Context:
People have been asking for IPv6 Support on GitHub since years (probably a decade by now)
… and someone even got so annoyed that they decided to setup a dedicated website for checking this: https://isgithubipv6.live/
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
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
Oooh is that why ipv6 adoption is so regional ( Based on https://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.
Apparently it’s still cheaper to buy IPV4 blocks than to upgrade all the equipment and IT staff to use 6.
Any (enterprise grade) equipment not capable of 6 that is still in use is a ticking time bomb.
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.
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.
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.
it’s y2k, but not 2k, it’s just y.
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
If your ISP supports it
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.
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.
I’ll start using it after I migrate to Wayland.
“Everyone is using IPv6”
It’s barely supported. Most providers here “offer IPv6”, but each has a different gotcha to actually using it, if it works at all and they didn’t just route you through hardware that doesn’t know what it is.
What’s “here”? Here in Germany, mine has it for maybe 10 years or so. Basically since launch day.
And new ISPs only have v6 since all legacy (v4) blocks have been sold years ago.
While you may have IPv6 it doesn’t do anything if the services you utilize don’t support it.
MANY major websites and domains have no IPv6 support. https://whynoipv6.com/
Just because you have a IPv6 address doesn’t mean you’re actually using it. At best you’re tunnelling IPv4 traffic through your carrier’s IPv6 network. Current estimates (from Cloudflare) show only about 34% of the global internet uses IPv6.
If you only used IPv6, you wouldn’t be able to access nearly 66% of the internet.
rose are red, violets are blue, money is the reason we can’t have nice things.
Roses in summer, violets in spring, it’s trivially easy this rhyming thing
shitposting properly is the objective, regardless of my rhyming imperative. My post must be shit, in order to get the hits.
I would like to use IPv6 but google and MS are having a dick waving contest with competing implementations, as I understand it. So fuck it.
People use IPv6?
I still don’t know anything about it
Same. I have disabled it on my devices since it mostly just causes problems.
By disabling both v4 and v6 you can fix 100% of the problems.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
How do you guys remember IPv6 addresses?
You shouldn’t need to remember IP addresses, they invented DNS to solve that problem lol
Even so, the addresses can be even easier to remember because we get a-f as well as digits, my unique local subnet is fd13:dead:beef:1::/60 cause I like burgers haha
You do need to know it when you’re working with subnets and routing tables.
Unless you have anything but a flat network structure with everything in one subnet, working with IPV6 is a giant PITA.
I’m curious how you normally deploy since there’s a couple of ways to do it, I’ve mostly dealt with requesting a number of prefixes from the upstream router and delegating to each subnet/VLAN as appropriate, and each time I’ve done it it’s been a breeze
Even if you need static addressing you can just set it manually and DAD will handle it if it ever conflicts with a DHCP address, at least in my experience
It’s when you have to set static routes and such.
For example I have a couple of locations tied together with a Wireguard site-to-site VPN, each with several subnets. I had to write wg config files and set static routes with hardcoded subnets and IP addresses. Writing the wg config files and getting it working was already a bit daunting with IPv4, because I was also wrapping my head around wireguard concepts at the same time. It would have been so much worse to debug with IPv6 unreadable subnet names.
Network ACLs and firewall rules are another thing where you have to work with raw IPv6 addresses. For example: let’s say you have a Samba share or proxy server that you only want to be accessible from one specific subnet, you have to use IPv6 addresses. You can’t solve that with DNS names.
Anyway my point is: the idea that you can simply avoid IPv6’s complexity by using DNS names is just wrong.
Yes. However I can just avoid using ipv6 by NATing the fuck out of my network lol. Kick that can!
Why should we care? So address space may run out eventually - that’s our ISPs’ problem.
Other than that I actually don’t like every device to have a globally unique address - makes tracking even easier than fingerprinting.
That’s also why my VPN provider recommends to disable IPv6 since they don’t support it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read today… Your ISP is fleecing you and you’re happy with it.
What the fuck are you talking about? My ISP supports IPv6 just fine, but following my VPN’s advice I disable it (on certain devices at least) for privacy concerns. And it makes exactly zero difference in functionality.
OK, not your ISP, but your VPN is shit.
whats the problem with IPv4?
IPv6 changed some things. First and foremost it has a huge address space:
- IPv4: 4294967296 (2^32)
- IPv6: 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (2^128)
Then they simplyfied some things:
- Removed Broadcast in favor of Multicast and Anycast
- Added autoconfiguration without a DHCP server
- Better subnetting support
And much more
- we already have enough IPv4 addresses thanks to stuff such as NAT and CG-NAT, these devices also protect the end-user by not directly exposing their IP to the internet
- what’s the problem with broadcast? also afaik IPv4 also supports multicast
- what’s the problem with IPv4 subnetting?
In my opinion NAT is a hack that makes lot of things harder than they should be. STUN and TURN are services that are created because there is no easy way to connect two hosts between different NATs. UPnP for port forwarding is another. CG-NAT is even worse. I have heard of so many people having problems with it.
Breadcast is messy. It is like screaming into a room and waiting for an answer. Multicast lets the computer decide if it wants and needs to listen to a specific group message.
IPv4 didn’t have cidr from the beginning. They only had classes. IPv6 was designed with complex routing and sub routing in mind.
