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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Amazon can start?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl...

> You can configure your Application Load Balancer so that clients can communicate with the load balancer using IPv4 addresses only, or using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (dualstack).

I'd love to go IPv6 only. Amazon won't let me, and charges for the privilege.

Look at the list of "no"s on https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ipv6-su....

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Why would they, now that IPv4 brings in $1B/year

Cable ISPs have been doing this for years... want a static IP or multiple IPs? $$$.

Want IPv6...... please hold forever.

I'm on metronet, which is a new-ish fiber optic ISP. They're exclusively IPv4 and they default everyone to CGNAT unless you call and complain - in that case you get a static IPv4 for free for a year and then $10/month after that (although another phone call usually gets another free year.)

I specifically asked for IPv6 and was told they don't offer that.

That’s great to know. I’m literally watching them install in my neighborhood as I type this.

To be fair to metronet, aside from that and some hiccups during the initial install, I've been pretty happy with the service. The speed is fantastic, and it's been fairly reliable.

The price keeps slowly going up, but that seems to be par for the course with ISPs.

Admittedly, the time you know if a ISP is good or not isn't reached _until_ there's a problem. Because it's all about how they work with you to get it resolved.

This isn't universally true. They've primarily expanded by acquiring other companies, and a few regions do have IPv6. Lansing, Michigan in particular which was previously Lightspeed.

That being said, the CGNAT thing is just silly in 2023 - give us IPv6.

they're still going to have to CGNAT 65% of your traffic that's IPv4 only.

At the very least they could use 4x6x4 instead of normal CGNAT, and bring down the costs.

65% is a lot better than 100%.

But the real number (at least on mobile networks) may be closer to 20%: https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/2018/state-of-ipv6...

Thats also six year old data; a lot has happened since, especially outside the US. For example european connectivity rate has doubled, and the top 1000 websites is close to 50% now which is also almost double that of 2018.

What's the source for that number?

I'd assume that when you have IPv6, the majority of your traffic (in bytes) will be IPv6 simply because all the CDNs and big video services do support IPv6.

Once my router at home crashed in a way that IPv4 stopped working but IPv6 kept on working and it was actually kind hard to figure out what went wrong because so much of the internet still worked fine.

I've heard of at least one isp that is IPv6 only and tells customers to use whois to find someone to help them with sites that don't work.

[citation needed]

I've gotten a /64 delegation from my cable ISP for almost a decade. There were some hiccups at first, but it's been working for a while now, to the point where I recognize issues with IPv4 as when my wife tells me "only Google and Netflix work"

They should be giving you a /56 or a /48 though, since you're not supposed to subnet a /64.

This is now so common, I expect the common software to adjust soon. You can still subnet below /64 with some patching or a more complex config. Software will match reality it exists in - we already did that for classless ipv4 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routi...

Why though? Classless ipv4 solves a real problem, handing out /64's not

Is not subnetting /64 solving a real problem?

Obviously we couldn't subnet it back when we derived the last 64 bits from the MAC address. But since then everyone decided that's a bad idea, so why not use the address space?

It's the other way around. Handing out /64 is the problem, but you and I can't solve it - that's the ISPs stupid decision. People will continue solving this by making smaller subnets and I believe this will become an official solution in the future, because smaller subnets solve a real (even if artificially created) problem.

I think I can reconfigure DHCPv6 for a /56 (IIRC I need to talk to a person if I want a /48) but I only currently have one network at home, so shrug.

I've found that even if the default is a /64, when you send a /48, /56, or /60 etc. DHCPv6-PD prefix-length hint, the ISP will often give it to you.

I'm on Verizon FIOS - they rolled out IPv6 a couple years back and it was so poorly rolled out and communicated (i.e., lots of things/services were complete broken) that I fully disabled IPv6 on my router and don't intend to reenable it until I have to...

Comcast has supported IPv6 for approximately a decade.

Weird, most cable ISPs that I know of have been IPv6. Last I checked in the US (pre pandemic) there is more IPv6 nights and weekends than working hours by a lot because the Cable ISPs and cell phone companies rolled out IPv6 long ago, while companies mostly are behind. OF course you didn't say what country you are in - different countries have very different numbers.

Telus in Canada is a bit annoying. Residential connections get dynamic IPv4 and not-quite-static IPv6 /56 - I had the same prefix for about 6 months until some recent maintenance changed it.

