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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Even in developed countries IPv6 is barely deployed (my UK ISP - BT - pretends that they rolled it out but half of the time my modem tells me IPv6 is not availabled until I force it to reconnect, and no sign of IPv6 on mobile networks).

Was looking at whether it was more economical to buy a small address block vs rent it from a datacentre. A /24 address block seems to cost around $4,000 upfront but then you need to pay €2,000 signup + €1,400 per yr RIPE membership fee. On the other side IPv4 is not going away and the price is only going to go up given the failure of IPv6 to deploy. Is there any way around the RIPE membership? Like owning an IPv4 address block through a proxy / broker?

[edit: RIPE fee]

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Support for IPv6 is weird.

Comcast's IPv6 implementation is rock solid and faster than IPv4 most of the time. I've been running publicly accessible IPv6 HTTP hosts over it for several years now.

The last two Motorola Modems I've had came with IPv6 support and were provisioned by Comcast out of the box.

Access Points from D-Link will autoconfigure via SLAAC but DNS has to be hardcoded.

It's 2018 and yet Ubiquiti's UniFi enterprise networking gear only has alpha support.

IPv6 on Tomato just works and has for years, IPv6 on Raspbian not so much.

Windows just works seems to fuck with nonWindows clients so Enterprises disable it via Group Policy.

Android devices seem to forget IPv4 if they catch a wiff of IPv6 on the network.

> Windows just works seems to fuck with nonWindows clients so Enterprises disable it via Group Policy.

well I've seen most enterprise networks with no IPv6 support. (mostly admins thing that this beast is hard to work with) Also Kubernetes has limited IPv6 support (mostly on the documentation site) (of course it's easier to support a IPv6 only cluster, because heck you wouldn't really need BGP or some wierd overlay networks (sadly it still is not there yet)).

In Germany IPv6 within "Deutsche Telekom" is just good. But sadly on the consumer side you still won't get any fixed IPv6 (due to privacy concerns!)

telekom has some IPv6 routing issues every now and then that I did not encounter with other ISPs. I believe it is because they peer more selectively at de-cix instead of having open peering.

They finally peer on DE-CIX?

privacy is not the issue. Selling business plans is the real reason.

You won't believe the number of crazy people in Germany who believe that static IP addresses are the root of all evil because of all the magucal tracking and surveillance possibilities they famtasize about.

The only reason I can still post here is that I don't have a static IP address. So yes, they are the root of all evil.

IPv6 would allow for both.

Other big German providers just fail at this. O2 for example only hands out IPv6 addresses very selectively based on whose lines they are renting in the area. I have no chance in hell of getting an IPv6 prefix from them.

> Windows just works

Almost. IPv6 privacy extensions are subtly broken.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/57...

Does your Comcast IPv6 address ever change on you? If yes, do you have any tricks to keep your HTTP servers accessible?

It does but I can't say how frequently. My IPv4 address has only changed 7 times since 2012. My IPv6 record has changed once this year when I shut down my modem for an extended period of time.

I use http://freedns.afraid.org/ to manage my DNS. They support IPv4 and IPv6 with domain linking so you can update all your DNS records with 2 calls (one for IPv4 and one for IPv6). This can be done with wget via a cronjob on your web server or in most routers these days. If you use their premium tier you can use stealth records and wildcard DNS.

Just remember to set your TTLs on your A records to something low like 60 seconds. And don't host anything mission critical.

Thanks. I am very much interested in making a similar setup of my own on a Raspberry Pi. Do you recall what were the IPv6 issues with Rasbian? Also, do you have any concerns about potentially going against Comcast policies which appear to prohibit running servers?

I guess I should rescind my comment about Raspbian because I haven't had any major issues since the Jesse release and I doubt anyone is even going to use that with the Stretch release out.

I had a lot of issues with Raspbian prior to Jesse just failing completely to get an IPv6 address from the Gateway and not being able to resolve anything.

I've been running Pi.Hole and OctoPi on Jesse for at least 6 months with only minor issues that aren't the distro's fault but the applications. OctoPi doesn't even configure the HTTP Server so IPv6. Pi.Hole listens for HTTP requests and responds with errors.

I installed Stretch on a Pi and setup a Ubiquiti Controller a few weeks ago and IPv6 works flawlessly with it.

\* Regarding Comcast's policies, I have never run into an issue with them and I've been running servers for over a decade. That being said, mine are personal use, low traffic, and not business related.

