6 ms·

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely us

by jdw64 4mo ago

I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4

BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
It's good to support it to resolve the chicken egg problem. If no service supports it, there is no sense in deploying it to the customers and the other way around. Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.
- reddalo 4mo ago
  For people like me: DS Lite stands for "IPv6 dual-stack lite". My mind went directly to Nintendo and I was confused.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
  For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?
  - gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
    1. Peer-to-peer networking won't usually work correctly. And quite a bit of software uses P2P networking these days---BitTorrent, Zoom/Teams (via WebRTC), Tailscale, PlayStation/Xbox multiplayer, etc. Most of these services have automatic fallbacks when P2P networking doesn't work, but these fallbacks are usually slower and less reliable. 2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run into rate limits. Or even worse, you might be blocked entirely if your CGNAT neighbours are spammers or otherwise breaking website rules.
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
      - gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
        > While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). Yeah, I just mentioned that because P2P networking is used a lot more than most people think these days, since even things like Zoom that look like typical client–server web browsing actually use P2P networking internally. > It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. Reliability and latency will be marginally better with IPv6 than with CGNAT, but this is so minor that I doubt that most people will notice this. And many CGNATs will RST connections that last too long, but most protocols have some sort of automatic retry/reconnect built in, so this shouldn't cause issues very often either. IPv6 addresses are quite a bit cheaper than IPv4 addresses in most clouds, but since most servers still need to support IPv4, this doesn't help you directly. Supporting IPv6 means that others using the cheaper IPv6-only cloud services will be able to connect to your server, but this doesn't matter for consumer-only services. So yeah, you're probably right that enabling IPv6 server-side won't have (m)any benefits. > I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it. Being able to ban IP addresses without worrying about collateral damage is a pretty big benefit to the service provider though, for certain applications at least.
        inigyou 4mo ago
        If you're using a cloud you'll probably find it useful to have ipv6 on every server and ipv4 only on the front end gateway
- ash 4mo ago
  Unfortunately, individual actions would never be enough to solve the IPv6 chicken and egg problem. See djb's "IPv6 mess" article: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.
  - tormeh 4mo ago
    This stuff is obvious now, but I think back then this was probably quite clever.
  - BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
    It's not a lot but it's better to be part of the solution than the problem even if it is an insignificant contribution.
    - commandersaki 4mo ago
      Which is which?
Hendrikto 4mo ago
> Is IPv6 really that widely used? Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too. > I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.
- tormeh 4mo ago
  I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.
  - Hendrikto 4mo ago
    All the more reason to support it. There are lots of ISPs that only assign you an IPv6, and do hacky trickery to make IPv4 work over that. We wouldn’t need all of this.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    So, like, the three most popular things still worked. I wonder if working more is related to their popularity.
    - tormeh 4mo ago
      I think it's more that Google and Meta have the surplus engineering resources to implement IPv6 for what is essentially no reason.
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        Probably for lower latency and higher reliability on mobile networks.
jon-wood 4mo ago
When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice. From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)
- jdw64 4mo ago
  Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university
  - jon-wood 4mo ago
    Heh, there’s a blast from the past. I was doing Ruby professionally from 2005 to 2024 or so, I’m primarily using Python now because that’s what the business I’m working for was built on but I’ll always have a soft spot for Ruby.
    - jdw64 4mo ago
      I got help with an assignment from you before. You were probably just responding, lol. I was grateful back then.
- hdgvhicv 4mo ago
  So your isp is rinsing you for the cost of a an IPv4 address. £10 a month will pay for a whole /24 in 3 years. Chances are they also skimping on other areas including over subscription. Choose a better isp if you want a better service. Your “just open traffic to internal host 1 on your firewall is the same no matter if it has nat or not, unless you are using a non stateful firewall? Or perhaps your configuration layer splits the two for reasons.
inigyou 4mo ago
A lot of internet spambots and vulnerability scanners are v4 only. I discovered this when I found an open mail relay on v6, contacted the owner and he said it's been like that for ages due to a config mistake and he'd never heard a complaint. It wasn't an open relay on v4.
newsoftheday 4mo ago
My selfhosted email has been dual stack for close to a year and my eyeball estimate of the logs is around 10% of the traffic is IPv6.
nottorp 4mo ago
I recently enabled ipv6 on an unadvertised server i use just with people i know... it's on my home connection actually. The great news is those vulnerability scans from random IPs are coming just on ipv4, there hasn't been any yet on ipv6 :)
tumetab1 4mo ago
Likely caused by better performance provided by IPv4. Browsers try both stacks (Happy Eyeballs algorithm) so likely the IPv4 is working better for your visitors. Since must people use IPv4 most of the time, IPv6 performance issues go unnoticed by the users, ISPs, CDNs, etc.

