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?
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 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.
Cloud infra engineer here.
Answer: I don’t think about it. Nothing fully supports it, so we pretend it doesn’t exist.
Which is why “nothing” supports it
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.
Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.
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.
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
Another thing that makes no sense is if my ISP provided prefix changes -which it will- this affects the IP addressing on my local network. Ain’t noboby got time for that if you’re managing a company or having anything other than a flat home network with every device equal.
IPv6 is just people shouting NAT BAD, but frankly having separate address ranges inside and outside a house is a feature. A really really useful feature. Having every device have a public IP6 address I’d an anti-featute.
if my ISP provided prefix changes… affects the IP addressing on my local network.
IPv6 is just people shouting NAT BAD… Having every device have a public IP6 address I’d an anti-featute.
If you’re working in IT then you should find a new career.
We mainly use ipv4, but recent laws that all public sector websites are to use IPv6, we have had to update our stack.
Now we can do IPv6 public endpoints with ipv4 backends.
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.
If you’ve never thought about it, there’s a good chance your actually using it. ISPs around the world have been turning on IPv6 for their customers. About half the internet is using IPv6 these days, so there’s a 50/50 chance you’re part of that.
I suspect my cellphone does, but not my work or home internet.
You can always check https://ifconfig.co if you want to be sure.
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
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??
It fixes must about every gripe I have with IPv4. It closes the hidden security holes NAT introduces. It pretty much configures itself. It allows you to use multiple Xboxes or Playstations within the same network and play online without faffing about! You can also disable the firewall entirely and basically never get scanned because scanning 2^64 addresses to find one computer is infeasible for bots (though you shouldn’t).
The addresses are longer, that’s for sure. But you shouldn’t be remembering those anyway. That’s why DNS exists! If you don’t have a local DNS server for some reason, just use mDNS, every device supports it out of the box. yourcomputersname.local will work in place of an IP address in just about everything since Windows Vista.
IPv6 was severely underdeveloped when the Necromancy Address Translation kept IPv4 usable twenty years ago, but we’re beyond that now. We have been for a while, actually.
Unfortunately, a lot of network people are the type that learned how networks worked in school forty years ago and decided that this is the way things are and they should never change again. That’s how you get things like “TLS 1.3 pretends to be a TLS 1.2 session resumption or half the internet will break” and “only port 80 and 443 are usable on the internet”. They even brought DHCP back when IPv6 works perfectly fine without it! At least Google did the right thing and refused to play ball with that malarkey in Android.
The whole address reserve argument never helped much. Super expensive cloud providers are now charging extra for IPv4 addresses but if you’re using Amazon AWS you’re used to paying through the nose anyway. CGNAT is a much worse problem, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people sharing the same IPv4 address and basically being forced to solve CAPTCHAs all day because one of their IP coinhabitors has a virus.
As the comments here show, plenty of people can’t be bothered. That’s fine, legacy websites and devices can just use IPv4, that’s the beauty of it.
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.
If organisations track your IP back, they can get your ISP to give them your contact details. CGNAT doesn’t protect you from carriers and legal means.
Govt, sure. Law firms running sting operations sure as hell can’t
Depends on where you live, I suppose. Here they sure can.
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.
Widespread IPv6 adoption is right there with the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a good idea, it’s always Coming Soon™ and it’s probably never going to actually happen. People are stubborn and thanks to things like NAT and CGNAT, the main reason to switch is gone. Sure, address exhaustion may still happen. And not having to fiddle with things like NAT (and fuck CGNAT) would be nice. But, until the cost of keeping IPv4 far outweighs the cost of everything running IPv6 (despite nearly everything doing it now), IPv4 will just keep shambling on, like a zombie in a bad horror flick.
We are going full v6 with SIIT-DC (rfc7755) with our next hardware refresh. Our mother site doesn’t but we don’t care what they do as that’s not our problem
