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Comment by seeekr | Hacker News Reader

Hypothesis: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted. Depending on how many of these individually affected businesses represent major infrastructure providers (such as public clouds), the individual moves to IPv6 might together bring about a globally noticeable effect.

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Who here actually feels any sort of pain, as an internet technologist, or as business owner, from "still" being on IPv4? I know that I do not.

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I don't know. IPv6 is ugly, yeah, but not any more ugly than other long random strings that we just copy-paste all the time, like API keys. For me, not adopting IPv6 has these reasons:

* My home and small business Internet provider does not support IPv6, despite them talking about deploying it for about 10 years now. Actually here in the Netherlands I have never encountered a mainstream consumer ISP that supports IPv6.

* I don't have any users that are on exclusively on IPv6. All my users have access to IPv4.

* IPv6 does not bring me any visible benefits, like faster performance.

You go ahead, and try relaying an IPv6 address over the phone from one of your end users.

Sure, the IPv6 address of my server (vsza.hu) is 2a01:270:2016::1, which is 2-A-0-1-colon-2-7-0-colon-2-0-1-6-double-colon-1 over the phone. Many people seem to forget that leading zeroes within 16-bit groups and one contiguous block of zeroes can be omitted.

"Sir, please type this into your browser to get to the router web interface: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. I repeat 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334."

"Server IP address could not be found."

5 minutes later...

"Now could you please tell me the IPs of all connected devices?"

Customer hangs up and cancels his subscription.

Wasn't a similar problem solved by services like URL shorteners? I had to work occasional technical service for products where I was one of the embedded engineers and I leaned heavily on bit.ly at the time to get URLs back and forth from customers and it worked exceedingly well.

So, with that in mind, what would be the major drawbacks to IPv6 address shorteners? You'll always have a certain class of issues such as transcription errors, of course.

Problem with URL shorteners is ones that use characters, especially of varying cases. Relaying letters across a telephone sucks, I often resort to NATO codes, and now you'll have to distinguish capitalization.

Yeah, actually I guess that I was spoiled in that regard. I worked for an RF company when I had that experience and, also having a military background myself, the NATO phonetics were used naturally when communicating with our customers.

That's why you need a solid solution for DNS, though from my experience, mDNS does a decent enough job to solve it.

Instead of the numbers you type in the hostname of a device. IPv6 encourages to improve on the current lackluster DNS solutions some routers have.

Here, the linux routers are way ahead of you. Odhcpd used to handle ipv6 delegations for normal users can coordinate with dnsmasq (often used for ipv4 assignments and dns proxying) or unbound - to assign nice local names.

Three trouble begins at internet scale where mDNS just does not work due to collisions. And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.

I use Pfsense which communicates DHCPv6 leases to Dnsmasq/Unbound fairly easily.

>And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.

Probably not but for internal resolution a .local or similar TLD is sufficient.

Yes. The thing is, this would be super easy for the ISPs as they already have to maintain reverse DNS for dynamic IPv4 most of the time, so modifying it to also allow delegating to an authenticated DNS secret should be trivial. Eslecially now that ISPs are so fond of giving you big routers.

I work for an ISP so I have some perspective on this issue. We do offer static IPv6 addresses to our customers, but only upon request (by default they get one static IPv4).

If we had demand for it, I'm pretty sure we'd start including an IPv6 subnet by default. It doesn't cost us much, it's just more bookkeeping really. If anything, it could be a turn-off to our customers who might not be used to configuring their router with an IPv6 subnet (the 'ugliness' problem you're talking about, but also just unfamiliarity).

I think IPv6 adoption will happen when cloud providers start running out of IPv4 space. If AWS has to drastically raise its prices for IPs, or simply announces they're running out, then AWS customers will have to start evangelizing IPv6 to their own customer bases.

Eventually an IT guy in an office says, "I heard Slack is only going to support IPv6 soon, we need it!". So the ISPs start doing it.

>: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted.

it's a 128 bit number. no matter how you encode it, the ux is going to suck.

I don't think the UX necessarily has to suck. Three observations:

1. Just because we have 128 bits doesn't mean we have to use them all right now.

2. As anyone who's familiar with data compression knows, there are ways to represent some values in convenient forms and other values in less convenient forms.

3. There is a trade-off between ease of allocation and ease of use. Maybe we shift the focus toward ease of use if we want wide adoption.

With the benefit of hindsight, one way the IPv6 rollout could have been done differently is to have initially restricted ourselves to 40 bits of the address space. Thus we'd have started with addresses that look like (say) A.B.C.D.E instead of the current A.B.C.D.

