented in base-2 (binary digits: bits) that we affix certain labels to (char, int, float, struct).

rickcarlino 6mo ago

Imagine being able to connect two computers over the internet using sockets. WebRTC is a marvel, but I miss the whimsical days of running something on a port at home and connecting to it without thinking about NAT.

kalleboo 6mo ago
Imagine being able to make a voice call to a friend without paying for a middle-man to proxy the traffic completely unnecessarily.
- vsgherzi 6mo ago
  You can still do this! It’s just very hard and needs hole punching and maybe a stun server

sidcool 6mo ago

What dictates the allocation per country?

orangeboats 6mo ago
IPv4 - first come first served, with a 24 karat FU to the 3rd world countries. It is their fault that they are poor. IPv6 - still the same, but the space is large enough that any first-mover advantage is minuscule.
- labcomputer 6mo ago
  I think that's a bit uncharitable. 32 bits seemed practically infinite at the time IPv4 was created, and the whole thing started as a way for the American military-industrial-research complex to communicate with itself anyway. Why would you even want to assign addresses on your defense network to foreign adversaries? Now that it's a commercial thing, a more equitable distribution would have, with hindsight, been a good thing.

rkagerer 6mo ago

The main complaint I have against IPv6 is the addresses are so unwieldy. When I look at them I have the same reaction as when I look at some kind of complex scientific formula comprised of operators and symbols that are unfamiliar. It also takes extra mental effort to expand the compressed zeros and interpret what I'm viewing. Even after reading about them many times and using them in (an albeit limited) fashion, they still just don't feel human friendly. Not like the more straightforward IPv4 addresses do. (Or even like a hypothetical "IPv5" that simply prefixes one extra octet). Whenever I bring this up I'm told something like "Don't bother memorizing IPv6 addresses. Use DNS instead."[1] That take completely overlooks the fact that if the numbers exist, you will inevitably wind up needing to deal with them at various points along the way. Eg. Debugging logs, sniffing network traffic, ruling out if DNS is down, etc. I'm a big fan of ergonomics to make things intuitive and reduce unnccessary cognitive overhead, and the new scheme is a regression in that regard. If anyone has tips on how they became more fluent with IPv6 I'd love to hear. [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossible-memorizing-ipv6-addresses.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossib...

rkagerer 6mo ago
This is without even getting into learning the new (old?) paradigm of "exposing" all addresses to the whole internet. I realize "NAT" is not equivalent to "firewall", but placing them at the same boundary made things simple to understand conceptually. I for one never had trouble opening/forwarding ports (and liked the control it provided over what goes in and out, especially in the days before it all just became HTTP) but I sympathize with the major headaches the NAT "workaround" caused.
- lunar_rover 6mo ago
  NAT also solves the dynamic address issue. With GUA I need to deal with both dynamic prefix and randomised suffix that can be changed by seemingly unrelated things when opening ports to the internet.
  - preisschild 6mo ago

preisschild 6mo ago

I love IPv6, SLAAC, mDNS, Thread, Matter and the other cool stuff in the ecosystem. I have wasted too much time setting manual DHCP static assignments. Now I just use SLAAC and mDNS with basically no manual config.

nesarkvechnep 6mo ago

Reading the comments, it looks like some people dismiss IPv6 just because they need to sit down and learn a couple of new things.

MaKey 6mo ago
Yeah, it's always the same with IPv6 discussions. The main points being: 1. IPv6 addresses are too long to remember 2. IPv6 doesn't need NAT and people are uncomfortable with their devices having a public address as they see NAT as an additional layer of security
- redserk 6mo ago
  If someone is still using the “remembering IP addresses” argument in 2026 (or at any point in the 21st century), I question their technical competence in configuring a network correctly.
  - WorldMaker 6mo ago
    It also seems to be a learning curve thing because IPv6 addresses have their own versions of memorable mnemonics. If you are in a LAN space manually configuring LAN addresses, you just need to remember one of the local address (ULA) prefixes like fc00 and then start numbering your devices as ::1 and incrementing (fc::1, fc::2, fc::3, etc). But also in LAN spaces you could just rely on mDNS (devicename.local), it's gotten quite good in most OSes today. If you need to remember random WAN IPv6 addresses without being able to use DNS or at least a hosts file you've probably got a bunch of other more pressing problems.
wao0uuno 6mo ago
I dismiss IPv6 because my ISP doesn't support it.
- voxadam 6mo ago
  I dismiss ISPs that don't support IPv6.

bdeol22 6mo ago

We've had enough address space for ages—the recurring pain is incentives at org boundaries: whoever owns the legacy peerings pays the migration tax.

everdrive 6mo ago

Here comes the flood of IPv6 evangelists who thinks everyone is confused about NAT and firewalls. I don't know where they get their talking points, but they descend onto these threads with their sanctimony. "Oh, you must be confused about how NAT works, allow me to educate you." It's very tiresome.