If you pay for a business connection you can get 1 or more static IPv4 addresses, but then you get no IPv6 connectivity.

I reckon 20% of EC2 is NAT gateways with one instance behind them.

Why would this make sense?

I've configured at least 3 VPCs in the last decade which were exactly that.

Literally one instance with VPC service endpoints deployed and an egress NAT gateway. Surprisingly common when you have a random shitbox which sucks data up from somewhere and doesn't fit within the constraints of a Lambda or something. They mostly exist to tick the compliance and architectural documents which are all under AWS "best practices".

Note that I do not consider AWS "best practices" to be best practices necessarily. In fact a lot of time they are completely over-engineered against hypothetical scenarios which if they did happen, fixing some EC2 integration shitbox would not even remotely be the first problem you had to worry about.

But someone demands it and someone pays for it and Bezos ain't complaining so meh!

Fly aspires to be on this gravy train too. IPv6 UDP where?

They make more money from selling servers than they do from selling v4 addresses. There's a limit to how many v4 addresses they can get, so they'll make more money if they can sell servers without v4 addresses -- otherwise the limit on v4 addresses will turn into a limit on the number of servers they can sell.

My guess is that going IPV6 only for load balancers would make it break for enough people that AWS thinks it would reflect poorly on their service.

That seems unlikely given that the vast majority of users have no clue what the underlying service provider is for the web services they're using, and those who do know are savvy enough to understand the difference between an AWS issue and a configuration issue.

Imagine if Cloudflare went to IPV6 only. Yes, Cloudflare's customers should know what that means, but the end users that are using the service may not be and if the error in anyway says Cloudflare, then it gives Cloudflare a bad reputation.

While AWS is a bit (just a bit) more removed from the end user than Cloudflare, there is still the potential for it not being good PR.

Cloudflare couldn't dare of IPv6 only until a lot more of the internet supports IPv6. They could however offer a discount of some sort to customers that are IPv6 only. That includes proxy your IPv6 only site to IPv4 (actually they would probably not give a discount directly, but let you apply discounts you get from your ISP)

Cloudflare actually presents end users with an authentication page on a regular basis. AWS is strictly behind the scenes. The only time I've ever become aware that a site is using AWS is when reading their engineering blog or spelunking in the dev tools.

These infinite verification prompts are the reason I no longer consider Cloudflare as an option for business use and would not recommend it to anyone. I know that they are configurable by the admins but they give bad PR to Cloudflare. I am not sure what this company was thinking associating itself with such a terrible user experience.

I agree and would first urge people to test IPv6 client access using some lazy-loaded image that is IPv6 only on their website. It should look like a normal resource so that false-negatives are not introduced by NoScript or uBlock.

People can of course manually test here [1] from their homes, schools, work place. I would wager most cellular data networks would be fine. The impact would probably depend on how a website is utilized. Stats on mobile vs. non-mobile would probably be telling. The people on their cell should test LTE vs Wifi and clear cache between tests.

[1] - https://test-ipv6.com/

And now you reminded me of the "Dancing Turtle" from KAME.

https://www.kame.net/

You would lose that wager. I’m in the southeast United States. My ISP, Spectrum, works fine with IPv6. My cellular provider, Total by Verizon, is IPv4 only.

One provider without v6 doesn't mean that most providers don't have v6.

For what it's worth I did qualify my statement using most. A few of the older cellular networks are slower to adopt and sadly I can understand why having worked for one of them. If you find it interesting here [1] are some rudimentary stats from the US. It's not an all inclusive picture of things.

[1] - https://ipv6-test.com/stats/country/US

But a load balancer doesn't have to be user-facing. It might just be fronting an internal API or microservice

If they would, they could easily recover the money from the data transfer they charge on the Load Balancer.

"Elastic Load Balancing pricing" - https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

Last time I checked GitHub was also an offender.

Speaking of...

"AWS Free Tier now includes 750 hours of free Public IPv4 addresses, as charges for Public IPv4 begin"- https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/02/aws-free-...

They barely got dual stack working for the more important services just recently, wouldn't expect ipv6 only for years.

What about the dark web? It’s already not trying to be too visible and I assume many participants would be happy to jump through hoops.

Or something crypto. Pay to your IPv6 address, or nodes must be IPv6.

Or social network.

Start with an edge case that gets insiders to change behaviour.

It's rather brave of them to publish the list of "no"s. I imagine that's helping to crack the whip on IPv6 support within the company.

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