IPv6 Excuse Bingo
ipv6bingo.com
ipv6bingo.com
Then, I used test-ipv6.com from my home network and found, again, that IPv6 wasn't enabled.
From my standpoint, it doesn't matter that I, a techie, can get IPv6 working by doing one or two things. The VAST majority of people out there wouldn't know where to start. If it's not enabled in their router by default it's not getting enabled. Maybe newer devices are getting shipped with it enabled by default, I don't know. But LOTS of people have modems and routers that are going to be in the same state as mine, and best I can tell, they won't be able to reach my websites if I turn off IPv4.
If I'm misunderstanding the state of things, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could illuminate me.
My sense is this transition is going to take another 10+ years to get done. The big web properties where most people spend most of their time have the IPs to maintain IPv4 indefinitely, which will slow it way down. It's the smaller apps who are going to want to deploy IPv6-only who will generate consumer complaints: "I don't understand, why does Google work but this app doesn't? Why does it work from my phone when I'm out and about, or from work, but not from home?" The consumer won't exactly know who to direct these complaints to, the cause is non-obvious to most "tech support" people, and the fix is either too complex for consumers to implement or involves getting new equipment.
When I switched to my own modem and router (Arris and Ubiquiti/Unifi), I really wanted to dig in and understand IPv6 thoroughly. The modem acts as a bridge and the router gets a single /128 address, and then uses IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD) over that link to request additional address space for clients (from a different subnet).
The Xfinity gateway only has one local network to support so it requests a single /64 PD, and then clients can use SLAAC (and optionally the privacy extensions) to acquire one or more addresses out of the /64.
When I switched to the Unifi equipment, through some trial and error I found out I could request up to a /60 from Xfinity. Some ISPs will do more, some will do less. No way to really tell, just request larger prefixes and see what you end up getting. Anyway, my /60 gave me 16x /64s to play with. It is wild that my address space is 68,719,476,736 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space.
I have a few VLANs, each of which gets assigned a /64 out of the /60, but even if I'm not using all 16 of them, Xfinity's routing table will send the entire /60 to me. So beyond my VLANs and directly-connected devices, I have the rest of the /60 to use for VMs, Kubernetes pods, etc. and I can add routes to direct that traffic to its next hop. It was a learning curve and a little unsettling that every VM or pod has a publicly routable address. But NAT != Firewall, so unsolicited inbound connections are still blocked, and not having to deal with NAT is very cool! Even though many networking people have it ingrained that private devices should have private addresses.
Yes — the misunderstanding is that in most cases the CPE is either fully managed by the ISP, or gets sufficient provisioning information to know whether to enable IPv6. For home networks, in most cases if the ISP enables IPv6, it simply works out of the box.
> from my home network and found, again, that IPv6 wasn't enabled.
> I, a techie
You being a techie probably configured your home network manually to some degree? It's likely your device(s) are now operating in a semi-manual mode where they don't pick up IPv6 provisioning from the ISP. Sadly, knowing and doing more results in less functionality.
> local office router/gateway; it's about 10 years old
OTOH this is in fact the main blocker to IPv6 adoption: small to medium company networks. Both outdated equipment as well as insufficient management lead to IPv6 being close to non-existent there. It costs employee/consultant/service time and/or new hardware. It's a sad state but I don't know what to do about that…
It's a 3rd party wifi router I bought on Amazon or Best Buy or whatever like millions of other people have. It's sitting in front of the ISP's modem which is in bridging mode. So many people have this configuration (or they're doing double-nat, no bridge) and have never configured anything manually.
Deploy it dual-stack so that people on IPv6 can reach it natively, and people on IPv4 can reach it natively. More and more people have their IPv4 connections going though CGNAT or NAT64 which can be a bottleneck, so IPv6 is faster and more efficient when available.
45% of people online have working IPv6 today (according to statistics from Google). This number has been continually growing.
This is more helpful than most of the widely broadcast IPv6 adoption figures.
Percent of end-user connections with IPv6 is the figure we need most.
IPv6->IPv4 failover where the IPv6 DNS records are busted make a whole lot of sites unusable.
Basically, the AAAA record provides some broken IP6 address, and the browser then just "site not found, NXRECORD", even if there's a perfectly valid A record for the same.
If a company doesnt have an AAAA record, it works fine. Its when the AAAA record is busted (but present) is where you will see loads of weird and bad stuff.
or is this just and "you're an idiot for thinking that" sign?
