Now currently I’m not in the workforce, but in the past from my work experience, apprenticeship and temp roles, I’ve always seen ipv4 and not ipv6!
Hell, my ISP seems to exclusively use ipv4 (unless behind nats they’re using ipv6)
Do you think a lot of people stick with the earlier iteration because they have been so familiar with it for a long time?
When you look at a ipv6, it looks menacing with a long string of letters and numbers compared to the more simpler often.
I am aware the IP bucket has gone dry and they gotta bring in a new IP cow with a even bigger bucket, but what do you think? Do you yourself or your firm use ipv4 or 6?
Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.
Cloud infra engineer here.
Answer: I don’t think about it. Nothing fully supports it, so we pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s exactly my experience with it.
Some certificates are even annoyed by IPv6 and they won’t install until i remove any trace of it from the DNS. This should also pretty much be the only occasion I’m forced to deal with IPv6, instead of glancing over it while working on the server configs.
Which is why “nothing” supports it
Well if you want to be the one who retrofits google cloud to support it more widely, go to town. But I’m sure as hell not going to bother, I have other work to do. And also I don’t work at google.
People still use IPv4 because companies are slow to adopt new technologies. They see it as a huge money drain and if there is not a visible or tangible benefit to it then they won’t invest in it. IPv6 is definitely a growing technology, it’s just taking it’s sweet time. For reference, currently the IPv4 has just under a million routes in the global routing table while IPv6 has ~216K routes. About 5 years ago it was something like 100K for IPv6 and not much has changed for IPv4.
I personally do not like the addressing of IPv6. It’s not just the length, but now you have to use colons instead of period to separate the octets which leads to extra key strokes since I have to hold shift to type in a colon. It’s a minor thing, but when networking is your bread and butter it adds up.
There are also some other concerns with IPv6. Since IPv6 tries to simplify routing by doing things like getting rid of NATing it also opens us up to more remote attacks. It used to be harder to target a specific user or PC that’s behind a NATed IP but now everything is out in the open. I’m sure things will get better as more and more people use it and there will be changes made to the protocol however. It’s just the natural evolution of technology.
I am very surprised to hear your ISP is not using IPv6. Seems like they’re a little behind the times. Unless they just don’t offer it to residential customers, which is still a bit behind the times too I guess.
Iv6 doesn’t try to simplify routing and remove nat. that’s just how things work. Nat is a workaround for ipv4.
Ipv6 is around since 1998. that’s not slow to adopt, at that point it is just plain refusal from some because of the costs you mentionend
Ipv6 does simplify routing. It has less headers and therefore less overheard. IPv6 addressed the necessity of NAT by adding an obscene amount of possible IPs. Removing the necessity of NAT also simplifies routing as it’s less that the router has to do.
Ipv6 as a concept was drafted in the 90s. It didn’t start actually being seriously used until ~2006/7ish.
IPv6 addressed the necessity of NAT by adding an obscene amount of possible IPs
that is correct but doesn’t change the fact that nat came afterwards as a workaround und now the ip stack goes back to it’s roots without a nat workaround.
It didn’t start actually being seriously used until ~2006/7ish.
true but still nowadays it isn’t even slow anymore just refusal
that is correct but doesn’t change the fact that nat came afterwards as a workaround und now the ip stack goes back to it’s roots without a nat workaround.
And the end result is a simplification for routing.
true but still nowadays it isn’t even slow anymore just refusal
That’s just the pace of large scale adoption of new technology. Look at some of the technologies the banking and financial industry uses as an example (ISO 8583 is a great example). ISP’s still support T1 circuits as well.
There are other benefits of NAT, besides address range. Putting devices behind a NAT is hugely beneficial for privacy and security.
NAT is not a security feature. Your firewall blocks incoming traffic, not NAT. It introduces new complexity that now needs to be solved.
In corpo environments you have to struggle with NAT traversal for VoIP communication.
In home networks “smart” devices attempt to solve it with shit like uPnP and suddenly you get bigger holes in your network security than before. You could find countless home network printers on shodan because of this. Even though (or maybe because) they were “behind” NAT.
IPv6 has temporary IPs for privacy reasons. NAT is NOT a firewall. Setting up a real firewall is more secure and gives you more control without things like UPNP and NAT-PMP.
Time isn’t the only factor for adoption. Between the adoption of IPv4 and IPv6, the networking stack shifted away from network companies like Novell to the OSes like Windows, which delayed IPv6 support until Vista.
When IPv4 was adopted, the networking industry was a competitive space. When IPv6 came around, it was becoming stagnant, much like Internet Explorer. It wasn’t until Windows Vista that IPv6 became an option, Windows 7 for professionals to consider it, and another few years later for it to actually deployable in a secure manner (and that’s still questionable).
Most IT support and developers can even play with IPv6 during the early 2000s because our operating systems and network stacks didn’t support it. Meanwhile, there was a boom of Internet connected devices that only supported IPv4. There are a few other things that affected adoption, but it really was a pretty bad time for IPv6 migration. It’s a little better now, but “better” still isn’t very good.
IPv6 has a policy of throwing more address space at stuff to make routing simpler, though.
IPv4 will individually route tiny slices of address space all over the world, IPv6 just assigns a massive chunk of space in the first place and calls it a day.
