Prices have been coming down for years in nominal terms, let alone real terms. Cg nat does everything that’s needed, there are no significant ip6 only services, there are plenty of ip4 only services, so you have to support ip4 anyway, so why bother with ip6
My company has just turned off all ip6 connectivity for its corporate laptops because it’s considered a security risk. I disagree, but I do agree that having 4 and 6 is a higher risk than 4 alone or 6 alone, and 6 alone sadly still doesn’t work reliably.
All the “promise” of ip6, direct connections etc, were lost when stateful firewalls became required and memory became cheaper than $20 a megabyte. Some bespoke old protocols don’t like ports changing, which can be a problem, but it’s a very small number and easier to work around with modern protocols than support a dual stack environment securely for the majority of places that struggle securing a single stack.
Everything that's needed besides letting computers talk to each other, that is.
With ipv4 you have a two tier internet. Computers talk to servers, servers talk to servers, computers can't talk to computers so every video call must be routed through a server.
I hear this as a cited as a benefit of IPv6 a lot. Honest question: Isn't this at least a privacy issue, at most a security issue? SLAAC seems like what we already have with extra, breakable steps, which doesn't effectively address the privacy issue anyway.
Yes. Letting anyone talk to anyone was the point of the internet. It's been co-opted by these massive centralising forces and you know what? They're right. With IPv4 everything has to be centralised, we don't even have the faintest chance to avoid it. With IPv6 at least we have a chance to take it back.
Some people will mention stateful firewalls. They're pretty easy to holepunch through because you just need each side to send a packet to the other, then each firewall sees it as an outgoing connection and allows it. It's nothing like IPv4 NAT.
> My company has just turned off all ip6 connectivity for its corporate laptops because it’s considered a security risk. I disagree, but I do agree that having 4 and 6 is a higher risk than 4 alone or 6 alone, and 6 alone sadly still doesn’t work reliably.
I had a very concreteish security risk with IPv6 and openvpn. At least in Debian config openvpn tunneled only IPv4 by default. I only noticed this by being surprised I got results tailored to my origin country instead of the VPN out node country.
It's eternal (dual stack) paper cuts like this why just turning IPv6 off makes life a lot easier.
> It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.
HE tunnel IP space is now sufficiently penalized as non-residential/office that I’ve had to turn it off anyway. YouTube, for example, largely seems to block users in HE space unless they are logged in.
Every ISP has to pay Hurricane Electric for their tunnels, that's why it's free to you. If enough people start using HE tunnels, ISPs will get native IPv6.
But you can't use HE tunnels because every website you visit will block you. You also can't use them from CGNAT or if your home router doesn't have a DMZ.
It is entertaining that the situation becomes opposite in T-Mobile on States does not support IPv4 and only assigns IPv6 with 464xlat for "Fake-NAT" to IPv4.
Old Nanostations as a client need to do proxy arp or something, which doesn't handle ipv6. That said it's probably 15 year old hardware. I ended up using a wireguard tunnel across it instead.
I'd however mention, the two biggest ISPs that remain today both have adopted IPv6 on their fiber connections. They're also heavily using CGNAT for IPv4. It makes sense, the volume at which they're working makes dedicated IPv4 very uneconomical.
Reason that Google isn't seeing more is a) some BigCo v4 holdouts b) happy eyeballs sometimes landing on v4 because their v6 is shitty 6rd or something (e.g Free SAS)
Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites.
But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.
Put OpenWRT on the thing and you'll be able to do what you want. Experience the joy of adding not port forwarding rules for IPv4 but more or less identical (same ports) access rules for IPv6.
All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
To your point, IPv6 sought to replace NAT with just having enough addresses but interestingly, that created a problem. If you used NAT and had a service on your computer request a port for incoming connections, that showed intent on behalf of the owner of that service. IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.
So is the bigger address range better? Technically, maybe? But you have to consider defaults and intents of users. And that can take a good technical solution to a bad solution or at least create a whole bunch of problems.
I don't think this is inherently a problem. It's good for home routers to have sensible defaults. Blocking incoming IPv6 connections is such a thing. Opening a port in the firewall shows the same kind of intent as forwarding a port with NAT. The burden is on the router manufacturers to expose these options in a sensible way. My router for example has a similar UI to forwarding a port with IPv4 and opening the port for IPv6.
Using NAT as a firewall might work but it brings it's own problems. I find the IPv6 way better.
> I don't think this is inherently a problem. [...] My router for example has a similar UI to forwarding a port with IPv4 and opening the port for IPv6.
Glad to hear that you don't have a problem with your router, but how does that relate to GPs problems with theirs?
> There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it.
Nobody includes their MAC address in their public IPv6 addresses anymore, but every IPv6 setup that I've seen still gives every device a unique globally-routable IPv6 address, with no NAT at all.
> One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks.
The nice thing is that a /64 is big enough that clients can just randomly pick any address, and it will almost certainly be available, meaning that you don't need DHCP. This is actually widely implemented, and is known as SLAAC [0].
> Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
The extra address space only adds 16 bytes to every packet, and it ensures that we will never run out of addresses like we did with IPv4.
With current addressing scheme we only have 2^13 times more site addresses than IPv4, which is plenty in absolute numbers, but not necessarily enough for more coarse aggregation, and definitely not infinitely future proof.
Crucially though, if we change it, we just have to change how addresses are allocated, not change the protocol again.
The point of local networks of a minimum size of 64 bit isn't only to have MAC-based addresses (48 bit would have been enough for that, fwiw), but in general to support non-coordinated/probabilistic self-assignment schemes with negligible collision probability.
Picking a random local address (which is very important for privacy, as you've mentioned) is much easier if you don't have to do an elaborate dance of listen, announce, listen for collisions etc. first (practically that still happens, but collisions are the absolute exception).
> So is the bigger address range better?
Yes, because consider the alternative of re-doing all of this again in a future in which IP usage for some reason jumps by a few orders of magnitude again.
Due to hardware getting better over time, the per-packet cost of a few extra bits is going down all the time, while the cost of rolling out a future IPv7 increases with every new deployed host.
The best thing about SLAAC is that it forces your ISP to give you at least 64 bits. Otherwise you know Comcast would only give out a /128 and charge you for more, so you'd use NAT at home just like IPv4.
> Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
Randomizing the local address doesn't mean it isn't useful. You can't scan a /64 so that's already a major improvement. The fact that randomly selecting a number is effectively never going to collide greatly simplifies automatic network configuration.
The major issue is that the /64 isn't mandatory from a technical perspective. Being merely a subset of the larger address it's nothing more than a convention. In the end not all providers make it available to you even though supposedly they ought to.
If we're going to complain about anything it should be the godawful notation that so easily breaks parsers. Or the fact that the width is massively excessive which creates a usability nightmare due to normal humans not being able to readily recall 128 bit numbers (let alone how long it takes to type them in).
I have yet to see any ISP use CGNAT here in Sweden. It seems to be a highly regional problem for some reason. Both on mobile and on broadband I get publicly routable IPv4.
In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts.
This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.
Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this.
Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean.
This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this.
Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption.
I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong.
It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense.
The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.
> This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.
Do you have examples for this? I've never experienced this, and I've been using IPv6 for years.
Also, how can you be sure that the same request to IPv4 would have been fine? Did you actually see consistent failures on v6 and consistent success on v4? Otherwise, if a service has a reasonably low error rate, success on retry is the expected outcome, regardless of the path the retry takes.
That depends on your isp. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’ve never had an isp on the U.K. which didn’t give me at least a dynamic ipv4 address to my router.
Infact the only isp I have seen do it is starlink and I have contacts with ISPs in 60 different counties.
Faster webrtc establishments and other negotiated connections. CGNAT means more relayed than P2P connections so it should be possible to have more direct traffic for services that want to save that bandwidth.
and anything P2P. Maybe that would have been a driver 20 years ago, but now everything is expected to be centralised. Our culture has shifted. Remember when people used to host their game servers? If you're under 16, you don't because it was never in your lifetime.
I have to open a hole in my firewall to host any service. Nat doesn’t change that.
Unless you want to host multiple minecraft servers on the same port on different servers at home?
Indeed hosting anything at home is such a rare workflow that someone wanting it can choose an isp which gives them the facilities they need.
Unless you don’t live in a competitive market based economy and just have the single government mandated isp aimed at the lowest common denominator, in which case you’ve got far worse problems.
Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.
But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.
I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4
I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.
You can do IPv6 only if you have a 64 nat on your edge and use dns64 and just use a limited set of applications and devices.
Some applications will still fail to work though unless you also have 46 nat on your device which still doesn’t work transparently on majority of types of device.
You also need all devices on your lan to support v6 natively, and v6 only. From your printer to your speaker.
You might be able to do something with mdns and nat64 to get them working on an IPv4 only subnet. But you’re talking layers and layers of complexity for things which just have to work.
I’m posting this from my phone on my IPv6 only subnet, not sure if it’s using a 64 gateway or 6 native to HN, but it’s possible.
All the more reason to support it. There are lots of ISPs that only assign you an IPv6, and do hacky trickery to make IPv4 work over that. We wouldn’t need all of this.
It's good to support it to resolve the chicken egg problem. If no service supports it, there is no sense in deploying it to the customers and the other way around.
Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.
Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.
For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?
1. Peer-to-peer networking won't usually work correctly. And quite a bit of software uses P2P networking these days---BitTorrent, Zoom/Teams (via WebRTC), Tailscale, PlayStation/Xbox multiplayer, etc. Most of these services have automatic fallbacks when P2P networking doesn't work, but these fallbacks are usually slower and less reliable.
2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run into rate limits. Or even worse, you might be blocked entirely if your CGNAT neighbours are spammers or otherwise breaking website rules.
While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
> While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above).