I taught some networking back in the mid- to late-90s. I remember being all enthusiastic about IPv6, and how it would soon take over the world. Didn't happen. Why? Because it was incredibly stupid not to make IPv6 backwards compatible.
Instead, here we are 26 years later, and the adoption rate looks like this: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
That says everything about IPv6 that needs to be said.
> Because it was incredibly stupid not to make IPv6 backwards compatible.
Without providing a non-stupid solution to a problem not solved for decades, and likely not solvable. (Also I assume you meant ipv4 forward compatible, you can name ipv4 hosts on ipv6)
It's only a question of time.
Huh? My thermostats are IPv6 only… (they're on Thread/Zigbee/whatever they call it now)
I mean, yeah, sure, there are old IPv4-only devices around. But we're now in a situation where a significant part is in fact IPv6-only. So,
> what a mess that would be
whatever mess that would be, we are already in it, and the way to fix it is forward.
No, it's IoT devices being on the public internet that is a mess. The "S" in IoT stands for Security.
> how it would soon take over the world. Didn't happen
It's at 45% on the public internet and growing. The majority of LAN connections are probably also IPv6 (mediated automatically through zeroconf without people even being aware)
Some of those are not excuses, but facts of life.
- If your IP transit provider doesn’t support IPv6 there is FA you can do about it. Linking to HE is just a bad joke. Not only are they a bottom of the barrel provider, they also have a very sparse network of POPs.
- not all vendors support IPv6 and, yes, there are bugs.
- if there is no RoI in moving to IPv6, pouting about it isn’t going to make a difference.
The IETF does not have a committee process.
* Literally offers no upsides to the consumer, only potential downsides
* ipv6 enabled devices don't live up the promise of "data center free vacuum robots", even though that's what everyone is screaming is the purpose
* Private devices should not be exposed to the internet anyway, nor individually identifiable when they use the internet
* IPv6 Privacy protections are less powerful than ipv4 NAT.
* Google/Facebook/Everyone pushing ipv6 the hardest has reasons to invade your privacy, therefore I suggest we do the exact opposite of what they want us to do with our personal lives and networks
I'm not opposed to new tech, but ipv6 for ipv6's sake is stupid. I just block it everywhere I can and move on with life.
2. Also false. Upsides include more speed (due to ISPs usually having newer infra for IPv6), cheaper addresses (for people who want static ones), and I'm sure there are more benefits I can't think of.
3. This one is true, but I've never heard anyone say that's why we need IPv6 (that could just be me though).
4. Then don't expose them to the internet. Your network is still behind a router/firewall, and the device in question (hopefully) can be configured.
5. I'm not sure what you mean by "less powerful" here - NAT was never good at protecting privacy anyways. Anyone who wants to track you has been doing it without IP for a long time. Further, you can still have a NAT if you want one, and IPv6 offers random/temporary addresses.
6. True! Big tech has a vested interest in undermining our privacy, but please see above. I also think, in this instance, it's genuinely because IPv6 is better than 4.
Having globally routable addresses is a pretty big upside. For nerdy types, it means you can run web/game servers at home (i.e. without needing a credit card), which is a way for kids to develop their technical interests.
For the rest of society, getting rid of NAT is a requirement to allow seamless p2p apps to work without needing to use giant corporations in the surveillance business as an intermediary. Instead of being jerked around with Google moving people onto their 15th video chat app with potato quality, we have the necessary foundation to be able to directly connect with your counterpart. This could be completely seamless with e.g. a DHT to locate your contact's devices (or gossip if you can reach at least one that you already knew about, to maximize privacy) and uPnP or hole punching to their address to open your router's firewall.
NAT forces centralization for our foundational ability to communicate, which robs everyone of their autonomy in ways that are so pervasive it's increasingly hard to imagine another world. But that other world is still possible.
Absolutely in the P2P case it is fantastic. IPv6 effectively guarantees direct connection for WebRTC audio/video, VPNs like Tailscale, etc. However there is still some necessity for video services that can provide a Selective Forwarding Unit, for instance once you get 5+ people in a video chat, you want a server in the middle to mediate and rescale video to manage the experience for all participants. But for sure it is better for everyone for 1-on-1 chats to be able to establish the connection without an intermediary, and that underscores what the Internet is all about.