Roses are red, violets are blue, everyone is using IPv6, why aren't you?

chris , 18 days ago

The perpetual chicken egg problem of IPv6: many users don’t have IPv6 because it’s not worth it because everything is reachable via IPv4 anyways because IPv6 only service don’t make sense because they will only reach a subset of users because many users don’t have IPv6…

JovialSodium , 18 days ago

This sums it up. I’m too lazy and there’s too little incentive.

drkt , 18 days ago

Yes but IPv4 is becoming expensive and it’s annoying having to use a middleman to clone github repos on a v6-only VPS

IPv6 is not hard, there is no excuse not to have it

krellor , 18 days ago

I mean, yes and no. For an individual or individual systems? No, it's not hard. But I used to oversee a WAN with multiple large sites each with their own complex border, core, and campus plant infrastructure. When you have an environment like that with complex peerings, and onsite and cloud networks it's a bit trickier to introduce dual stack addressing down to the edge. You need a bunch of additional tooling to extend your BGP monitoring, ability to track asynchronous route issues, add route advertisements etc. when you have a large production network to avoid breaking, it's more of a nail biter, because it's not like we have a dev network that is a 1-1 of our physical environment. We have lab equipment, and a virtual implementation of our prod network, but you can only simulate so much.

That being said, we did implement it before most of the rest of the world, in part because I wanted to sell most of our very large IPv4 networks while prices are rising. But it was a real engineering challenge and I was lucky to have the team and resources and time to get it done when it wasn't driving an urgent, short timeline need.

30p87 , 18 days ago

Or one could use alternative hosters, or maybe even selfhost git services.

drkt , 18 days ago

Yeah let me self-host other peoples github repos because github doesn’t have IPv6 lmao dude

30p87 , 18 days ago

How about “Let me selfhost my own repos, so other people working with my stuff can use IPv6, as well as be sure no large corporation known for being cancer stands behind it and monitors every thing I do.”?

drkt , 18 days ago

I do 🥰

That doesn’t solve the problem of me needing other peoples githubs repos on a VPS with no v4

takeda , 18 days ago

If IPv6 is done right you don’t even know you have it. If you use a cell phone or a home Internet, there is a high chance you are already using IPv6.

ryannathans , 18 days ago

If your ISP supports it

takeda , 12 days ago

Sure, but my point is that if it is implemented right, you won’t even know you’re using IPv6 until you check network configuration.

Album , 18 days ago

Honestly this isn’t even true anymore. Most major ISPs have implemented dual stack now. The customer doesn’t know or care because it’s done at the CPE for them.

I use a browser extension which tells me if the site I’m at is 6 or 4 or mixed. In 2024 most major sites support V6. A lot of this is due to CDN supporting it natively.

The fact that GitHub doesn’t is quickly becoming the exception.

serpineslair , 18 days ago

May I ask which extension you are using?

Album , 18 days ago

IPvFoo

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipvfoo/

There is a chrome version too.

serpineslair , 18 days ago

Thanks.

chris , 18 days ago

IPv6 traffic is globally steady at around 37%. So it isn’t a majority by far.

Album , 17 days ago

www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Globally it’s at about 47% and growing at about 4% per year. If the rate remains unchanged it’ll be about a decade for >95%.

But the reality of it is, you don’t need global adoption out of the box. You just need majority adoption in the countries you visit, which for me are western countries (north America and Europe) which now have a majority adoption.

chevy9294 , 18 days ago

I don’t have IPv6, but I can still reach IPv6 only sites if I use MullvadVPN (and probably also with other VPN providers).

hddsx , 18 days ago

Roses are red, violets are blue, everyone is using IPv6, why aren’t you?

Roses are red, violets are blue, IPv6 costs extra, and that just won’t do

carrylex OP , 18 days ago

As far as I can tell it’s the other ways around: IPv4 is getting more costly

Example: AWS started to charge for IPv4 addresses a few months ago - a IPv4 address now costs around $3.6 per month

hddsx , 18 days ago

Might just be my host. Maybe I need to find another one

smileyhead , 17 days ago

You’ll still pay, just not have an option not to pay.

crony , 18 days ago

“everyone”, tell that literally to every isp my country that doesn’t even provide ipv6 support.

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

In the USA they charge extra for IPv6? I'm in the UK and while there are some ISPs that don't provide IPv6 at all, and some that do shitty things like dynamic prefixes on IPv6, I've not seen anyone charging for it.

