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/
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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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
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!
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.
"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.
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."
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
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
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.
I wouldn't trust it unless I wrote it myself. And even then maybe not.
well then go and do it manually, surely you as a human wouldn't make any mistakes. Would you?
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.
That's not what an IP is though, that's just dotted representation
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....
I see you've worked with my employer
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.
Fixed. Thanks!
Next up, the Oxford comma; Meet the strippers, Hitler and Stalin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
oh so it's a classic instance of shitty hardware vendors doing shitty software things.
Gotta love technology.
Always has been
CGnat is an abomination.
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.
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..
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.
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.
a combination of all of these, most likely
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The adoption of IPv6 on some segments of the Internet has lessened the crisis around IPv4 availability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.