Google’s IPv6 Stats Pass 3% Less Than 5 Months After Passing 2%
internetsociety.org
internetsociety.org
Is this because there's a lot less overall traffic on the weekend and the IPv6 part is fairly constant, or is there some other reason why IPv6 traffic should spike* during the weekends?
*As a proportion. It jumps about 50 basis points on the weekend.
That said, I recently had to disable IPv6 on my parent's ISP for bandwidth reasons. They live in France and are served by Free[1], who enabled IPv6 a few years ago. This christmas, I was surprised by their terrible bandwidth, which was worse in the middle of Paris than something in a village in the alps! I ultimitely traced it to the IPv6 option, though I didn't do deeper tracing to find out why.
I suppose it's because many legacy backbone routers don't handle IPv6 at their top capacity, as they have HW to accelerate IPv4 but not IPv6. See for example the question "What is the difference between hardware and software IPv6 acceleration?" in this FAQ at Cisco: [2].
[1]: http://www.free.fr [2]: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/p...
(I have a 5+-year-old Geode-based router at home, and it can do full pf rule evaluation and forwarding at about 300Mbps.)
eg, with the setting enabled (Chrome/iPhone), http://test-ipv6.com shows a User Agent / v6 address corresponding to Google's proxy farm.
[1] https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compre...
Since all my devices have publicly visible ipv6 addresses, I can access them e.g.
laptop.lelandbatey.com
homedesktop.lelandbatey.com
phone.lelandbatey.com
Edit - if it is really that useful, is it not instead the death of cloud storage?
Cloud storage is really nice when your home PC is switched off, or a hard drive crashes, or your computer catches on fire. Other than those sorts of problems, BitTorrent Sync can already do pretty much everything you want over IPv4.
A tunnel broker is like VPN/proxy that allows you to connect to the IPv6 web over IPv4.
It adds latency to my connection (because all my IPv6 data goes from me, over IPv4 to the tunnel broker who then routes my data the rest of the way to where it's going), but for me it's worth it.
In terms of security, my machines are run largely the same as any server: locked down, except when for the things I need. It helps that I only do this for *nix devices as well.
In particular, it is better than other VPN/port forwarding type solutions because it works transparently and universally. It works on your phone (where VPN can be more tricky). It works in environments where you aren't allowed to install special relay software. It works when you are a guest somewhere else without them having to change their network setup.
As for cloud services... yes and no. In a world with direct addressing you open up many opportunities for innovation in the home cloud appliance market. However, many cloud services are made affordable because they can leverage shared infrastructure, sell usage metadata, or add and remove capacity instantly. Whether home based solutions could be competitive in price and reliability without those abilities. I see some categories of service that it makes sense for, others, less so.
Security is a concern, yes, but one that can and should be addressed by good security tools and practices (firewalls, automatic security updates, good backups, not running services you don't use, etc) not by crippling your network with NAT.
Because of this I would suggest that if you go router shopping that you should choose a model that supports IPv6 rather than not, even if you don't necessary care which you will end up using. Get a model with a good IPv6 firewall that you can tell to block all incoming connections.
Lastly, I think it is dangerous for "casual users" to say things like "I don't care about direct addressing of devices at home". I firmly believe that universal direct addressing will result in new innovation that might change your mind. :)
And yes, a good point about the reliability of cloud services - but still at 50 bucks for 2 TB and iCloud costing me 20 bucks a month I think Shared infrastructure savings have a long way to go !
Re: security. Cloud services aren't doing a lot better. They are repeatedly broken into and have huge password lists stolen, many have governments have direct programs for extracting datas from them, and someone else can call up their customer support reps and practically ask for your password. Many effective security best practices amount to obscurity (change ssh port number). Large central services are very attractive and lucrative to hack.
Assuming he is having a firewall configured on his gateway then it is not any different from security standpoint than being behind a NAT.
For example in my university, all computers have a public IPv4 address, it still does not mean you can connect to them from outside, but if you need to open a port to the world you don't need to deal with all that NAT crap.
I have this installed in both Chrome and Firefox and its great to see which websites are available over IPv6 and which are not. (such as HN, sadly)
(Those measurements show the % of IPv6 traffic from various operator networks seen by Akamai, Facebook, Google and Yahoo.)
December 24: 2.57%. January 25th: 2.92 %
Probably relates to people being at home accessing Google's services over residential networks.
All other tunnel types use IPv6-in-IPv4 directly, so they don't know anything about the IPv4 NAT. This is called protocol 41 (the version number for 6in4, see http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-nu...).
If you run into trouble, email me; my address is in the profile.
In reality it is more complex as the address space is split in two, the bottom 64 bits rarely has any density, only a few devices. End users get a /64 or a /48 (or a few); a VPS will probably get a /64 by default.
I don't think they're being facetious at all. The Internet Society cares about things like this.
At that rate it would exceed 100% in four years. Chances are that there will be something like a tipping point well before that, and it obviously won't exceed 100%, but that increase from 2% to 3% is a 50% increase, and promising in terms of future growth if not in current level of adoption.
The best advice about IPv6 is to just disable it. IETF designed a terrible protocol that doesn't even address the underlying major issue: routing table size. Instead they just made it much worse.
You won't see me deploying IPV6 for another 20-30 years at least. Hoping it's replaced by something actually usable by then.
See? no flame.
Direct addressability. Removes the need for slow, expensive intermediaries like NAT boxes and certain types of proxies by allowing security policies to be applied independently of network addressing.
Simplified network planning. Enough address space to make an address layout based on your actual needs rather than being forced to carve up your limited v4 allocation in weird ways. You no longer have to guess what the right long term size of your subnets are (they are always big enough) or worry about putting unrelated machines on the same subnet because you are out of space for new subnets.