An IPv6 Update [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An IPv6 Update [pdf]

conference.apnic.net

38 pointsokket26 comments

As a network engineer for over 2 decades, I've been skeptical of IPv6 for the majority of them.

I still am.

As IPv4 becomes more scarce, two economic forces trigger

1) They become more valuable (read more desired). IPv4 has all the network effects going for it. It's where 99.9% of the Internet already is. .1% being IPv6 only devices.

2) To counter the rising value/cost: Workaround/Kludges/Alternatives to every devices needing a globally unique address are tried. Everyone is going to reply with how awful NAT is, and I concede it has its flaws. However, it is hard to deny its success so far. Business then do the cost benefit of the shortcomings of things like NAT vs selling their now valuable IPv4 address space, think where they are going to come down?

Having rolled out IPv6 only networks experimentally at conferences I was struck by how well it worked. By the end of the conference 1/2 the delegates used the IPv6 network (ie was a separate SSID). There was not one complaint. (I had the pleasure of a few network engineers tell me their phones, tablets and PC or whatever would never work on IPv6 network, only to later discover later they were already on it.)

In particular NAT works both ways, meaning IPv6 only devices have zero issues accessing the IPv4 world via NAT. When used in that way you get the best of both worlds - a world route-able IPv6 address and perfectly backward compatibility.

In the mean time I've rolled our a dual IPv4, IPv6 network that spans the country for my company. Almost zero issues (I had routing bugs). I was blown away to discover that any device that was smart enough to get itself a IPv6 address was smart enough to just work in the mixed environment. And this is in an environment running from XP machines to the latest Android and iPhones.

So we appear to be reached the stage where there are no reasons not to use IPv6. Of course they is also very little reason to move to IPv6 if you have an existing stable IPv4 network. Our networks aren't stable of course, and we are continually adding new connections. We (or rather I) demand a routeable IP address for each of them - life is just too hard otherwise. We are in the APNIC allocation pool that run out of IPv4 addresses ages ago. Right now the ISP's aren't handing out IPv6 addresses. If that ever changes to "you have to pay for an IPv4 address, or you can have a IPv6 address for free", I know which way I will be jumping. It's a no-brainer.

> IPv6 only devices

That would be an interesting choice to make, seeing as the surrounding infrastructure is still transitioning and you can just as easily support both stacks. The real obstacles are legacy devices and misconfigured appliances, which can't simply switch over without anyone noticing.

Business then do the cost benefit of the shortcomings of things like NAT vs selling their now valuable IPv4 address space, think where they are going to come down?

You can see one such analysis at http://www.asgard.org/documents.html

> 19 ISPs have more than 100 customers per advertised IPv4 address

I guess this means carrier-grade NAT works well enough; given this, I can imagine ISPs just don't see enough upside to IPv6 to spend on it.

Not necessarily? It could also just mean that there are a lot of people not complaining enough, or simply without any alternatives and consigned to their fate.

It would also be interesting to know how much of their traffic winds up on IPv6 tunnels like Teredo anyway to NAT break. Windows by default tries to avoid the worst NATs by using Teredo IPv6 tunneling, and has since Vista.

It's certainly possible that IPv6 traffic already accounts for why users aren't complaining about how much CGNAT breaks IPv4.

> It could also just mean that there are a lot of people not complaining enough, or simply without any alternatives and consigned to their fate.

Sad but true, but in the ISP's mind, this is exactly "good enough".

Google's IPv6 traffic stats show Teredo traffic is negligible in 2018. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Teredo is dead.

I recently moved into an area that is served by Spectrum and a local ISP/electric company that is providing fiber internet (100-1000mbs). They haven't run the fiber lines by my house yet (they state they will by the end of the year), but during my communication with them they stated that "IPV6" was in the works. Promising to offer that by the end of the year as well. I just checked some online arin records, and it still shows them as having no ipv6 allocations...

My main complaint with that I spent a large amount of time a year ago deploying ipv6 dual stack on my home network. My router is a debian box with shorewall, so I had to learn what was needed all manually. And now, a year later, I'm not even sure how it works as I've forgotten everything. It took a bit of work to figure out how to get my router/shorewall box to request an ipv6 prefix for each internal interface, and then how all that is handled. And now I don't even know lol

So if this local ISP doesn't offer IPV6, I get to tear all that down and then I guess start over again re-learning in a future date.

I started learning IPv6 before it was widely deployed and just used Hurricane Electric's tunnel broker: https://tunnelbroker.net/

I think you can just set one of those up and keep using IPv6 regardless of whether or not your ISP gives you an IPv6 prefix; when they do, just switch over to that.