In Belgium, my provider's (Telenet) IPv6 connection is better than IPv4. Every now and then some network applications and websites will stop working, and invariably they're the ones that depend on IPv4. Meanwhile the IPv6 internet just keeps working without a hitch. Takes a good 5 minutes for the IPv4 to come back on then. Luckily I've got a static /64 subnet from the ISP so most of the services I run for personal use are basically IPv6-only at this point.

I'd wager your v4 goes through a CGN (carrier grade nat) which is very high grade until it breaks.

My ISP supports IPv6, but I have to open up a second PPPoE connection to an IPv6-only endpoint. I've never gotten it to work.

You need to make the distinction between PA(provider allocated) and PI(provider independent) objects, as well as the distinction between LIRs(members of the RIPE NCC) and end-users.

PA can only be held for further assignment in their networks by a LIR that is a member of the RIPE NCC, received in two ways: maximum of one IPv4 allocation /22 with proper justification, or acquisition through merger with another LIR. The membership fees are as you mentioned.

PI resources are assigned to end-users in the region, that do not need to be members of the NCC. They do however need a valid end-user agreement with a LIR, and each(unless they are allocated on the same date) object entails a 50€/yr fee, billed to the LIR. PI IPv4 is no longer being assigned from RIPE, but existing ones are openly traded.

My guess would be that the nets you were looking at were PI networks, so no, you do not need to pay the membership fee.

The document ripe-680 covers basically everything you need to know: https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-680

> Even in developed countries IPv6 is barely deployed

For reference, the list of currently leading and trailing countries by IPv6 adoption (from Akamai's August 2017 numbers):

Belgium 46%, US 40%, India 36%, Greece 32%, Germany 25%, Switzerland 20%, Finland 20%, Brazil 19%, Canada 18%, Norway 16%, Japan 15%

Portugal 13%, UK 12%, France 12%, Australia 8%, New Zealand 8%, Sweden 8%, Netherlands 7%, Mexico 5%

Israel 3%, South Korea 2%, Ireland 1%, Denmark 1%, Russia 1%, Spain 0.7%, Italy 0.5%, China 0.3%, Colombia 0.1%

The way some of these nations are lagging is bizarre.

> Italy 0.5%

Yet Italy was home to Tinet, part of Tiscali and the largest IPv6 network of the world until 2009.

More saddening than bizarre.

It doesn't help the UK that one of the largest ISP's, Virgin Media (the only cable supplier) don't yet support IPv6. They're talking about going with DS-Lite, which carries its own problems.

Once they go live, expect to see the UK climb significantly.

> and no sign of IPv6 on mobile networks

Not quite true - EE (so one of the 'big four' providers rather than a small MNVO) has IPv6 support. Right now, my phone has an IP address assigned out of EE's 2a01:4c8::/29 netblock and I can connect to IPv6 only websites.

My phone isn't super modern either - a 2016 era OnePlus 3 running Android 8.0.

I thought LTE was IPv6 native? T-Mobile in the US has two APNs available, EPC and Fast, and Fast is IPv6 only.

no. just as with most things it just have the option to support either or both

Andrews & Arnold do a tunnel that supports ipv6 - their support and network is awesome, too.

Ah I thought I'd imagined the BT router saying it supported IPV6. By the time I'd enabled DHCPv6 on my Mikrotik hardware, it had disappeared from the HomeHub dashboard.

Works fine on the superhub, or on the HG612 standalone VDSL modem.

OVH doesn't properly deploy IPv6 either. pfSense is also being weird (if you only get a /64 you need SLAAC or else you can't configure the LAN with it for some bizarre reason and OVH doesn't SLAAC properly)

Though thanks to HE/tunnelbroker.net I deployed a /48 on my network and all is good now (and easier).

Hetzner allows you to have a block, but it requires you to be a Hetzner client.

Also you need to provide a reason why you need it and how are you going to use it.

Have you tried using a linux-based router? ISP-provided CPE is notoriously bad on average, especially in the IPv6 area.

It's a brand-new BT router so I would be surprised if that was the case. I suspect the non IPv6 connectivity rather come from which node I connect to on the network.

If you're on VDSL try grabbing an HG612 from ebay and using that instead, with a decent router behind it. I was running a dual stack setup like that for over a year without issue, before moving over the Virgin Media and having to rely on a HE.net tunnel.

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