Likewise, server providers generally don't charge for it. In fact, they will often charge less if you don't need IPv4.

mitchty , 18 days ago

No don’t take shitposts literally. I’ve been using ipv6 for a decade at home now in the USA and I don’t pay extra for it ever. Also why are you assuming this post refers to the us?

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

There's been other posts about IPv6 and the TL;DR is that while there are shitty implementations everywhere, the USA seems to be ahead of the game of doing it badly, if at all.

mitchty , 18 days ago

The USA is ahead of most nations at about 50% so not sure how you’re coming to that conclusion based off of evidence. Outside of maybe Brazil in the americas on both continents our ipv6 adoption is better than the rest, Canada included.

orangeboats , 17 days ago

I reckon I see most IPv6 complainers are from the US though…

In my country, turning on IPv6 is not really something ceremonial, it’s just literally clicking on the IPv6 checkbox. The default configurations set in the router are good enough for an average home user, firewalls and all that security jazz are enabled by default.

The DNS didn’t break just because I enabled IPv6, nor did my phone apps stop working. Life goes on, and I have gotten rid of that terrible CGNAT. Somehow this is not the case for many US users across multiple ISPs, I have heard IPv6 horror stories from Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T. Like how did you manage to do that?

mitchty , 13 days ago

I mean I’ve been using native dual stack for over a decade and I’m most definitely American. A fun anecdote was I was having issues with clicking on links from Google once and turned out ipv4 was busted but 6 worked fine for half a day. And there really isn’t any turning on ipv6 I get it by default and it’s with the most hated isp Comcast. They’re actually really good about v6 support I’ve not moved off them because of it. It’s literally 10ms faster than 4 lilely due to cgnat.

smileyhead , 17 days ago

Meanwhile me who needs to pay 97 EUR / year for two V4 to V6 proxies so people not having (or disabling, ugh) V6 can connect to my stuff.

Actually those proxies are still cheaper than renting v4 address space for all my servers.

henfredemars , 18 days ago

I’m not using it because by and large it’s not implemented properly on consumer hardware, and my ISP doesn’t care if their IPv6 network is broken.

MagicShel , 18 days ago

I’ve tried multiple times to go IP6 only. I mostly thought, despite my reasonable understanding of IP4, that I was the problem in trying to set it up. I found my dns host was being forgotten multiple times a day, set to something invalid, then it would time out and revert back to the working one. I couldn’t figure out how to connect two computers together for Minecraft.

Now I hear it was just garbage consumer hardware and software? Fuck me. So much wasted time and effort to say nothing of believing I had turned into a tech idiot.

henfredemars , 18 days ago

You’re not an idiot. You’re using tools that don’t really do what they claim because it wasn’t considered an important use case.

IPv6 is great, but we haven’t seen enough pain yet to really drive adoption on the home LAN.

My solution uses the ISP box to deliver stateless auto conf, and bridging a consumer router. I can’t open ports but at least I get an IP.

Album , 18 days ago

Do you have an example? Because it works great on openwrt, dd-wrt, pfsense, opnsense, unifi, mikrotik…and then if you’re using the isp equipment it works out of the box.

henfredemars , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

TP-link can’t open ports in the v6 firewall neither can Linksys and it doesn’t support DHCP forward so literally was incompatible with my ISP implementation. Some current TP Link router sold at Walmart don’t even have an IPv6 firewall.

Open source works great. Can’t speak to unifi never seen it for sale here.

madscience , 18 days ago

You’re using open source third party firmware and higher end networking gear as an example. Of course they work. Shitty consumer grade brands aren’t in the same class

Album , 18 days ago

You think an asus, linksys, netgear,etc doesnt handle ipv6???

umbrella , 18 days ago

tplink handles it badly ootb, youd need openwrt/ddwrt.

my isp’s modem cant handle it well either.

i doubt older asus/linksys/etc devices handle it well either.

skilltheamps , 18 days ago

That is not the case for every country though. In France and Germany for example almost 3/4 of google requests are via IPv6.

iknowitwheniseeit , 18 days ago

www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Redex68 , 18 days ago

Interesting that India has such a high percentage. I’m guessing it’s because most of their network infrastructure is probably relatively new and so they can include support right off the bat, instead of having to retrofit stuff?

sep , 18 days ago

Not much choise i guess. Usa and europe grabbed the majority of available ipv4 space. Asia got a bit. And only scraps and leftovers for africa and latin america.

Redex68 , 18 days ago

Yeah but then you look at China and it’s at 4%. Maybe they got into the game early enough to get enough adress space for it to be serviceable?