I think I can give a pointer as to why the IPv6 deployment speeded up and then slowed down. Reliance Jio started public deployments in mid to late 17 and they grew very very quickly through till early this year as they were giving free access to their 4G networks. They have started charging only from this year.

During the later part of last year I think they managed to get over 100M customers...

I think one will see more growth in a year or two. They are looking at offering (almost free) internet access to IoT devices across the country. Let's see how that goes.

The presentation does point out that new customer growth doesn't correlate well to IPv6 adoption (and to the extent that there is correlation, it's negative).

I believe in this explanation a bit. u/okket (@OP) will it be possible to get IPv6 in India graph somewhere? (like you have for China)

Here's a graph from Google's IPv6 statistics: [0]

[0] https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timef... (data from [1])

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

The following is a surprise coming up the horizon. It makes use of the basic IPv4 standard RFC791 to resolve the issue of IPv4 public address shortage. Since it may sound like out-of-the-blue, allow me to state that it has been in private reviews at the highest levels of responsible organizations without getting a shot at yet. So, please enjoy the information.

We came upon a scheme that can expand each public IPv4 address by 256M (Million) fold without affecting the current Internet. A proposal called EzIP (phonetic for Easy IPv4) has been submitted to IETF:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-add...

Essentially, among other benefits, EzIP can establish a sub-Internet capable of serving an area with up to 256M IoTs, from just one IPv4 address. This is bigger than the largest city (Tokyo metro) and 75% of the countries. This can realize the CIR (Country-based Internet Registry) model proposed by ITU a few years ago stealthily even without setting up a CIR organization. If a government is not interested in this resources, private enterprises can make use of it to provide "local" Internet service in parallel to the current "global" Internet model, very much like the Independent telephone companies in the PSTN industry.

The current Internet then becomes the backbone / infrastructure / skeleton for interconnecting these sub-Internets, yet only for carrying inter sub-Internet traffic, very similar as the electric grid supporting islands of renewable energy generated by individual homes and businesses. Consequently, there will be a lot of spare IPv4 addresses for quite sometime to come.

In terms of the IP address length, the basic EzIP header format proposes to double it by utilizing the Option Word mechanism in the IP Header to make the overall system 64 bits. It is just as well to make the Option Word to carry longer bits like up to 96 bits so that the overall address system becomes 128 bit, in the same class as IPv6 while totally staying IPv4 within conformance.

Then, much of the efforts in developing and deploying IPv6 are no longer needed.

Thoughts and comments will be much appreciated.

Abe (2018-09-15 12:48)

I have IPv6 deployed at home for a few years now and it works great! I wish more places adopted it.

I have the feeling that a working IPv6 comes out of the box with most Internet providers nowadays. I used it at home for months without realizing it.

So when I started hosting a side-project I made sure it was accessible via IPv6. Skimming through logs many people connect through IPv6 as well, so I'm a bit surprised when I read that deployment is slowing down.

Hi @bhhaskin, what practical advantages do you see to running IPv6 at home? I think my ISP (Xfinity) provides it, but have not tried enabling it yet.

If you tend to have IPv6 at work and on mobile, you can out up multiple servers at home and reach them -- without having to use alternative ports or a port multiplexing scheme. (Provided the ISP CPE lets you actually get incoming SYNs; sometimes that's a lot harder than it should be)

The biggest practical advantages are hard to say because it is a chicken before the egg issue. Having a dedicated IP address for each device is very nice. Especially if you like hosting your own services or have a home lab.

TLDR; "IPv6 deployment has slowed in the past 12 months. Why? We're not sure"

Though you have received downvotes, that is a good tl;dr. To expand on it, they had a couple theories about what is driving ipv6 adoption, but there measurements don't support them, so they still don't know.

So china recently turned off their ipv6 basically?

Not really. They turned it on for an increasing number of customers during a single week and then turned it off for most of them, but still ended up with more IPv6-enabled customers than before. As explained in the Cloudflare blog post [0], this is common when testing IPv6 deployement before complete rollout.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/

No. The Chinese state firewall can't easily measure the true level of IPv6 and we don't completely know why our measures have fallen. There is no strong evidence it's in decline there is only evidence our measurements are unable to reliably track things.

Most measurements are over https. If they intrude a fake TLS certificate in the flow (for instance) which is common in strategic DPI inside secure channels the web blot won't fetch properly.

We've started looking at tshark captures to see if we can see partial connects.

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