Yeah, I just mentioned that because P2P networking is used a lot more than most people think these days, since even things like Zoom that look like typical client–server web browsing actually use P2P networking internally.
> It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that.
Reliability and latency will be marginally better with IPv6 than with CGNAT, but this is so minor that I doubt that most people will notice this. And many CGNATs will RST connections that last too long, but most protocols have some sort of automatic retry/reconnect built in, so this shouldn't cause issues very often either.
IPv6 addresses are quite a bit cheaper than IPv4 addresses in most clouds, but since most servers still need to support IPv4, this doesn't help you directly. Supporting IPv6 means that others using the cheaper IPv6-only cloud services will be able to connect to your server, but this doesn't matter for consumer-only services.
So yeah, you're probably right that enabling IPv6 server-side won't have (m)any benefits.
> I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
Being able to ban IP addresses without worrying about collateral damage is a pretty big benefit to the service provider though, for certain applications at least.
When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice.
From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)
Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university
In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
And I've only ever had v6, both on DOCSIS and fiber. Both observations are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things; actual adoption rates are what matter.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration.
That's a pretty wild thing to say in the comment section of an article about v6 reaching 50% eyeballs-side deployment.
I’ve yet to live anywhere where the available mainstream ISPs were willing or able to provide IPv6 service. I’d be happy to use it, if I were able.
I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested in the full network re-architecture required to truly support it internally.
There are still several basic services you can’t run IPv6-only in AWS, and a handful of AWS service features that don’t support it at all.
As a sysadmin for decades now, I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous. But I’d love to be supporting it in everything I do. Only I still can’t, even after 20+ years of being lectured about it; even after complete IPv4 exhaustion has been reached. I don’t think we’re ever going to turn IPv4 off. At best it will be progressively hidden, even from technical users. And folks like me will just have to keep building workarounds to patch the holes where IPv6 still doesn’t work.
> I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous.
Most software continues to have horrible IPv6 support and documentation making it look more complicated, but the actual protocol is considerably simpler than IPv4. For example:
1. An IPv4 packet header is variable-length, and the checksum must be recalculated by every router because the TTL is included in the checksum. Whereas an IPv6 packet header is fixed-length and has no checksum.
2. NAT is effectively required with IPv4, but it makes everything much more complicated, since it means that most computers don't even know their "real" IP address, it makes peer-to-peer networking very challenging, and it's tricky for routers to implement. Whereas with IPv6, no NAT is required.
3. Any router along the network path is allowed to fragment an IPv4 packet, and is in fact required to if its MTU is smaller than the packet's size. Whereas only the originating node is allowed to fragment an IPv6 packet.
4. To acquire an IPv4 address, both clients and routers must implement DHCP, which is a fairly complicated protocol, and both clients and routers must remember the list of assigned addresses. Whereas with IPv6, the client can just choose a random address (via SLAAC) and then start using it immediately.
5. IPv6 multicast is considerably simpler than IPv4 multicast, and NDP (v6) is considerably simpler than ARP (v4).
Despite all this, I agree with you that setting up IPv6 networking is harder than setting up IPv4 networking, but this is more of a software problem than a protocol problem.
The only one I don't understand is how NDP is simpler than ARP. ARP is an Ethernet broadcast while NDP is built on IPv6 multicast which creates a recursive chicken and egg situation.
I'm interested, apart from the chicken egg problem, what are things that you found bad about IPv6. What do you think is overengineered?
I personally found that the features I interacted with were useful (SLAAC, address size, router advertisements, ...) and the changes made it cleaner (removal of broadcast for multicast, removal of fragmentation fields, ...).
Just remove the A record, and nearly all the scrapers disappear. :-) (And then you get one email per month or so that “your host does not resolve in DNS”.)
Google is having a real issue with LLMs using it for search. As in, real load issues. Unless you're running a publicly accessible search engine, and the top one at that, the LLM traffic you're seeing is not representative.
I want Google gone. This company is causing too many problems.
I am still sometimes using Google Search. First results are now
almost always videos on youtube, aka self-promo. These videos are
in 99.9% of the search results I use, totally useless and worthless.
Even searching on youtube has recently gotten worse. It is also
crap now. I know that because I bookmark various videos, and I
can not find older videos anymore either. I can eliminate some
results I don't care via ublock origin hero-blocking this Google
garbage, but I really think we should no longer allow this de-facto
monopoly to worsen the global situation any longer. The USA is
protecting these gangsters - it is time to have true legislation
that gets rid of that mafia bloc that is Google.
Great example of how fixing things "the correct way" does not seem to work sometimes.
They added those new addresses that can store more information.. but this requires a rewrite of old software to make it work.
If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.
Actually no software rewrite is needed because the Berkeley Sockets API is agnostic to address format. If your software requires a particular address format, that's a bug. if you pass an IPv6 literal to getaddrinfo, you get a result with an IPv6 address structure and it tells you the IPv6 socket type you need to connect to it.
There is no space to put the additional octets. Supporting this would have needed a rewrite anyways. Nothing won there. They took that as a chance to improve the protocol overall.