Album , 18 days ago

Most of China can’t reach Google so the reporting is off anyway. But in 2023 the govt mandated ipv6 support to all carriers and manufacturers.

www.theregister.com/…/china_networking_hardware/

sep , 18 days ago

China block much of the internet so who knows with china. Do not know if anyone have real china numbers of IPv6 deployment. They also had their own “IPv9” that was rumored some years ago that may or may not have been used internally.

henfredemars , 18 days ago

That’s good to hear! Very encouraging!

Dumbkid , 18 days ago

My isp does t even support ipv6

nick , 18 days ago

I’m not. I disable it on all Linux machines I manage. And we do not use it at work either.

smileyhead , 17 days ago

This. And also disable https. Those things just break all the time.

nick , 17 days ago

Not sure what you are going for here

ryannathans , 18 days ago

Interesting, github websites/pages support ipv6

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

github.com doesn't have a AAAA DNS entry. So it's not serving anything directly over IPv6. Likewise, ping -6 github.com fails. So, what are you seeing that is supporting ipv6?

ryannathans , 18 days ago

Websites hosted by github pages, like 2009scape.org or pytorch.github.io

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

That is interesting. I figured they would be something like cloudflare/other redirection for github pages. But the IPv6 address space is github registered.

So, really not sure why they don't have the rest of their site enabled.

ryannathans , 18 days ago

Yeah bit of a head scratcher

tmpod , 18 days ago

I just upgraded my Lemmy instance’s hardware and finally got IPv6 support :D

VonReposti , 18 days ago

Cause none of my choices of ISP supports it…

mindlight , 18 days ago

2 months ago I thought I’d start learning IPv6 and started watch some intro videos on YouTube.

Holy crap… It’s a beast and it just felt like if you don’t know what you’re doing you might lose all control over your network. Ok. So a device didn’t get a dhcp address? No problem… It creates it’s open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own…

Normally that’s not a problem since your normal home router wouldn’t route 169.254.x.x… But it just seems like there’s A LOT to think about before activating IPv6 at home. I’ve got a Creality K1 Max… Fun thing: factory reset also creates a new MAC Address… So there’s no way in hell thay I just let her lose by activating IPv6.

Ps. Yes, I most likely panic because I haven’t figured out IPv6… But until I understand IPv6 there’s just going to be IPv4.

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

Generally, a device cannot get an internet facing IP address unless something else on your network is advertising the prefix. In fact, I'd argue there's little point using DHCPv6 now. Some devices are only interested in SLAAC. But, if you have a router that gets an IPv6 prefix from your ISP (usually /48 or /64, but you can get other sizes) it will usually then advertise that onto your local network.

As for the IP addresses. I would say that you should definitely still have a firewall in place. But the setup is the same as IPv4 just without NAT. e.g. you set a blanket rule for your prefix to allow outbound and block unrelated inbound. Then poke holes through for specific devices and services.

By default, IPv6 implementations make an assumption that they're not going to be a server (if you want a device to be a server, you can just set a static IP) and their "main" IP will be a random looking one (and the configuration will depend on whether it uses an interface identifier to create the address, or if it is random) within your (usually huge) allocation. But more than that, they will usually be configured to use the IPv6 privacy extensions (RFC4941). This generates extra temporary addresses per device, which are used for outbound connections and do not accept incoming connections. That is, people cannot see your IP address on their host from your connection and then port scan you, since no ports will respond. You could still have ports open on your "real" IP address. But, that one isn't ordinarily used for outgoing connections, so no-one will know it exists. To discover it they would need to scan your whole prefix (remember that the /64 allocation you will generally get is the internet * the internet in terms of address space, that is much harder to brute force scan).

I think the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 might seem scary, but most of them are actually improvements on what we had before, making use of the larger pools we have available. Once you work it out, it's really not so bad.

I would like to see routers setup to firewall ipv6 by default to give the same protection as NAT though, meaning users need to poke holes into the firewall for incoming connections. Maybe some do. I know mine did not and it was one of the first things I did.

Redex68 , 18 days ago

Didn’t know about the outbound traffic thing, that’s really cool.

sloppy_diffuser , 18 days ago

Ok. So a device didn’t get a dhcp address? No problem… It creates it’s open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own…

Its not that different from a conceptual point of view. Your router is still the gate keeper.

Home router to ISP will usually use DHCPv6 to get a prefix. Sizes vary by ISP but its usually like a /64. This is done with Prefix Delegation.

Client to Home Router will use either SLACC, DHCPv6, or both.

SLACC uses ICMPv6 where the client asks for the prefix (Router Solicitation) and the router advertises the prefix (Router Advertisement) and the client picks an address in it. There is some duplication protection for clients picking the same IP, but its nothing you have to configure. Conceptually its not that different from DHCP Request/Offer. The clients cannot just get to the internet on their own.

