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Comment by tonetegeatinst | Hacker News Reader

This. IPV4 is a mess.....and its extremely frustrating just how unsupported ipv6 is.

IPV6 is one of those things where if isp,'s just switched over to it, I'd have so less nightmares caused by cgnat and that bullshit like how expensive static IP's are.

Many its because I'm not working at a ISP or a teir 1 backbone but forcing the transition to ipv6 seems like overall it would be less of a clusterfuck than our current ipv4 stuff. I know their is stuff going to break, anytime changes are made at this scale it often has some hickups....but dear god I really hate how static IP's are so expensive, and how expensive a small IP block is. Also IPV6 is just an excuse to get fiber everywhere.....I hate how slow many services are.

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The problem is that you have to have working IPv4 in some form, because enough major sites (e.g. Twitter, Wordpress, Github, Pintrest, Vimeo, bit.ly, TikTok, Tumblr, the New York Times, but also mozilla.org and Archive.org) don't support IPv6. [1]

Likewise, some Linux mirrors don't support it. If I decide to try an IPv6-only server, and the first thing I see after "apt update" is network errors, I'm not very motivated to use IPv6 in the future.

Then add some problems where having IPv6 enabled randomly breaks things for one reason or another. I can either debug it forever, or turn the "internet is broken" switch (labeled "Enable IPv6") to "off" and get on with my day. That means more people that support IPv4 but not IPv6 (to be fair, this one seems to have gotten a lot better).

But ultimately, until some major, hard-to-avoid site says "we'll only be on IPv6", there is little reason for most to use it, and many reasons not to. That's why the transition takes forever.

[1] http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Major sites don't deploy IPv6 because "everyone has IPv4", and people don't roll out IPv6-only servers because they still want to be able to reach IPv4-only hosts.

Amazon has hopefully started a change in this mentality by charging money for every IPv4 address used. This creates a real financial incentive to deploy IPv6-only servers, which in turn means that critical services like Github and Linux mirrors are slowly forced to provide IPv6.

afaik there was a serious lack of v6 support within aws services. has the financial incentive reached this far or do they just want to charge you more?

>afaik there was a serious lack of v6 support within aws services.

There still is, even though they've started charging for v4!

Azure too.

NAT64 is a thing, combined with CGNAT it offers a way for IPv6 only clients to acess the legacy internet. Mobile prividers are doing this, ISPs can as well. It would incentivize IPv4 only sites to upgrade, to avoid the CGNAT.

Imho, IPv6 has failed, it's time for a new version that is compatible to IPv4 by being a pure address space extension.

This gets written all the time but not once have I seen HOW this should work. How can IPv4 magically talk to IPv7 without ANY changes to v4?

People hail CGNAT and IPv6 as the savior but don't realize you still need v4 addresses to make it work.

CGNAT at scale functions by assigning a range of ports on a shared v4 address to a downstream customer. You can normally get between a 1:8 and 1:32 "compression ratio."

We still need to free up additional IPv4 to keep the internet growing. Don't let the "just switch to v6" crowd fool you, both solutions need to addressed in parallel.

That's a really confusing comment. Cgnat is almost universally criticised. IPv6 doesn't need ipv4 addresses. Cgnat and IPv6 are not related.

Maybe they meant NAT64? Not sure though

IPv6 depends on IPv4 addressing if you have downstream devices that need to reach the entire internet. If you go to ARIN they have an explicit policy of allocating IPv4 blocks to facilitate IPv6 deployment.

CGNAT is a term that broadly used to refer to carrier-scale solutions to deal with issues with number exhaustion and dual-stack deployments. What most people think "CGNAT" is, is actually NAT44. https://nfware.com/blog/why-cgnat

Mobile providers have IPv6 only networks and use NAT64 with CGNAT and DNS64 to permit access to the legacy internet. No incoming IPv4 ports. CGNAT can serve way more than 32 customers per IP, and they are pooled.

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