Software availability isn't really the problem. For most software there was no change at all ("connect to that host" or "listen to any device" and operating system will handle details), most software which needed adaption had it for a while (picking up a devices explicitly, handling of IPv6 addressees, ...) while maybe not equally good (missing GUI improvements for better handling of IPV6 addresses)
The problems, as I observe, are more in network infrastructure, routing, etc.
Are you just talking about how you write the addresses or are you talking about the actual protocol?
The IPv4 protocol has 4 octets each for source and destination address. Period. If you change that, your packets won't work on any IPv4 routers or software any more.
If you want to write IPv6 addresses as numbers separated by dots no one's stopping you but I don't see how it's better. They switched to hex because the old format was too long.
You have not heard if before, because that is the most naive and stupid take imaginable. It is the “let them eat cake” of networking.
It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?
You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.
First thing I do on a fresh Linux install is set ipv6 to deactivated. Fixes all my initial Linux install problems. I don't question it, it just works every time.
Similar experience. I bought an ASUS router and enabled IPv6. It slowed down everything down. Immediately flashed OpenWrt on it, IPv6 works like charm.
It's usually bad configuration done by the router vendors. It doesn't mean IPv6 is bad.
There are maybe many buggy routers still out there that reset the IPv6 flow label field when they shouldn't, breaking hash-based load-balancers (the symptom is TCP connections spontaneously reset).
IIRC, a workaround was to prevent Linux from setting this field, or force-reset it on every outbound packet using netfilter.
UX issue, and UX issues are often downplayed by engineers, leading to adoption failures.
Another such example is SELinux, which would have prevented so many vulnerabilities from being exploited, but whose poor UX also caused everyone to disable it at install time.
SELinux's UX was significantly improved many years later, but already too late to change ingrained opinions. There are a lot of ingrained opinions about IPv6 too.
Conversely it means people who have ISPs that do IPv6 just have IPv6 and don't need to turn it off. Because it just works. The other day my IPv4 was down and I didn't even notice.
Noooo, my /22 IPv4 subnet allocation is my personal 401k, I need this money to retire.
You joke, but its exactly how society thinks about housing…
Time to cash in?
Prices have been coming down for years in nominal terms, let alone real terms. Cg nat does everything that’s needed, there are no significant ip6 only services, there are plenty of ip4 only services, so you have to support ip4 anyway, so why bother with ip6
My company has just turned off all ip6 connectivity for its corporate laptops because it’s considered a security risk. I disagree, but I do agree that having 4 and 6 is a higher risk than 4 alone or 6 alone, and 6 alone sadly still doesn’t work reliably.
All the “promise” of ip6, direct connections etc, were lost when stateful firewalls became required and memory became cheaper than $20 a megabyte. Some bespoke old protocols don’t like ports changing, which can be a problem, but it’s a very small number and easier to work around with modern protocols than support a dual stack environment securely for the majority of places that struggle securing a single stack.
Everything that's needed besides letting computers talk to each other, that is.
With ipv4 you have a two tier internet. Computers talk to servers, servers talk to servers, computers can't talk to computers so every video call must be routed through a server.
I hear this as a cited as a benefit of IPv6 a lot. Honest question: Isn't this at least a privacy issue, at most a security issue? SLAAC seems like what we already have with extra, breakable steps, which doesn't effectively address the privacy issue anyway.
And wasn't that THE POINT of the internet and it's decentralised design?
Yes. Letting anyone talk to anyone was the point of the internet. It's been co-opted by these massive centralising forces and you know what? They're right. With IPv4 everything has to be centralised, we don't even have the faintest chance to avoid it. With IPv6 at least we have a chance to take it back.
Some people will mention stateful firewalls. They're pretty easy to holepunch through because you just need each side to send a packet to the other, then each firewall sees it as an outgoing connection and allows it. It's nothing like IPv4 NAT.
> My company has just turned off all ip6 connectivity for its corporate laptops because it’s considered a security risk. I disagree, but I do agree that having 4 and 6 is a higher risk than 4 alone or 6 alone, and 6 alone sadly still doesn’t work reliably.
I had a very concreteish security risk with IPv6 and openvpn. At least in Debian config openvpn tunneled only IPv4 by default. I only noticed this by being surprised I got results tailored to my origin country instead of the VPN out node country.
It's eternal (dual stack) paper cuts like this why just turning IPv6 off makes life a lot easier.
About 2023 I think
You'll be really screwed in around the year 2100!
Meanwhile T-Mobile/Odido in the Netherlands is still not supporting IPv6 despite promising to have been working on it for years.
Ubiquity gateways also seem to not support it sadly. It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.
> It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.
HE tunnel IP space is now sufficiently penalized as non-residential/office that I’ve had to turn it off anyway. YouTube, for example, largely seems to block users in HE space unless they are logged in.
Every ISP has to pay Hurricane Electric for their tunnels, that's why it's free to you. If enough people start using HE tunnels, ISPs will get native IPv6.