SLACC doesn’t support sending stuff like DNS servers. So DHCPv6 may still be used to get that information, but not an assigned IP.

Just DHCPv6 can also be used, but SLACC has the feature of being stateless. No leases or anything.

The only other nuance worth calling out is interfaces will pick a link local address so it can talk to the devices its directly connected to over layer 3 instead of just layer 2. This is no different than configuring 169.254.1.10/31 on one side and 169.254.1.11/31 on the other. These are not routed, its just for two connected devices to send packets to each other. This with Neighbor Discovery fills the role of ARP.

There is a whole bunch more to IPv6, but for a typical home network these analogies pretty much cover what you’d use.

farcaller , 18 days ago

SLACC doesn’t support sending stuff like DNS servers.

It does

sloppy_diffuser , 18 days ago

Oh nice! I’ll have to dig into that. Wonder if its an implementation issue across vendors. I was always under the impression that DHCPv6 was the common convention if not static.

smileyhead , 17 days ago

Those are just the same networking concepts as v4. Just 128 bits instead of 32. The hard thing can be ULA or SLAAC, which are like “yeah, just some random address to not get conflicts” and “yeah, first half your ISP gives you, second is taken from MAC address”.

We even get rid of a bunch loaded crap that holepunching v4 and making it work developed through years.

Maybe it seems hard, because what was used before was not really learned how it works but just relied on hacks.

the_doktor , 18 days ago

Working in computing for years and this is what I’ve heard

2000: IPv4 is about to dry up, we really need to start moving to v6!

2005: OH NO THE SKY IS FALLING IPv4 IS ALMOST GONE! IPv6 IN THE NEXT YEAR OR TWO OR THE INTERNET WILL DIE!

2010: WE’RE SERIOUS THIS TIME IPv6 NEEDS TO BE A THING RIGHT NOW! HELP!

2015: Yeah, okay, NAT has served us well so far, but we can only take it so far, we really need v6 to be the standard in the next 5-10 years or we’re in trouble!

2020: Um… guys? IPv6? Hello? Anyone? crickets

2024: IPv6ers are now the vegans of networking

this may or may not be satire, just laugh if unsure

r00ty Admin , 18 days ago

But new IPv4 allocations have run out. I've seen ISPs that won the lottery in the 90s/2000s (when the various agencies controlling IP allocations just tossed them around like they were nothing) selling large blocks for big money.

Many ISPs offer only CGNAT, require signing up to the higher speed/more expensive packages to get a real IP, or charge extra on top of the standard package for one. I fully expect this trend to continue.

The non-move to IPv6 is laziness, incompetence, or the sheer fact they can monetize the finite resource of IPv4 addresses and pass the costs onto the consumer. I wonder which it is.

umbrella , 18 days ago

a combination of all of these, most likely

szczuroarturo , 18 days ago

Oooh is that why ipv6 adoption is so regional ( Based on www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ) . Like france ,germany or india having more than 70 % while italy or poland hanging below 20% ? Also judging from this site it seems like ipv6 is actually getting adopted at quite the rapid pace. Even if some regions are faring way worse than the others.

GTG3000 , 17 days ago

I mean, at least over here, a white IP has been a paid service for as long as I can remember. Absolute majority of people don’t need a static IP, which is why we haven’t had internet “breaking” because of IPv4 running out.

r00ty Admin , 17 days ago

But this is another interesting thing. Dynamic IP addresses made sense, when we were dialling up for internet, and the internet wasn't the utility it is now.

Back then we'd dial up for a few hours in the evening or weekend. Businesses that didn't have a permanent presence would connect in the day to send/receive emails etc. So, you could have 500 IP addresses to around 1500 users and re-use them successfully.

But now, what is the real point in a dynamic IP? Everyone has a router switched on 24/7 sitting on an IP. What is the real difference, in cost in giving a static IP over a dynamic one? Sure, CGNAT saved them IP addresses. But, with always on dynamic just doesn't make sense. Except, that you can charge for a static IP. The traffic added by the few people that want to run services is usually running against the tide of their normal traffic. So, that shouldn't really be an extra cost to them either.

If everyone that ran a website did the extra work (which is miniscule) to also operate on IPv6, and every ISP did the (admittedly more) work to provide IPv6 prefixes and ensure their supplied routers were configured for it, and that they had instructions to configure it on third party routers, IPv4 would become the minority pretty soon. It seems like it's just commercial opportunity that's holding us back now.

