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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

Not a popular idea here, but IPv6 folks. Even for k8s, even for your internal stuff.

offtopic: ipv6 is fine, but the ipv6 internet is just broken

few days ago I had ipv6 enabled on my pi4 and was trying to update it, turns out that the ipv6 address of archive.raspberrypi.org was returning 404 (its fixed now)

but it took me like 3 seconds to just net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1, and i am not gonna enable it until something on ipv4 does not work

(and by ipv6 i mean native ipv6 from my ISP)

it has been like that for the last 15 years, since we gave native ipv6 to our users in my ISP, people just had worse experience than not having it.

Right. Dual stack IPv4 + IPv6 is strictly worse for reliability than plain IPv4 because both stacks need to work perfectly or you'll encounter issues. In that sense it provides the opposite of redundancy.

Happy Eyeballs (RFC 8305) is the typically touted solution, but even that doesn't help in the scenario you describe: IPv6 connectivity wasn't broken.

The problem is simply that we now have twice as many things that can go wrong and no plausible route away from dual stack in sight.

Why is IPv6 not a popular idea here?

I work at an ISP and not a single customer has ever even mentioned IPv6. There zero demand on the residential side.

I’ve begged my isp to get on it

I just got a /32 from ARIN to start implementing it on our network but it is by no stretch of the imagination worth the effort. I will probably have at least 40 hours into testing it and no increased revenue will be realized by it. Maybe IPv6 was the the right thing to due but the practical implementation is ridiculous.

I doubt you'll see more revenue from it. If you're low on v4 addresses and you're willing to put (some) subscribers behind CGNAT, then inplementing v6 should reduce the number of v4 addresses you need and thus reduce your costs.

If you give each subscriber an IPv4, then yeah, added operational cost, no revenue, maybe added capital cost depending on your equipment. Not much upside for a small ISP. In a competitive market, v6 can get you some points with the technical folks, but not many.

There's not much upside for a legacy network that already has all the IPv4 it needs, but an upstart ISP will do well starting with IPv6 and layering CGNAT IPv4 on top. With 30% of the Alexa top 500 supporting IPv6 (and a lot of the top traffic sites like Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Netflix etc) it will reduce the amount of IPv4 you need to buy

have you seen the cost of v4 recently?

My experience was that my ISP (major cell provider) silently moved everyone to IPv6, did DNS64 for most legacy stuff, and provided RFC1918 IPv4 NAT for anything else.

No customer demand was involved, I imagine.

That is one of the most disappointing aspects of ipv6. Even if you implement it perfectly you are still stuck with having to deal with ipv4 with no end in sight. Had backward compatibility been a primary goal, is there any doubt we would have made vastly more progress at this point 20+ years later?

It's an address space expansion. You were always going to need hacky stuff for legacy clients, and for any service that wants to be reachable by said clients.

> It's an address space expansion

Exactly this. There is no "backwards compatible" way to have more addresses in a protocol that's wedded to 32-bit addresses. That's just how numbers work. The protocol with a larger address space will be incompatible, and so anybody who seems surprised/ disappointed hasn't even really thought about the problem.

I worked at an (residential) ISP and not a single customer has ever asked about IPv4 or IPv9 or any IPvX. They were buying 'Internet' or even 'Wi-Fi'. Now, on on the DSL reports there are plenty of questions 'When will ISP_X will support IPV6'

I get plenty of requests for static ipv4 from smb and home users.

I could see that being down to IPv4 allocation issues, specifically CG-NAT or dynamic pools, that people want to avoid.

You get plenty of requests for the static part of it and less so for actual ipv4. If there was an option for static ipv6 then people would also request that instead. Static IPs have use cases that people in the wild need, however I don’t think anyone cares if it’s ipv4 or ipv6.

I mean, I'd love static both, but I'm going to ask for static v4 first, because I can always run a tunnel for static v6.

Why couldn't you do it the other way around? Run a tunnel for static IPv4 over IPv6.

Because there's not a mainstream (and free) tunnel broker for IPv4.

I am a customer, and I just filter out providers that don't have IPv6 as I assume they are incompetent.

I wouldn't waste time asking someone to support it. It's 2021.

> I work at an ISP and not a single customer has ever even mentioned IPv6. There zero demand on the residential side.

It is one of these things that customers who know they want it will look for an ISP that offers it. There is no point in asking one who doesn't in 2021 because they will be like "oh we will look into it", and then close your ticket.

> I am a customer, and I just filter out providers that don't have IPv6 as I assume they are incompetent.

> I wouldn't waste time asking someone to support it. It's 2021.

True. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks like this. The ISPs that don't support it usually have huge ancient antiquated middle boxes that can't be upgraded. I wouldn't choose an ISP with old cumbersome infrastructure.

I have IPv6 only servers and I am not moving to fiber because the ISP does not offer IPv6 with it. I will move when they offer it.

Out of all the stakeholders in IPv6 migration, I blame the ISPs the most.

Probably a different ISP, but, see this thread (and many others) https://twitter.com/karmanyaahm/status/1426552449314299919 with requests from 2011-2021

How many customers directly ask for an IPv4? If ISP wait for the average consumer to ask for IPv6, it will never get implemented.

wait until you're out of v4 and people's stuff breaks due to CGNAT

If we're going for anecdata, I called Comcast Business a couple of months ago and asked about IPv6 support. The sales rep asked, "What is IPv6?"

I never mentioned IPv6 to my ISP either, I have no problems with the /56 they give me by default.

IMO, it is frequently seen as a solution in search of a problem, that breaks things and makes things harder when used to no real benefit. Whether any of that is accurate is left as an exercise for the reader.

Importantly it really did not focus on actually supporting a migration (ie, IPv4 only nodes connecting to IPv6 only or visa versa). And yeah, it scrambled up lots of things for very little gain - even big players like Google took a while to support it across their entire stack.

They don't have the vocabulary, but they want internet, which v4 + nat is a watered down version of and hampers apps.

It's the investor mentality. HN folks seem to view the IPv4 shortage like an opportunity for investement

HN is largely American, and as far as I know, CGNAT is not as near-universal in the U.S. as it is elsewhere.

Yes, IPv6 solves this problem.

But in this context - I don't think this is helpful. If you care enough (and have means to do it) to move all of your network to IPv6, then you for sure aren't using DoD space internally.

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