But you can't use HE tunnels because every website you visit will block you. You also can't use them from CGNAT or if your home router doesn't have a DMZ.
And wouldn’t it add a considerable latency?
Possibly. They let you pick your nearest server, and HE is a tier-1 ISP which a lot of your packets may traverse already.
It is entertaining that the situation becomes opposite in T-Mobile on States does not support IPv4 and only assigns IPv6 with 464xlat for "Fake-NAT" to IPv4.
They support it. I have it enabled with Spectrum. No file modification necessary; all configurable from the UI.
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/36378535649687-Configu...
Huh? Ubiquity has dropped support? I can't believe that, even the older EdgeRouter series supported it.
Old Nanostations as a client need to do proxy arp or something, which doesn't handle ipv6. That said it's probably 15 year old hardware. I ended up using a wireguard tunnel across it instead.
Thread from two months ago (626 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777894
Interesting to see the per-country rates[1]. France is up to 85%, apparently!
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
The more mobile traffic, the more IPv6. Have a look at India, it is not as if everyone has a fibre connection running IPv6.
My home internet has IPv6 but my mobile carrier doesn't. IPv6 on mobile carriers is unfortunately still not universal.
I'd however mention, the two biggest ISPs that remain today both have adopted IPv6 on their fiber connections. They're also heavily using CGNAT for IPv4. It makes sense, the volume at which they're working makes dedicated IPv4 very uneconomical.
Well, France has 99% IPv6 deployment through both mobile and landline these days
https://www.arcep.fr/fileadmin/reprise/observatoire/ipv6/Arc...
(2025, from 2024 data)
Reason that Google isn't seeing more is a) some BigCo v4 holdouts b) happy eyeballs sometimes landing on v4 because their v6 is shitty 6rd or something (e.g Free SAS)
You mean that Free's ipv6 is not implemented correctly?
Google hits 50% IPv6, very good for accessing websites.
But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.
Put OpenWRT on the thing and you'll be able to do what you want. Experience the joy of adding not port forwarding rules for IPv4 but more or less identical (same ports) access rules for IPv6.
All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
To your point, IPv6 sought to replace NAT with just having enough addresses but interestingly, that created a problem. If you used NAT and had a service on your computer request a port for incoming connections, that showed intent on behalf of the owner of that service. IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.
So is the bigger address range better? Technically, maybe? But you have to consider defaults and intents of users. And that can take a good technical solution to a bad solution or at least create a whole bunch of problems.
I don't think this is inherently a problem. It's good for home routers to have sensible defaults. Blocking incoming IPv6 connections is such a thing. Opening a port in the firewall shows the same kind of intent as forwarding a port with NAT. The burden is on the router manufacturers to expose these options in a sensible way. My router for example has a similar UI to forwarding a port with IPv4 and opening the port for IPv6.
Using NAT as a firewall might work but it brings it's own problems. I find the IPv6 way better.
> I don't think this is inherently a problem. [...] My router for example has a similar UI to forwarding a port with IPv4 and opening the port for IPv6.
Glad to hear that you don't have a problem with your router, but how does that relate to GPs problems with theirs?
> There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it.
Nobody includes their MAC address in their public IPv6 addresses anymore, but every IPv6 setup that I've seen still gives every device a unique globally-routable IPv6 address, with no NAT at all.
> One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks.
The nice thing is that a /64 is big enough that clients can just randomly pick any address, and it will almost certainly be available, meaning that you don't need DHCP. This is actually widely implemented, and is known as SLAAC [0].
> Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
The extra address space only adds 16 bytes to every packet, and it ensures that we will never run out of addresses like we did with IPv4.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...
With current addressing scheme we only have 2^13 times more site addresses than IPv4, which is plenty in absolute numbers, but not necessarily enough for more coarse aggregation, and definitely not infinitely future proof.
Crucially though, if we change it, we just have to change how addresses are allocated, not change the protocol again.
The point of local networks of a minimum size of 64 bit isn't only to have MAC-based addresses (48 bit would have been enough for that, fwiw), but in general to support non-coordinated/probabilistic self-assignment schemes with negligible collision probability.
Picking a random local address (which is very important for privacy, as you've mentioned) is much easier if you don't have to do an elaborate dance of listen, announce, listen for collisions etc. first (practically that still happens, but collisions are the absolute exception).
> So is the bigger address range better?
Yes, because consider the alternative of re-doing all of this again in a future in which IP usage for some reason jumps by a few orders of magnitude again.
Due to hardware getting better over time, the per-packet cost of a few extra bits is going down all the time, while the cost of rolling out a future IPv7 increases with every new deployed host.
The best thing about SLAAC is that it forces your ISP to give you at least 64 bits. Otherwise you know Comcast would only give out a /128 and charge you for more, so you'd use NAT at home just like IPv4.
> Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
Randomizing the local address doesn't mean it isn't useful. You can't scan a /64 so that's already a major improvement. The fact that randomly selecting a number is effectively never going to collide greatly simplifies automatic network configuration.