GTG3000 , 17 days ago

From what I understand about the providers, they really don’t like it when you’re generating outbound traffic. Sure it’s advertised to be symmetrical, but the actual hardware they place here can get bogged down if you start hosting a popular site (or seeding too much).

And of course, if they can charge you for a static IP then defaulting to dynamic is imperative, isn’t it? Pretty sure they’d try that with IPv6 too just to keep the income stream.

Regardless, the actual issue with IPv6 around here seems to be that the providers either don’t know how to or don’t care to implement it properly. Sure I can tick on “IPv6” in my router, but that doesn’t mean I have an unbroken chain or routing hardware that supports it connecting me to the great internet.

r00ty Admin , 17 days ago

And of course, if they can charge you for a static IP then defaulting to dynamic is imperative, isn’t it? Pretty sure they’d try that with IPv6 too just to keep the income stream.

I've mentioned it elsewhere. Some ISPs here in the UK have a dynamic IPv6 prefix. Want a static one? Sure, pay up.

I suppose to an extent this kind of thing is akin to low cost airlines. Sure you can "technically" get a flight for €15. But once you've made it even remotely bearable you'll be paying around the cost of a full service airline. But, it does make it very hard to have a website doing a proper price comparison.

I suspect it's the same here. I pay a bit more than most ISPs. But for that, I get decent in country support, fixed IPv6 prefix and static IP (I actually have a legacy IP block, but you don't get those included in the base price any more). Whereas plenty of other providers charge less, but will charge you for anything beyond the most basic of connections. It means my ISP always appears at the expensive end of price comparisons.

GTG3000 , 17 days ago

Yeah, I just checked, getting a static IPv6 here in Russia from my ISP costs ~.4 eur per month. IPv4 is ~1 eur, so you get a discount if you go for v6! Oh and despite my ISP saying they support v6, connection I got doesn’t have it at all. Probably whatever hardware they got in my house doesn’t know what it is.

ikidd , 17 days ago

Apparently it’s still cheaper to buy IPV4 blocks than to upgrade all the equipment and IT staff to use 6.

Zorsith , 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

Any (enterprise grade) equipment not capable of 6 that is still in use is a ticking time bomb.

Toribor , 18 days ago

The adoption of IPv6 on some segments of the Internet has lessened the crisis around IPv4 availability.

MystikIncarnate , 18 days ago

As a networker, ipv6 is the future. I’m a fan of it, but I don’t really talk about it anymore because there’s no point.

I threw in the towel after an ISP messed up so badly that I just couldn’t bother anymore.

At a previous job a client I was doing some work for got a new internet connection at a new site, the ISP ran brand new fiber for it. This wasn’t a new building or anything, but the fiber was new. They allocated them a static IPv4 thing as usual, and I asked the tech about V6, and they said we would have to take it up with the planning team, so I did. I was involved in the email chain at the end of the sales process to coordinate the hookup. So I asked. After many emails back and forth, I was informed the connection was allocated.

They allocated one single IPv6 subnet directly off of their device. I couldn’t even.

For those that don’t understand, the firewall we had connected to the device is an ipv6 router. What normally happens, especially in DHCP customer connections, is that the router will use DHCP-PD to allocate a subnet for the router to use on the LAN, and automatically set up a route to say “reach this subnet we allocated for this router, via this router” kind of thing. I’m dramatically simplifying, but that’s the gist. In DHCP-PD, the router will also have an IPv6 address on the ISP-facing link to facilitate the connection. In the case of the earlier story, they gave us an entire subnet to communicate between the ISP and the router, and didn’t give us a subnet for the client systems inside the network.

I did ask about this and I can only describe their reply as “visible confusion”.

I know many who will still be confused by this point are people who have not used IPv6; to explain further: the IP on your local (LAN) systems needs to be a public IP address, because the router no longer does network address translation when sending your data to the internet. So the IP on the router has no bearing on your computer having a connection to the internet over v6. If your local computer does not have a globally unique ipv6 address, you cannot use IPv6. There are ways around this, NAT66 exists but it’s incredibly bad practice in most cases. The firewall I was working with didn’t really support NAT66 (at least, at the time) and I wasn’t really going to set that up.

ISPs are the reason I gave up on IPv6.

I’ll add this other story to reinforce it. I’ll keep it brief. A different ISP for a different company at a different site entirely. The client purchased a static IPv4 address, and I asked about IPv6, as you do. To preface, I know this company and used them for my own connection at the time. They have IPv6 for residential clients via DHCP-PD. I was told, no joke, that because of the static IPv4 assignment, and how they execute that for businesses, that they couldn’t add IPv6 to the connection, at all.

