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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

You can use IPv6 today. If your ISP doesn’t give you a connection, get a tunnel set up with Hurricane Electric. Since about 2012 I’ve considered any network that doesn’t have IPv6 to be broken. I think currently I run only one site that doesn’t support it and next time I touch it I’ll convert it to dual stack.

If you are curious, you could always get a browser extension that shows you which IP version a given site was loaded on to see how many actually support IPv6, or just straight up disable IPv4 on your network for a bit to see what happens.

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I have Cogent Fiber to my office and because of installation and other costs (e.g. healthy SMTP IPv4 status) I'm not keen to change it. I have a /64 from Cogent, but Cogent and HE still refuse to peer after all these years. If you're a direct HE or Cogent customer, to reach the other's network you have to arrange transit with a third party. As a practical matter my IPv6 block is crippled, as are those from HE. (Something similar might also be going on with Cogent/Google, too.)

If I need to go through the rigamarole of tunnel brokering, BGP advertising, etc, I may as well just get my own block from ARIN. Vultr offers BGP brokering for a pittance, and they (presumably) have peering arrangements that handle the HE/Cogent debacle. I also want to try to get an IPv4 block, so I can enjoy SMTP hosting portability across ISPs. It would be nice to not be constantly harassed by Cogent sales staff. One of these days....

Didn’t know about Cogent and HE, that’s unfortunate.

I was reading recently about whether you can get IP allocations and it seemed to me that ARIN basically requires that you show that you’ll be using some large percentage of addresses right away and keep growing that usage. Basically they seem to want to give them to ISPs or hosting providers. Can you can your own IPv6 block as a private small business?

ARIN makes you justify an ASN (you need to have at least two ASNs that will connect with you, making you multihomed). If you've got an ASN, you qualify for a minimum allocation, regardless of use. That's a /24 for v4 and a /48 for IPv6. Of course, ARIN doesn't have any /24s to assign, but you need to qualify to have them transferred when you find a seller.

There's otherways to qualify for an IPv6 delegation, but GP wants to be multihomed, at least a little.

https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/

Ah so I was thinking about getting an ASN maybe. It seems I can say that I need IP space to use 2000 IPv6 addresses in the next year. That’s probably not far off from what I already do.

Do you happen to know any guides on how to set up and use your own IP space, either with my ISP or with a cloud provider.

No, not really. You'll most likely need to talk to your ISP or cloud provider.

They'll most likely have rules/procedures for setting up BGP and what not. Look for 'bring your own ips' or similar language in cloud providers. Residential ISPs probably won't support it, but commercial ISPs all should, and may possibly help you with the ARIN procedures.

The problem with this is that most big services now support IPv6, and probably have CDN's literally co-located within your ISP, or very close to. Even if the tunnel endpoint is not that far from you, I found it still makes a big difference in day-to-day operation tunneling past these edge caches.

Your ISP may well already support IPv6, especially if they have CDN endpoints in their data centers.

Yes, I actually pay a premium to go with an ISP that has a decent implementation of native IPv6. I work day-to-day with several clouds that are IPv6 only (they have IPv4 NAT for getting out) so it makes things significantly easier.

None of the kit I have can do GRE encap fast enough for the tunnel to be a good alternative to the native v4 I have.

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