wpm 6mo ago
[flagged]
- orangeboats 6mo ago
  Pretending that 0-9A-Z is somehow comparable to 行 or ∮ is quite daring, I will give you that. And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead. - In the grand scheme of things, the IP address itself is of very little importance. It was given undue attention because of how IPv4 was inherently limited in address space. - If you simply needed a way to name your machines, what are you doing not using the (m)DNS? You know, services literally with the word "Name" inside their name?
  - everdrive 6mo ago
    >And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead. I spent some good time trying to learn IPv6. I was pretty open to it, but it was just awful. There were parts of it that were bad due to other reasons -- my router, my ISP. But it was unworkable, produced a number of problems and provided me no benefit. I learn new things all the time. I learn things I like, learn about things I dislike. I find it really rude that people suggest "I just don't want to learn things."
    - orangeboats 6mo ago
      If bad routers etc. makes you think IPv6 is bad... then man, I think for me IPv4 is a mountain of shite. But my comment was not directed at you, more so towards those people who looked at IPv6 very superficially (i.e. the ipV6 AddRESs iS UgLY!!1! people), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

artooro 6mo ago

I'm surprised how few people are talking about ULAs. For any home network where you don't have a reserved global address space from your ISP, it makes sense to configure a ULA on your router and use it for all internal hosts, and the ISP assigned address is only used for Internet access. This does not require NAT/Npt and you have the best of both worlds.

skybrian 6mo ago
First I heard of it. Apparently they are private Ipv6 addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address If your intranet has no IPv4 addresses, this is better than a NAT somehow?
fulafel 6mo ago
If you want to have an airgapped network, sure. For most people it doesn't make sense. You'll just get the worst of of both worlds.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  It’s pretty sweet. By using ULA addresses for everything, all internal networking keeps working as-is if my ISP allocation changes. Every host can talk to its neighbors using internal addresses, and still connect to remote hosts without NAT breakage.
  - fulafel 6mo ago
    You also get this if you use mDNS, but without the ULA hassle and you get to use DNS names instead of hardcoding IP addresses.
    - kstrauser 6mo ago
      You can use both. I do. I do want some hardcoded addresses. In particular, some of the daemons I run get twitchy when the remote address changes unexpectedly.

gosub100 6mo ago

Can someone pity me enough to explain how to do DNS on ipv6 while using slaac? All I want to do is give every machine on my network a friendly hostname like storage.lan, timsPhone.lan, etc without having to run BIND (if possible), or dhcpd. I have heard of zeroconf for ipv4, but the catch is I want this to work across several different platforms like Windows , freebsd, Linux, etc. I also don't want to use static addresses, but I feel like that's asking too much.

WorldMaker 6mo ago
You are looking for mDNS which is the modern name for zeroconf/Bonjour/etc. The URL suffix is .local (storage.local, myphone.local, myprinter.local). Most modern OSes support it out of the box, but also don't advertise their names on mDNS until you ask them nicely (travel through a maze of Settings and Firewall options). mDNS supports IPv6 just fine/works on IPv6 only LANs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
- gosub100 6mo ago
  Thank you. I may have tried this previously, but I think my router was blocking traffic between WiFi and wired. I will try this again. Appreciate it

ebiederm 6mo ago

For everyone getting into the details about how all of this should work please look at RFC7084: Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7084 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7084 It describes in detail what a home router needs to be doing to make all of this work seamlessly. Things work so well that half the world has working IPv6 already. Openwrt pretty much implements all of this out of the box. If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss. Personally I have moved several times changing ISPs in the process and my IPv6 setup involving multiple LANs on my home network has just continued to work. IPv6 renumbering events just work seamlessly and completely automatically. Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers.

esbranson 6mo ago
And I know the homenet WG has concluded but I found RFC 7368 IPv6 Home Networking Architecture Principles[1] interesting as well, including its discussion of reachability and RFC 6092 Recommended Simple Security Capabilities in Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) for Providing Residential IPv6 Internet Service.[2] IPv6 still occasionally seem more flaky than IPv4 with some set ups though. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7368.html#section-3.6.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7368.html#section-3... [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6092 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6092
throw0101d 6mo ago
> Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers. And corporate networks: in Google's stats you'll see IPv6 usage jumps on weekends as people do stuff not using their work computer.
lee_ars 6mo ago
> If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss. > ... > Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers. Yep, that's where I am. Frontier FTTH, IPv4 only. Because....I have no idea why. Because Frontier sucks, basically? They have at least started their rollout: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS5650?c=US&p=1&v=1&w=30&x=1 https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS5650?c=US&p=1&v=1&w=30&x... ...but it's going to be slow going. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather cut off my fingers than go back to Comcast, but at least Comcast gave me a /56.

anikom15 6mo ago

NAT is good enough.

ottah 6mo ago

Ipv6 is a theoretical benefit to the commons but as an individual it's an increase in complexity and a new abstraction for nearly the same result as your existing ipv4 network. There's just not enough incentive to invest in the switch.

cybercatgurrl 6mo ago

The same annoying and trite IPv6 haters come out of the woodworks with every article posted.