The last thing I want to mention is a video I saw, which is aptly named “CGN, a driver for IPv6 adoption” or something similar. It’s a short lecture about the evils of carrier grade NAT, and how IPv6 actually fixes pretty much all the bs that goes with CGN, with fewer requirements and less overhead.

IPv6 is coming. You will prefer IPv4 until you understand how horrific CGN is.

the_doktor , 18 days ago

Yep. It was mostly a joke. Mostly. The bungled adoption of v6 plus all the ways we can still leverage v4 is what’s keeping v6 from being adopted any time soon, but one day we’re going to have to rip off the band-aid and just go for it. Sure, v6 is going to bring its own issues and weirdness, but FUTURE!

Hobo , 18 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

I swear it’s going to be a generational change where it takes a slow adoption by the younger network people as the older network people slowly retire. Kind of like how racism and sexism has diminished. It wasn’t like we changed anyone’s mind, just that people held onto it until they died and younger people just said, “The future is now, old man.” and moved past it.

MystikIncarnate , 18 days ago

All I want to say about this is that the technology specialists, especially in networking, are usually not this opposed to change. Things change for networking and systems folks all the time. We’re used to it. Most of the time the hard sell is with the management folks who Green light projects. They don’t want to “waste” money on something that “nobody wants”.

Legitimately, one company I asked about IPv6 said to me that customers had not requested it, so they haven’t spent any time on implementing it.

As if customers know what’s good for them…

crispy_kilt , 17 days ago

I see you’ve worked with my employer

Semi_Hemi_Demigod , 18 days ago

“IP address are four sets of numbers with dots in between AND THAT’S HOW I LIKES IT!” - Me, an old network guy

Honestly the fact that I can’t remember or type IPv6 addresses is a big reason I haven’t bothered figuring it out.

Hobo , 18 days ago

I imagine you sitting there like Scotty, “Give me an ip address, not no colon, not no hexadecimal, and not no bloody double colon. Just 4 numbers between 0 and 255 with a dot in between.”

MystikIncarnate , 18 days ago

So, my argument here is… Why the hell are you memorizing IP addresses?

Is your DNS so misconfigured that you’re still punching in IPs by hand?

DNS is the solution. Going to “router.domain.local” or whatever your internal domain is, is easier to remember than… Which subnet am I on again? Is this one 192.168.22.254? Or 192.168.21.1?

Stop punching in numbers like a cave man. Use DNS. You won’t even notice if it’s IPv6 after that

Semi_Hemi_Demigod , 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

And what happens when DNS inevitably falls over and I need to fix it?

And when I’m watching IP addresses scroll by, IPv6 ones are a lot harder to read than v4

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

some super gigabrained chad linux nerd will have written a tool to automatically configure it and have open sourced it.

You could probably just use that. I think like most things in life, the answer is automation.

Semi_Hemi_Demigod , 17 days ago

I wouldn’t trust it unless I wrote it myself. And even then maybe not.

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

well then go and do it manually, surely you as a human wouldn’t make any mistakes. Would you?

MystikIncarnate , 17 days ago

DNS, by its very nature is redundant. So DNS shouldn’t just fall over. If it does, you’re doing something wrong.

If you absolutely need to go to IP addresses, they should be documented.

Unless DNS is outright wrong, there should not be an issue.

For scrolling: are you staring at active log files? Who isn’t using a syslog aggregator? You can easily look up the IP of whatever device that is interesting and filter the log by that IP.

crispy_kilt , 17 days ago

That’s not what an IP is though, that’s just dotted representation

el_abuelo , 18 days ago

Speaking of being an old man, let me tell you:

“The future is now old man” != “The future is now, old man.”

I genuinely tripped over this sentence thanks to the lack of punctuation.

Hobo , 17 days ago

Fixed. Thanks!

Zorsith , 17 days ago

Next up, the Oxford comma; Meet the strippers, Hitler and Stalin

MystikIncarnate , 18 days ago

The important bit is that almost every major web service is already running fully dual stacked. Azure, Amazon, Meta, CloudFlare, Google… If it’s a commonly known internet company, it’s probably ready for IPv6.

There’s still plenty that isn’t ready, but most well known things have been ready for years at this point.

the_doktor , 17 days ago

The fact that almost the entire internet is controlled by those evil companies is really fucking sad. I remember the old days when people, you know, hosted their own shit and used manual load balancing to keep large sites up and working.