Such a (hypothetical) system would be easy for an end user to handle, and most importantly that could be enough to get us over the hump to IPv6 adoption. Longer addresses would be valid, but they just wouldn't be assigned until later.

Of course, this is not quite how IPv6 works. But they do have a syntax that allows omitting zero values, and if addresses were assigned so that more of them were zero, it would make the UX better.

Your comment spawned the following (minor?) idea for me: A lot of the devices (and hence IP addresses) we basically know are never going to be accessed directly by a human being, only through some combination of tools and automated processes, if at all. Make a distinction, where possible and appropriate, between these and the actually-UX-relevant addresses and reserve the shorter/nicer ones for human use. (This may not be a great idea, or may be impractical, but I still wanted to put it here, because there's benefit in mapping out any amount of the potential solution space.)

Also, thinking about it in this way, "end user" for IPv6 does not only translate to the developers working with IPv6 as consumers (think someone getting an IP from AWS for deploying their app), but, for maximum effectiveness, should also include the developers working on the implementation as well as distribution end of the technology. As always, these two (or more) groups have different levels of motivation to adopt and use the technology, and as such it is likely that the usual tradeoffs can be made (making something a bit harder to implement, for the sake of much increased "consumer" experience).

Ideally there would be a spec and an implementation that would appeal to both allocators as well as consumers of the address space.

At home, I get IPv6, but I get assigned a different network every 24 hours, so it not that useful to, say, access my home server remotely. It works smoothly, though.

At work, we had some problems with Windows' Network Location Awareness where a domain controller thought it was on a public/non-trusted network unless IPv6 was turned off in the network settings. So we actually had at least a little pressure not to enable v6. :-|

Funny, this is ISP complicating your and their life only so they can price gouge you.

Well, that is not exactly news. The forced disconnect every 24 hours has been around as long as DSL (in Germany at least), so you would need to pay extra for a static line.

From a principal point of view, it is very annoying, practically it has not been sufficiently annoying for me to do anything about it.

Long address in not the only problem of IPv6. Mass adoption is also slowed by complexity of IPv6. There is rationale for this complexity (more features, more flexibility), but in most networks this complexity comes with little or no practical benefits.

When I work with HTTP APIs, IPv6 appears rather transparent. I just stick in a URL and it works.

But, you're right about IPv6 being extremely complicated. Back when I first heard about IPv6, I suspected it was going to fail in the marketplace.

the 'dotted quad' format was 'good enough' from a UI perspective (and... fitting in peoples' brains for short term). had we added one or two more spaces - and default all existing addresses to 0.0.x.x.x.x, we'd have had 65000 more blocks of 4 gig spaces. That should have been enough for most countries to have allocated enough space, while making the transition and UI upgrades pretty painless. If there's only a x.x.x.x address, assume leading zeros, and so on.

it's "failing" for a number of reasons - the UI and mental map model is certainly a stumbling block, but it's also something which requires coordinated effort between multiple parties to happen more or less at the same time. If it doesn't (and it didn't), it'll take years more for all players to get in sync, which is what we're seeing.

Residential ISP companies didn't have much incentive to upgrade when everyone's OS didn't include IPv6 stack. Not much push to try to upgrade your OS when your modem and ISP don't support it. Not much use to try to support it on your websites and email servers when no one is using it or asking for it.... and so on.

As all the pieces fall in to place - hardware, ISP, OS, web/mail/services - it'll still be a gradual move, unless some major players announce IPv6 only service. If Office365 was "IPv6 only in 2020", that might motivate a lot of orgs to push their IT/ISP to upgrade and migrate.

> As all the pieces fall in to place - hardware, ISP, OS, web/mail/services - it'll still be a gradual move, unless some major players announce IPv6 only service. If Office365 was "IPv6 only in 2020", that might motivate a lot of orgs to push their IT/ISP to upgrade and migrate.

It doesn't even need to be that drastic. Apple, Google, and Microsoft could just check for IPv6 when connecting to a network. If it's missing, display some kind of alert saying, "This internet connection is malfunctioning, please contact (lookup service number based on the IP address.)"

Constantly showing that nag will put a lot of pressure on major ISPs like Comcast.

> Constantly showing that nag will put a lot of pressure on major ISPs like Comcast

Comcast is making good progress: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...

For others, see: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/

Yes, Comcast has made, relatively speaking, amazing progress on deploying IPv6 across their network. It works very well (well, except if you have one of their business "routers" required if you need a static IPv4 address). This is a stark contrast of, say, Verizon Fios, who has yet to deploy ANY IPv6 across their network.

Quite a lot of major ISP's went all in on NAT64 and had no problems facing people screaming "you broke my Skype."

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