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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Adoption is limited by retail ISPs that refuse to roll out IPv6. But my AMZN stock thanks them.

Mine has supported IPv6 for years-

But I refuse to let them switch me, because their IPv6 offer does not include a v4 address, only CGNAT. Of course if everyone was on v6 that wouldn't matter, but until then I need the ability to forward ports to my server!

This isn't even technically in breach of the ToS; I have a business line, mostly for the customer support.

And thus I add to the problem, because now anyone who wants to connect to said server also needs a v4 option...

I am honestly curious, what do you run on your server that you can't connect to with Tailscale?

Not the person you're asking, but hosting a game server is one example where you probably wouldn't want to go through Tailscale, due to the added latency. A Plex server might be another one if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale)

Also, in general, it just adds a layer of complexity that I wouldn't want to deal with if I didn't have to.

> if Tailscale has bandwidth limits. (I could be wrong here - I'm on a static IP, so I've never used Tailscale)

Tailscale connections are primarily peer to peer. The service Tailscale is providing is orchestrating the connectivity and hiding the complexity, but the data flows directly.

Except that P2P mode tends to simply not work in cases where both of the clients are in CGNAT networks (unless both of them happens to have IPv6 addresses). Even Tailscale acknowledges this sad fact (https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works#have-you-...) because in practice CGNAT operators deploy an endpoint-dependent NAT (aka symmetric NAT) without the possibility of port mapping.

You can use Zerotier which doesn't have the problem. Some public nodes will assist with the nat traffic. It's not an ideal situation to be in and it's a bit slower, but at least it will work.

SSH, fileserver, occasionally game servers.

The internet is supposed to be peer-to-peer, and I shouldn't need third-parties in between my computers, or between my friends and me. Switching to IPv6 breaks the peer-to-peer nature of the internet.

Funny. The whole point of IPv6 is to restore the globally addressable peer to peer nature of the Internet.

Crusty enterprise networks are far bigger problem than retail ISPs. This is clearly visible by the fact that you have clear weekend peaks in e.g. Googles IPv6 adoption stats.

This is measurably false. Google’s IPv6 adoption graph has noticeable spikes on the weekends when people use their home internet, and decreases during the work week when people go to work: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Adoption is limited by enterprises who are change-averse and already entrenched in ipv4. Residential ISP’s have made much more progress.

My current (Brightspeed) and previous (Spectrum) ISPs have nominally "supported" IPv6. Except ... not nationwide, there are regional differences in how it's done and how well it works. And nobody can tell me if my specific location is supported or how to configure my equipment to use it.

On one hand, that gives me hope that we're getting closer to near-universal ISP support. On the other hand, it's been like this for so long I question if it'll ever improve.

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