The major issue is that the /64 isn't mandatory from a technical perspective. Being merely a subset of the larger address it's nothing more than a convention. In the end not all providers make it available to you even though supposedly they ought to.
If we're going to complain about anything it should be the godawful notation that so easily breaks parsers. Or the fact that the width is massively excessive which creates a usability nightmare due to normal humans not being able to readily recall 128 bit numbers (let alone how long it takes to type them in).
I wonder if there will ever come a day when IPv6 will provide a better web experience than IPv4.
At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4 but a lot not via IPv6. Will there be a day when this turns around?
> a better web experience than IPv4
That's already the case. IPv6 is often faster because most ISPs these days use cgnat for IPv4.
I have yet to see any ISP use CGNAT here in Sweden. It seems to be a highly regional problem for some reason. Both on mobile and on broadband I get publicly routable IPv4.
In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts.
This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.
Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this.
Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean. This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this.
Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption.
I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong.
It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense.
The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.
> This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.
Do you have examples for this? I've never experienced this, and I've been using IPv6 for years.
Also, how can you be sure that the same request to IPv4 would have been fine? Did you actually see consistent failures on v6 and consistent success on v4? Otherwise, if a service has a reasonably low error rate, success on retry is the expected outcome, regardless of the path the retry takes.
That depends on your isp. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’ve never had an isp on the U.K. which didn’t give me at least a dynamic ipv4 address to my router.
Infact the only isp I have seen do it is starlink and I have contacts with ISPs in 60 different counties.
Note that most ISPs are cellphone networks and most end devices are cellphones.
That fraction of a millisecond doesn't meaningfully translate into a better experience for users.
You're assuming the ISP has dimensioned their CGNAT properly and it's not congested.
Milliseconds matter for gaming, for example.
Vast majority of people gaming are doing it via wifi
True but not deploying any IPv4 connectivity would be a worse experience than not deploying IPv6.
Faster webrtc establishments and other negotiated connections. CGNAT means more relayed than P2P connections so it should be possible to have more direct traffic for services that want to save that bandwidth.
I would expect online video games to be a more important driver.
and anything P2P. Maybe that would have been a driver 20 years ago, but now everything is expected to be centralised. Our culture has shifted. Remember when people used to host their game servers? If you're under 16, you don't because it was never in your lifetime.
I have to open a hole in my firewall to host any service. Nat doesn’t change that.
Unless you want to host multiple minecraft servers on the same port on different servers at home?
Indeed hosting anything at home is such a rare workflow that someone wanting it can choose an isp which gives them the facilities they need.
Unless you don’t live in a competitive market based economy and just have the single government mandated isp aimed at the lowest common denominator, in which case you’ve got far worse problems.
Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.
But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#ipv4-vs-ipv6
I made my homepage (www.makonea.com) support IPv6 too, but the number of people actually using it is much smaller than I expected. Is IPv6 really that widely used? I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is. Sometimes, when behind Cloudflare, I think even if someone connects via IPv6, it ends up coming through as IPv4
> Is IPv6 really that widely used?
Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too.
> I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is.
The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.
I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.
You can do IPv6 only if you have a 64 nat on your edge and use dns64 and just use a limited set of applications and devices.
Some applications will still fail to work though unless you also have 46 nat on your device which still doesn’t work transparently on majority of types of device.
You also need all devices on your lan to support v6 natively, and v6 only. From your printer to your speaker.
You might be able to do something with mdns and nat64 to get them working on an IPv4 only subnet. But you’re talking layers and layers of complexity for things which just have to work.
I’m posting this from my phone on my IPv6 only subnet, not sure if it’s using a 64 gateway or 6 native to HN, but it’s possible.
So, like, the three most popular things still worked.
All the more reason to support it. There are lots of ISPs that only assign you an IPv6, and do hacky trickery to make IPv4 work over that. We wouldn’t need all of this.
It's good to support it to resolve the chicken egg problem. If no service supports it, there is no sense in deploying it to the customers and the other way around.
Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.
For people like me: DS Lite stands for "IPv6 dual-stack lite". My mind went directly to Nintendo and I was confused.
Unfortunately, individual actions would never be enough to solve the IPv6 chicken and egg problem. See djb's "IPv6 mess" article:
https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.
This stuff is obvious now, but I think back then this was probably quite clever.
It's not a lot but it's better to be part of the solution than the problem even if it is an insignificant contribution.
For client server web browsing what's the downside of CGNAT? I'd understand if we were talking about self hosting a service from home but for typical consumer usage?
1. Peer-to-peer networking won't usually work correctly. And quite a bit of software uses P2P networking these days---BitTorrent, Zoom/Teams (via WebRTC), Tailscale, PlayStation/Xbox multiplayer, etc. Most of these services have automatic fallbacks when P2P networking doesn't work, but these fallbacks are usually slower and less reliable.
2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run into rate limits. Or even worse, you might be blocked entirely if your CGNAT neighbours are spammers or otherwise breaking website rules.
