
16 Years with IPv6 - okket
http://teamarin.net/2017/06/12/16-years-with-ipv6/
======
lwhalen
In Seattle and surrounding areas, Comcast is more or less the only game in
town (with Centurylink a distant, distant second) if you're not in one of a
dozen high-rise apartment buildings. For all their marketing around 'extensive
IPv6 rollout', I've found their deployment to be hideously broken and their
support staff deeply ignorant. Been here 3 years, moved once, and it's just
terrible. My latest foray into trying to get delegation to work was this past
weekend, and I had a Comcast supervisor (in Business class!) tell me that
"static anything is not a priority for the vast majority of their customers.
You can either have static v4 addresses or v6 connectivity, but not both"
after several hours of troubleshooting and 'automatically closed/resolved
tickets' with their level 2 support folks. It's one of the more brazen "we
dare you to stop being our customer" moves I've certainly been privvy to.

tl; dr - Comcast v6 works great on Business-class until you push a static v4
config, then it just stops responding to DHCPv6 and SLAAC requests. Ignorance
and aggravation ensued from Comcast support, at all levels I was able to get
ahold of. Being a monopoly is awesome.

~~~
edoceo
In Seattle there is also CondoInternet - a fiber company in many of the newer
development. But, I've seen an entire building on a NAT private network. It's
included in your HOA.

~~~
belovedeagle
Condointernet got acquired by Wave (branded Wave G); then they fired most of
the condointernet staff it seems. Wave recently got acquired themselves so
we'll see how much worse it gets.

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thinkMOAR
Are these truly all the findings of the author after 16 years of running IPv6?

I find the list/number of points very little and most are common knowledge or
been in countless of how to roll out ipv6 guides.

The mentioning that if end users have problems accessing your site, you should
roll out ipv6 to your internal network, reads a 'bit' strange.

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andruby
If we continue on the current trend as reported by Google [0] we should reach
20% IPv6 adoption by the end of this year.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

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toss1941
I think of IPv6 like driving a stick shift car that you skip a gear with. If
you're lucky, the engine won't stall but even if it doesn't, you'll be
accelerating very slowly until the RPMs catch back up to where they should be.
In IPv6's case they skipped 3 gears because they knew the car couldn't
possibly stall, but here we are, barely accelerating after all this time.

~~~
bluejekyll
Hm, this analogy is awkward. Definitely agree that it's taken a lot longer to
become standard than I would like.

I was discussing this with a coworker today, and we were reflecting on a
similar technical rollout that really did take of. The various ascii encodings
-> UTF8. This was a big shift at the time and took a lot of time to fix. In
fact I know of one large DB that, after a huge amount of outreach with
customers, was only finally decommed and replaced with a UTF8 last year.

We decided the big difference was that UTF8 solved a huge problem that
effected everyone. Was backward compatible with all basic ascii, and was an
easy upgrade in many cases (only a problem if you bastardized stored character
sets faking out the system and storing them in a different charset).

IPv6 is nicely backward compatible with IPv4, but in general it is not solving
a problem most people have (yet). Most sites work fine with IPv4; IPv6 for
many is just work with no significant benefit in general.

That being said, I really want IPv6 to become the only option for a lot of
reasons; but there is no stron forcing function.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> but in general it is not solving a problem most people have (yet).

I don't think that that's actually true. People have massive problems due to
NAT and overlapping address ranges and stuff ... but it's just commonly
accepted as the way IP works, people don't realize that they could just deploy
IPv6 and do away with all those problems.

~~~
bluejekyll
Some people sure. But it's nowhere near the number of people that UTF8 solved
for.

It would definitely make people's network connectivity simpler and less error
prone, but I just don't see it as a huge pressing need.

If NATs didn't exist at all, then this would have been such a huge issue that
it would have been _needed_. For most though, NAT is generally good enough.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
I am not all that sure about that, really.

I guess for most simple home users, it's currently not a huge pressing issue,
true. But anything beyond that and you constantly run into issues. And that
includes home users who also have to use some VPN to their workplace ...