by jdw64 4mo ago

BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago

It's good to support it to resolve the chicken egg problem. If no service supports it, there is no sense in deploying it to the customers and the other way around. Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.

reddalo 4mo ago
For people like me: DS Lite stands for "IPv6 dual-stack lite". My mind went directly to Nintendo and I was confused.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
fc417fc802 4mo ago
For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?
- gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
  1. Peer-to-peer networking won't usually work correctly. And quite a bit of software uses P2P networking these days---BitTorrent, Zoom/Teams (via WebRTC), Tailscale, PlayStation/Xbox multiplayer, etc. Most of these services have automatic fallbacks when P2P networking doesn't work, but these fallbacks are usually slower and less reliable. 2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run into rate limits. Or even worse, you might be blocked entirely if your CGNAT neighbours are spammers or otherwise breaking website rules.
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
    - gucci-on-fleek 4mo ago
      > While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). Yeah, I just mentioned that because P2P networking is used a lot more than most people think these days, since even things like Zoom that look like typical client–server web browsing actually use P2P networking internally. > It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. Reliability and latency will be marginally better with IPv6 than with CGNAT, but this is so minor that I doubt that most people will notice this. And many CGNATs will RST connections that last too long, but most protocols have some sort of automatic retry/reconnect built in, so this shouldn't cause issues very often either. IPv6 addresses are quite a bit cheaper than IPv4 addresses in most clouds, but since most servers still need to support IPv4, this doesn't help you directly. Supporting IPv6 means that others using the cheaper IPv6-only cloud services will be able to connect to your server, but this doesn't matter for consumer-only services. So yeah, you're probably right that enabling IPv6 server-side won't have (m)any benefits. > I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it. Being able to ban IP addresses without worrying about collateral damage is a pretty big benefit to the service provider though, for certain applications at least.
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        If you're using a cloud you'll probably find it useful to have ipv6 on every server and ipv4 only on the front end gateway
ash 4mo ago
Unfortunately, individual actions would never be enough to solve the IPv6 chicken and egg problem. See djb's "IPv6 mess" article: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.
- tormeh 4mo ago
  This stuff is obvious now, but I think back then this was probably quite clever.
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
  It's not a lot but it's better to be part of the solution than the problem even if it is an insignificant contribution.
  - commandersaki 4mo ago
    Which is which?

Hendrikto 4mo ago

> Is IPv6 really that widely used? Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too. > I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.

tormeh 4mo ago
I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.
- Hendrikto 4mo ago
  All the more reason to support it. There are lots of ISPs that only assign you an IPv6, and do hacky trickery to make IPv4 work over that. We wouldn’t need all of this.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  So, like, the three most popular things still worked. I wonder if working more is related to their popularity.
  - tormeh 4mo ago
    I think it's more that Google and Meta have the surplus engineering resources to implement IPv6 for what is essentially no reason.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      Probably for lower latency and higher reliability on mobile networks.

jon-wood 4mo ago

When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice. From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)

jdw64 4mo ago
Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university
- jon-wood 4mo ago
  Heh, there’s a blast from the past. I was doing Ruby professionally from 2005 to 2024 or so, I’m primarily using Python now because that’s what the business I’m working for was built on but I’ll always have a soft spot for Ruby.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    I got help with an assignment from you before. You were probably just responding, lol. I was grateful back then.
hdgvhicv 4mo ago
So your isp is rinsing you for the cost of a an IPv4 address. £10 a month will pay for a whole /24 in 3 years. Chances are they also skimping on other areas including over subscription. Choose a better isp if you want a better service. Your “just open traffic to internal host 1 on your firewall is the same no matter if it has nat or not, unless you are using a non stateful firewall? Or perhaps your configuration layer splits the two for reasons.

inigyou 4mo ago

A lot of internet spambots and vulnerability scanners are v4 only. I discovered this when I found an open mail relay on v6, contacted the owner and he said it's been like that for ages due to a config mistake and he'd never heard a complaint. It wasn't an open relay on v4.

newsoftheday 4mo ago

My selfhosted email has been dual stack for close to a year and my eyeball estimate of the logs is around 10% of the traffic is IPv6.

nottorp 4mo ago

I recently enabled ipv6 on an unadvertised server i use just with people i know... it's on my home connection actually. The great news is those vulnerability scans from random IPs are coming just on ipv4, there hasn't been any yet on ipv6 :)

tumetab1 4mo ago

Likely caused by better performance provided by IPv4. Browsers try both stacks (Happy Eyeballs algorithm) so likely the IPv4 is working better for your visitors. Since must people use IPv4 most of the time, IPv6 performance issues go unnoticed by the users, ISPs, CDNs, etc.