While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above). It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that. I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
> While true, neither of those are relevant in context (and I even explicitly acknowledged your first bullet in my comment above).
Yeah, I just mentioned that because P2P networking is used a lot more than most people think these days, since even things like Zoom that look like typical client–server web browsing actually use P2P networking internally.
> It was suggested that a website operator deploying IPv6 would somehow improve the end user experience by virtue of avoiding CGNAT and I was questioning that.
Reliability and latency will be marginally better with IPv6 than with CGNAT, but this is so minor that I doubt that most people will notice this. And many CGNATs will RST connections that last too long, but most protocols have some sort of automatic retry/reconnect built in, so this shouldn't cause issues very often either.
IPv6 addresses are quite a bit cheaper than IPv4 addresses in most clouds, but since most servers still need to support IPv4, this doesn't help you directly. Supporting IPv6 means that others using the cheaper IPv6-only cloud services will be able to connect to your server, but this doesn't matter for consumer-only services.
So yeah, you're probably right that enabling IPv6 server-side won't have (m)any benefits.
> I do of course appreciate that going via CGNAT to a clueless operator that eagerly adds IPv4 bans can be problematic but that's more a question of why you as a consumer might want IPv6 connectivity not why a service provider would want to deploy it.
Being able to ban IP addresses without worrying about collateral damage is a pretty big benefit to the service provider though, for certain applications at least.
When hosting a server IPv6 doesn't make a huge difference beyond your logs will probably be a bit more accurate, people behind CGNAT where an ISP has multiple customers sharing a block of IPv4 will show up with their actual IPv6 address. They'll maybe also find it slightly quicker because they're not being funnelled through NAT gateways but realistically not enough to notice.
From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)
Thank you for the advice. By any chance, have you worked with Ruby before? I remember seeing your username back when Ruby was popular and I first started learning it in university
How does IPV6 affect ip blocking. As a VPN user I wish it wasn't used as a metric for sites shaking you down.
It's just as easy or hard to map out a VPN's egress subnets on v6 than it is on v4.
I assume for aggressive blocking the only prefix size will change. What is a /32 for IPv4 might become a /64 or smaller for IPv6.
2026. Literally no reason to be using this outdated limited addressing.
New regex: IP(any collection of numbers and dots).
Now we have infinite IP address possibilities and no one controls the space.
Done.
What does a packet header look like?
In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
And I've only ever had v6, both on DOCSIS and fiber. Both observations are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things; actual adoption rates are what matter.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration.
That's a pretty wild thing to say in the comment section of an article about v6 reaching 50% eyeballs-side deployment.
I’ve yet to live anywhere where the available mainstream ISPs were willing or able to provide IPv6 service. I’d be happy to use it, if I were able.
I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested in the full network re-architecture required to truly support it internally.
There are still several basic services you can’t run IPv6-only in AWS, and a handful of AWS service features that don’t support it at all.
As a sysadmin for decades now, I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous. But I’d love to be supporting it in everything I do. Only I still can’t, even after 20+ years of being lectured about it; even after complete IPv4 exhaustion has been reached. I don’t think we’re ever going to turn IPv4 off. At best it will be progressively hidden, even from technical users. And folks like me will just have to keep building workarounds to patch the holes where IPv6 still doesn’t work.
> I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous.
Most software continues to have horrible IPv6 support and documentation making it look more complicated, but the actual protocol is considerably simpler than IPv4. For example:
1. An IPv4 packet header is variable-length, and the checksum must be recalculated by every router because the TTL is included in the checksum. Whereas an IPv6 packet header is fixed-length and has no checksum.
2. NAT is effectively required with IPv4, but it makes everything much more complicated, since it means that most computers don't even know their "real" IP address, it makes peer-to-peer networking very challenging, and it's tricky for routers to implement. Whereas with IPv6, no NAT is required.
3. Any router along the network path is allowed to fragment an IPv4 packet, and is in fact required to if its MTU is smaller than the packet's size. Whereas only the originating node is allowed to fragment an IPv6 packet.
4. To acquire an IPv4 address, both clients and routers must implement DHCP, which is a fairly complicated protocol, and both clients and routers must remember the list of assigned addresses. Whereas with IPv6, the client can just choose a random address (via SLAAC) and then start using it immediately.
5. IPv6 multicast is considerably simpler than IPv4 multicast, and NDP (v6) is considerably simpler than ARP (v4).
Despite all this, I agree with you that setting up IPv6 networking is harder than setting up IPv4 networking, but this is more of a software problem than a protocol problem.
The only one I don't understand is how NDP is simpler than ARP. ARP is an Ethernet broadcast while NDP is built on IPv6 multicast which creates a recursive chicken and egg situation.
I'm interested, apart from the chicken egg problem, what are things that you found bad about IPv6. What do you think is overengineered?
I personally found that the features I interacted with were useful (SLAAC, address size, router advertisements, ...) and the changes made it cleaner (removal of broadcast for multicast, removal of fragmentation fields, ...).
