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Comment by diegocg | Hacker News Reader

You can laugh but Google stats show nearly 50% of their global traffic being ipv6 (US is higher, about 56%), Facebook is above 40%.

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As soon as we get to about 70%, I reckon some games and apps will stop supporting ipv4 on the basis that nat traversal is a pain and dual stack networking is a pain.

If you spend 2 days vibe coding some chat app and then you have to spend 2 further days debugging why file sharing doesn't work for ipv4 users behind nat, you might just say it isn't supported for people whose ISP's use 'older technology'.

After that, I reckon the transition will speed up a lot.

What makes you think filesharing is going to work any better on IPv6?

NAT traversal not needed. Just need to deal with firewalls. So that's one fewer thing to think about when doing peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet.

“Just need to deal with firewalls.”

The only sane thing to do in a SLAAC setup is block everything. So no, it isn’t a solved problem just because you used ipv6.

No. Here's a simple strategy: the two peers send each other a few packets simultaneously, then the firewall will open because by default almost all firewalls allow response traffic. IPv6 simplifies things because you know exactly what address to send to.

That is my point. You hole punch in that scenario even without NAT. It is no easier.

It's easier since you don't don't have to deal with symmetric nat, external IP address discovery and port mapping.

> some games and apps will stop supporting ipv4 on the basis that nat traversal is a pain and dual stack networking is a pain

None of these are actually the game/app developers' problem. The OS takes care of them for you (you may need code for e2e connectivity when both are behind a NAT, but STUN/TURN/whatever we do nowadays is trivial to implement).

> None of these are actually the game/app developers' problem.

Except people complain to the game/app developer when it doesn't work.

It appears that my AT&T mobile data runs over IPv6.

If all the mobile is removed, what's the percentage then?

Younger folks are much less likely to have a PC. It may all (70%) be phones or phone like networks in 20 years

In North America there is some difference but worldwide it is more pronounced.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=i...

And yet here I am, fighting with our commercial grade fiber ISP over obscure problems in their IPv6 stack related to MTU and the phase of the moon. Sigh. I've been at this on and off for about a year (it's not a high priority thing, more of a hobby).

But how much of it is not natted?

Do they accept smtp over ipv6 now?

MX has IPv6:

~$ host gmail.com gmail.com has address 142.250.69.69 gmail.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4020:801::2005 gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

~$ host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has address 142.250.31.26 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4004:c21::1a

Yes. However SMTP these days is almost all just servers exchanging mail, IPv6 support is much less priority.

How does your MUA sends the message to the server? That's also SMTP.

They do, but I had to change my mail routing to use IPv4 to gmail because if I connect over IPv6 everything gets categorised as spam.

50%, after only 30 years.

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