SeeJayEmm , 18 days ago

I gave it the old college try about 6 months ago. Found out how to send the req for a subnet to my ISP. Configured my opnsense. When it worked, it worked. But it would randomly stop routing regularly. After a lot of troubleshooting determined it was the isp and have up.

Maybe I’ll try again in another 6 months.

MystikIncarnate , 18 days ago

This is remarkably common. A major factor is how to handle renewals. There appears to either be bugs with the procedure or there’s disagreement on how it should be handled. So it will work, for a while, until a renewal needs to happen, then everything goes to shit.

I’ve directly witnessed this in router/firewall logs. That there’s an attempt to renew the DHCP-PD, which does not get a valid reply.

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

so is there just no standard for renewal? Or are ISPs just refusing to use the standard, for whatever reason?

I can’t imagine we don’t already have a standard for this shit. I’d be baffled if we didn’t. So surely it’s just ISPs being their usual, useless selves.

MystikIncarnate , 17 days ago

This is less to do with the ISPs and more to do with the implementation of DHCP-PD renewals on various software/hardware devices. I’m not going to point any fingers, but it seems that some vendors don’t play very nicely with other vendors.

KillingTimeItself , 16 days ago

oh so it’s a classic instance of shitty hardware vendors doing shitty software things.

Gotta love technology.

MystikIncarnate , 16 days ago

Always has been

SpaceCowboy , 18 days ago

Thanks for the comment. Kinda confirms my approach (mostly out of laziness) of “I’ll do it when the ISP starts pushing it” is the correct one.

I think tech advocacy generally doesn’t work, and in the case of IPv6 I can’t see it working at all unless they can convince the ISPs to devote a lot more resources to it. But since I’m not an ISP… meh, whatever I guess.

Disaster , 18 days ago

CGnat is an abomination.

Alawami , 16 days ago

At least you can talk to someone at your ISP who can change things, in 10 years I was literally never been able to contact someone who knows anything about networks in any of the 3 big ISPs here… all I get is this:

“oh you have speed issue? Let me “refresh” your connection”

“No sir i have no speed issues, I just need to be able to open IPv6 ports”

“Oh trying to changing the cable port?”

“Sigh… can you transfer me to advanced support plz”

“Sure thing”

Advanced support: “So you having speed issues?”

“No i just need to be able to open IPv6 ports”

“Ah ports, you can do that from your router settings i think”

“No sir, you are the only ISP here where I can’t open ports or receive any ICMP on my ipv6”

“Let me see… i’ll refresh your connections”

And it’s the same of many different issues, you can’t get a hold of anyone who can change anything in any layer about any config. Take it or leave it…

MystikIncarnate , 16 days ago

At most, the difference between your experience and mine was that the support I recieved at least understood what IPv6 was, which is likely a function of most of my stories being from business support, rather than residential support.

Almost every time I call I get nowhere. Which is why I’ve given up. Obviously, someone high up in the technical teams is trying to implement IPv6 with very limited success. So I’m just trying to be patient, as they navigate the hellscape of corporate approvals and get things working.

It’s slow going, but at least it’s going.

Goodie , 18 days ago

Imho

Ipv4 and peak oil are similar.

We’re constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.

Someone sells of their underused block, or more people move to the services with excess IP addresses if they need one.

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

We’re constantly running out; but every fes years

critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It’s gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing, due to the price increase of oil. Likewise, our oil consumption has gone down, and our ability to extract it HAS gone up, just not all that much. The big difference is that there’s just more oil that we know about now, than there used to be.

IPV4 addresses are a static pool, that never changes, the only thing that changes is the adoption of them, as certain things move to IPV6 they’re still likely to hold IPV4 in some capacity, as IPV6 isn’t fully rolled out almost anywhere.

Goodie , 17 days ago

critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It’s gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing,

Do you have a source for that? Because this seems to suggest fossil fuel and oil demand might of roughly plateaued the last few years, the dip looks pretty welly correlated to Covid.

IPv4 addresses are a static pool, yes. But we’re continually using them more efficiently, the same as Oil. The difference being that Oil has a limit on the amount of energy contained in its chemical bonds, but you could quite happily host 1,000 or 10,000 websites on a single server.

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

Do you have a source for that?

yes sorry, what i meant to say was “the expected usage of oil over time” When a lot of the early to late 90’s "we’re running out of oil stuff was happening, a lot of predictions would’ve been based on continued increased usage of oil. Rather than it just randomly plateauing. It’s likely that the predicted curve would’ve have been significantly more exponential than presented.