Repeat after me kids:
NAT 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 security 👏 feature
I think djb was right, over twenty years ago: The IPv6 mess
The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space.
There was an alternative proposal that was backward-compatible with IPv4, but I’ve forgotten the name now.
Oh man, that would have been so great. Think of all the networking stacks that could have just been silently upgraded. Just some letters/numbers appended to the front or back. If you only get x bytes then prepend with zeroes. Adoption would have been mostly transparent.
Yup. For those that don’t know, that’s essentially how utf-8 works -
forgotten the name
I’m gonna guess… IPv5That wasn’t it. I wanna say “IPvX”, but my web search comes up empty, so it must have been something else.
I think IPv4+ is what you’re thinking of
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CGNAT is a feature – organizations tracing an IP back to source have to play bingo with a host of households who may / may not have downloaded that 1 torrent.
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Govt, sure. Law firms running sting operations sure as hell can’t
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Just annoyed when I need to specify port when using IPv6. Needs to add square bracket to workaround ambiguity of colon is kinda bad. How can they decide to use colon instead of another special character??
I have IPv6 at home, at work, on my phone, and my hotspot. I have them on my websites and servers. IPv6 is everywhere for me. I use it all the time. Most people do and don’t even realize it.
IPv4 still reigns supreme on a LAN, because you’re never going to run out of addresses, even if you’re running an enterprise company. IPv6 subnets are usually handed out to routers, so DHCPv6 can manage that address space and you don’t need to know anything unless you’re forwarding ports on IPv6.
For the Internet, just use hostnames. There’s literally zero reason to memorize a WAN address when it could be an A/AAAA record.
Company currently uses IPv6! For awhile firewall rules kept biting us as we’d realize something worked in ipv4 but not IPv6 but now I forget it’s even a thing really.
I once paid for a vpc host that was exclusively IPv6 and was shocked how many things broke. I was using it for a discord bot and the discord api didn’t even properly support IPv6 …
IPv6 is now twice as old as IPv4 was when IPv6 was introduced. 20 years ago I worried about needing to support it. Now I don’t even think about it at all.
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I suspect my cellphone does, but not my work or home internet.
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a teammate implemented it because he thought it would be a good resume project. it added more maintenance work to a lot of pieces, forever. there is no measurable benefit to the business
I try to force everything to use IPv6. It’s a huge pain to support IPv4 as a selfhoster. I never had to specify an IP manually, DNS exists for a reason.
IPv6 was “just around the corner” when I was studying 20+ years ago. I kept a tunnel up until the brokers shut down.
I’ve been hosting some big (partly proprietary) services for work, and we’ve been IPv6 compatible for a decade.
My ISP finally gave me native IPv6 earlier this year, which gave me the push to make sure my personal hosting does IPv6 as well. Seems like most big players services support it today. It’s nice to not have the overhead that CGNAT brings.
IPv6 got a bit of a bad reputation when operating systems defaulted to 6to4 translation but never actually managed to work.
A lot of networks were designed with ipv4 and NAT in mind. There really isn’t a cost benefit to migrate all your DHCP scopes, VLANs, Subnets, and firewall rules to IPv6 and then also migrate 1000’s of endpoints to it.
Much cheaper to just disable ipv6 entirely on the internal network (to prevent attacks using a rogue dhcpv6 server etc) and only use ipv6 on your WAN connections if you have to use it.
I want to love IPv6 but it’s unfortunately still basically impossible to get good proper IPv6 in the first place.
At home I’m stuck with fairly broken 6rd that can’t be hardware accelerated by my router and the MTU is like 1200 which is like 20% bandwidth overhead just for headers on the packets.
On the server side, OVH does have IPv6 but it’s not routed, so the host have to pretend to have all the IPv6 addresses and the OVH routers will only accept like 8 of them in use before its NDP table is full, so assigning an IPv6 to every Docker container fails miserably.
IPv6’s main problem is ISPs are so invested in NAT and IPv4 infrastructure they just won’t support IPv6. Microsoft, Google and Apple need to team together and start requiring functional IPv6 to create user demand, because otherwise most users don’t know about CGNAT and don’t care. Everything needs to complain about bad IPv6 connectivity so users complain to ISPs and pressure them into fixing it.
We were offered a /32(?) for like 1000$/yr… sounds like a good deal tbh
IPv6 or IPv4?
A /3 of IPv4 for that price is impossible, that’d be 10% of the entire IPv4 space. A /29 (32-3) would be more reasonable but 1k for a block of 8 IPs would be a massive ripoff.
Doesn’t make sense for IPv6 either, as that’d be exactly the global unicast range (2::/3), but makes sense they’d give you like a huge block in there, maybe a /32 as that’s what they assign to an ISP. As an end user you usually get a /48.
Phone keyboard ate the 2… it’s a /32 block ipv6
I’ve used IPv6 at home for over 20 years now. Initially via tunnels by hurricane electric and sixxs. But, around 10 years ago, my ISP enabled IPv6 and I’ve had it running alongside IPv4 since then.
As soon as server providers offered IPv6 I’ve operated it (including DNS servers, serving the domains over IPv6).
I run 3 NTP servers (one is stratum 1) in ntppool.org, and all three are also on ipv6.
I don’t know what’s going on elsewhere in the world where they’re apparently making it very hard to gain accesss to ipv6.