> apart from the chicken egg problem
"But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Did you call your ISP and ask? Some of them support it but won't enable it by default.
And 32% is all llm/bots using AWS and other "pay for ipv4 IP" use cases.
As someone on the fighting end of scrapers, this is absolutely not true. If anything I should bais towards v6 as the traffic is on par better than v4
Just remove the A record, and nearly all the scrapers disappear. :-) (And then you get one email per month or so that “your host does not resolve in DNS”.)
Google is having a real issue with LLMs using it for search. As in, real load issues. Unless you're running a publicly accessible search engine, and the top one at that, the LLM traffic you're seeing is not representative.
Citation needed. These numbers are quite consistent with the growth pattern that started well before usable LLMs were even a thing.
Took them long enough. Now if only Google would follow with their own services.
Sure Gmail has ipv6 enabled and routable ip6 MX. but sending to those addresses is often rejected and forced to retry over ipv4.
Don’t get me started on gh
I want Google gone. This company is causing too many problems.
I am still sometimes using Google Search. First results are now almost always videos on youtube, aka self-promo. These videos are in 99.9% of the search results I use, totally useless and worthless. Even searching on youtube has recently gotten worse. It is also crap now. I know that because I bookmark various videos, and I can not find older videos anymore either. I can eliminate some results I don't care via ublock origin hero-blocking this Google garbage, but I really think we should no longer allow this de-facto monopoly to worsen the global situation any longer. The USA is protecting these gangsters - it is time to have true legislation that gets rid of that mafia bloc that is Google.
Great example of how fixing things "the correct way" does not seem to work sometimes.
They added those new addresses that can store more information.. but this requires a rewrite of old software to make it work.
If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.
Actually no software rewrite is needed because the Berkeley Sockets API is agnostic to address format. If your software requires a particular address format, that's a bug. if you pass an IPv6 literal to getaddrinfo, you get a result with an IPv6 address structure and it tells you the IPv6 socket type you need to connect to it.
There is no space to put the additional octets. Supporting this would have needed a rewrite anyways. Nothing won there. They took that as a chance to improve the protocol overall.
Software availability isn't really the problem. For most software there was no change at all ("connect to that host" or "listen to any device" and operating system will handle details), most software which needed adaption had it for a while (picking up a devices explicitly, handling of IPv6 addressees, ...) while maybe not equally good (missing GUI improvements for better handling of IPV6 addresses)
The problems, as I observe, are more in network infrastructure, routing, etc.
I never heard this idea before, but more octets would be a lot prettier!!
Are you just talking about how you write the addresses or are you talking about the actual protocol?
The IPv4 protocol has 4 octets each for source and destination address. Period. If you change that, your packets won't work on any IPv4 routers or software any more.
If you want to write IPv6 addresses as numbers separated by dots no one's stopping you but I don't see how it's better. They switched to hex because the old format was too long.
They added 12 more octets. I mean we could have written IPv6 addresses in the old format but I don't think that
42.0.20.80.64.1.192.15.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113
is easier to remember than
2a00:1450:4001:c0f::71 (or 2a00:1450:4001:0c0f:0000:0000:0000:0071)
You have not heard if before, because that is the most naive and stupid take imaginable. It is the “let them eat cake” of networking.
It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?
You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.
First thing I do on a fresh Linux install is set ipv6 to deactivated. Fixes all my initial Linux install problems. I don't question it, it just works every time.
Something is very wrong with your network then. I never needed to disable IPv6. Maybe you should question it.
It is harder to maintain two networks instead of one. Potential problems double. Hacks like RFC8305 "Happy Eyeballs" become a must.
Fair enough. I do question it often.
It's a standard Asus router but it's given me a lot of ire. I hate to say it but it's never a problem when I install windows on the same machines
(I'm currently in the process of trying to completely remove windows from my life)
Similar experience. I bought an ASUS router and enabled IPv6. It slowed down everything down. Immediately flashed OpenWrt on it, IPv6 works like charm.
It's usually bad configuration done by the router vendors. It doesn't mean IPv6 is bad.
There are maybe many buggy routers still out there that reset the IPv6 flow label field when they shouldn't, breaking hash-based load-balancers (the symptom is TCP connections spontaneously reset).
IIRC, a workaround was to prevent Linux from setting this field, or force-reset it on every outbound packet using netfilter.
Skill issue.
UX issue, and UX issues are often downplayed by engineers, leading to adoption failures.
Another such example is SELinux, which would have prevented so many vulnerabilities from being exploited, but whose poor UX also caused everyone to disable it at install time.
SELinux's UX was significantly improved many years later, but already too late to change ingrained opinions. There are a lot of ingrained opinions about IPv6 too.
Conversely it means people who have ISPs that do IPv6 just have IPv6 and don't need to turn it off. Because it just works. The other day my IPv4 was down and I didn't even notice.
> SELinux's UX was significantly improved many years later
in what way?