And we’re also talking on a more local scale here, so this would be more centric around a single country, or north america specifically. Or perhaps assuming that third world countries would start industrializing or something. There are any number of factors that could have influenced the potential consumption predictions.

another interesting tidbit, this was also just after the time we thought we were going to build a lot of nuclear power, so arguably that influenced the older variants of the graph as well as the modern consumption of oil for power production, for example.

IPv4 addresses are a static pool, yes. But we’re continually using them more efficiently, the same as Oil.

Yeah but idk about this one. Perhaps at the scale of CDNs and proxy distribution, but generally, i don’t see this being very possible, simply because in order for a site to be supported strictly by IPV6 it must be supported by all connecting clients, and considering that most clients today are uh, not IPV6. If you want your service to work, it’s going to need to be IPV4. I mean sure internal communications, but those aren’t real so you can use any subnet range you want, it makes no difference.

but you could quite happily host 1,000 or 10,000 websites on a single server.

it depends on what you classify as a server, what you define a website as, and how you define the usage of it, but yeah generally, ignoring the fact that this is irrelevant, it’s about that simple.

Goodie , 17 days ago

And we’re also talking on a more local scale here, so this would be more centric around a single country, or north america specifically.

North America is an interesting example here, because North America HIT peak oil once, way back in the 80’s, and it was only with the invention of Fracking that it came back.

Yeah but idk about this one. Perhaps at the scale of CDNs and proxy distribution,

Once upon a time people debated if virtual hosts were best practice or if that would affect their SEO. We’ve definitely progressed since then, both to conserve IP addresses, but mainly because DDOS prevention is best done centralised (Looking at you Cloudflare).

Kalcifer , 17 days ago

We’re constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.

It’s a supply and demand situation. We run out of things not only when they are physically exhausted, but also when it’s not economically viable to find ways to make more. But when demand increases enough, it will eventually become economically viable again.

Aux , 18 days ago

IPv4 dried up a long time ago. But it’s different for every country. Countries like US and UK simply took over large blocks of IPv4 addresses and countries like Brazil got fucked. So, if you’re in a country with a large pool, you won’t notice any issues today, but if you’re not so lucky, a lot of internet services are not accessible to you because some dickhead got IP banned and that IP is shared by thousands if not millions of users in your country.

smileyhead , 17 days ago

Who needs an IP address anymore? What year is it? You want to connect to your friend’s computer and exchange some information via computer system, seriously? Just use Cloudflare, Google or Azure and route everything through them.

the_doktor , 17 days ago

You… do know how computers connect to each other, right? I hope this is sarcasm. But these days unless it’s specifically stated, it’s usually not, just a bunch of dumb kids who can’t understand how the internet works.

And then the dumb kid realizes he’s dumb and says “uh yeah, sarcasm, duh, didn’t you know i was joking, hahahahaha, yep, I knew, of course I did!” when he totally didn’t.

But regardless of the fucking point, no one wants to use these big business trash that is ruining the internet.

KillingTimeItself , 17 days ago

it’s y2k, but not 2k, it’s just y.

catculation , 18 days ago

Last year my ISP forced v6 and disabled the option to set v4 only. I lost the Adgurd Home DNS configuration in all devices. But then learnt a few things and able to use internal ipv6 address for dns although still unable to configure ipv6 in Docker :/

Fijxu , 18 days ago

I wish my ISP had ipv6 support to be honest

Turbo , 18 days ago

Because I can remember an IPv4 address and not a V6 address!

At least they could have added an extra octet to v4 instead of making it garbyremoved looking

technom , 17 days ago

You are not expected to remember a v6 address - or even v4 for that matter. They are designed for machines. DNS is designed for humans.

Turbo , 17 days ago

This is a good (and fair) point.

However they still look ugly and scary and intimidating :)

KindaABigDyl , 18 days ago

People use IPv6?

I still don’t know anything about it

spacemanspiffy , 18 days ago

Same. I have disabled it on my devices since it mostly just causes problems.

smileyhead , 17 days ago

By disabling both v4 and v6 you can fix 100% of the problems.

Fred , 18 days ago

Just under half of the Internet: www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

sep , 18 days ago

You do as well, if you run any operating system newer then the last 10 years.

JATtho , 18 days ago

I’m actually bit sad that I had to move onto a ISP which has zero IPv6 support, as I previously did have IPv6. The last thing I did on that connection was to debug the hell out of my IPv6 code I had developed.

snugglebutt , 18 days ago

I feel you, moved ISP maybe 3 months ago, only to find out I’m behind CGNAT and no IPv6…

sep , 18 days ago

That should simply not be allowed. Cgnat for ipv4 is fine if they also provide proper ipv6