But that does not mean that NAT really is good enough, it just means that
deployed systems nowadays just take it as a given that NAT exists, and any
technology that isn't compatible with NAT simply doesn't exist. Which makes it
less of a pressing issue in a way, but that does not mean that it doesn't
still cause huge costs even to home users in terms of missed opportunities of
a NAT-free world.

~~~
bluejekyll
I see that. And in general I agree with you. I think the only thing being
debated here is the urgency of the change, and the harm being done to
networks.

Many companies get away with NAT just fine; and that's the entire point. It
works well enough that for many it's just not an urgent issue.

Like you said, it would make a lot of technology easier to deploy and build.
The orthogonal comment about the Cellphone industry pushing the issue is right
on the money. For them this significantly simplies their network management
(which has tons of devices moving around). For laptops on wifi this would
probably be better as well, but there so much is just solved by the fact that
the Web is capable of tracking users across IPs with cookies.

Again I'm not arguing against IPv6; I'm just trying to better understand why
it's deployment isn't being done as urgently as that of other things, like
UTF8. I think the answer is in the fact that we've built so many workarounds
that it stretched IPv4 well beyond its end-of-life.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> I think the answer is in the fact that we've built so many workarounds that
> it stretched IPv4 well beyond its end-of-life.

Well, that is true in a way (I mean, without NAT (or something similar), there
obviously would not be any way to keep going, so, yeah, in that sense, NAT has
made things somewhat bearable instead of completely unworkable, thus making
the migration to v6 less urgent).

But my point is that the reason why people (companies in particular) aren't
migrating to a large extent seems to me to not be because it wouldn't be worth
it for them, but rather that they lack the understanding to see that it would
be. There are lots and lots of admins out there who operate IP networks and
essentially have no clue of IP routing. They have grown up in a world of NAT,
and just understand "the router" as "the public internet termination point" or
whatever you want to call it. They don't even see NAT as a workaround, but as
the obvious and natural state of affairs, because, what are you gonna do if
you want to connect more than one machine to your internet connection? You
need a router! And router is synonymous with NAT gateway, because that's why
you need the router ... or something.

If your whole mindset doesn't even allow you to see the possibility of the
natural state of the internet (i.e. end-to-end addressability of all
participants), you won't ever notice all the workarounds that you are using.
And if, say, port forwarding doesn't occur to you as being a workaround, but
rather the obvious thing you just need to do to make some internal machine
reachable from the outside, then you also never get the idea that IPv6 might
be the solution. You just assume that IPv6 obviously also has to have port
forwarding, because you still want to make internal machines reachable from
the outside, don't you?

------
ch0wn
I'm with a regional ISP in the UK (aquiss.net) and they assign you a native
/56 if you ask nicely. What surprised me was how complicated it still is to
get this set up compared to the DHCP and NAT setup we're all familiar with. It
took me quite a while to figure out how to distribute addresses in my network
and even get my pppd configured to request the prefix.

------
awelkie
It seems to me that there are disadvantages to widespread IPv6 adoption for
some big companies. For example, storage providers like Dropbox or Google
Drive would take a hit if I were able to send files via a direct connection to
a friend's computer, which is possible with IPv6. Right now, the best way to
send large files is to upload them somewhere and then send a link (dynamic DNS
is also possible, but certainly not as easy to set up as simply being granted
a globally routable IP address). Another example is for ISPs or anyone who
sells static IP addresses (e.g. AWS); IPv6 means severely decreasing the
scarsity of a resource that they own and profit from, which I'm sure they
wouldn't like.

To generalize, I think IPv6 represents more freedom for end-users in the form
of better p2p services, but I think it also represents a loss in profit for
some large companies. These companies play a roll in the IPv6 rollout, so
maybe it's not surprising that the rollout has been slower than expected.

~~~
bfred_it
There are plenty of methods for direct transfer already, I don't think a
different IP (with its likely non-trivial setup) would make much of a
difference for Dropbox.

Keep in mind that would you describe would require both computers to be on at
the same time, and that often doesn't happen either.

Dropbox would be here to stay even in an IPv6 world.

~~~
awelkie
Of course it would. I'm saying easy p2p transfer may reduce the usage of
Dropbox, not obsolete it.

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coding123
I keep wondering what will happen on AWS or Google when available public v4
IPs run out/low... Start charging $15 per address?

~~~
lumisota
They already charge on AWS. The cost of 1 IP is built-in to the hourly cost,
with extras and those attached to stopped instances charged explicitly.

~~~
nodesocket
Has the price per elastic IP ever gone up though on AWS? I don't think so, but
you'd expect price to rise over time as less addresses become available.

~~~
Xorlev
EIPs only cost money if they're unattached. Otherwise they're free.

~~~
nodesocket
That's what I am saying, the cost of an unattached EIP has not gone up has it?

~~~
moduspwnens14
I don't think so, but I do remember when unattached EIPs were free before they
became not-free.

------
firloop
In San Francisco of all places, neither my home nor my office have IPv6. I
wonder at what point the FCC or a similar regulating entity will require IPv6
rollouts (do they even have the power to do that?).

I have Webpass (now owned by Google Fiber) at home and Sonic.net at work.

~~~
dylz
Webpass doesn't offer IPv6? I've had native from them for a long time in the
past.

~~~
firloop
Googling shows that they have some deployments but at least as far as I can
tell from my network settings (and
[http://ipv6-test.com](http://ipv6-test.com)) I do not have an IPv6 address.
Perhaps they never got around to updating my apartment building.

~~~
IvyMike
My ISP (Spectrum) only enables IPv6 to a subset of their "supported" cable
modem list. In other words, if you don't have the right cable modem, you may
get IPv4 but don't get IPv6.

It's possible your provider may do the same.

~~~
posguy
Charter includes the modem with their plans though, so why would you not just
ask for an IPv6 approved modem? Its not as though they charge an equipment
rental fee like Comcast or Cox...

------
ec109685
IPv6 is not a requirement in all situations. At most enterprises need IPv6 at
their edge to avoid traffic flowing through carrier grade nats. Internally
private IPv4, plus nats for egress are generally fine for most use cases.

~~~
lmm
Internal IPv6 is much cleaner though, and less prone to failures (e.g. anyone
VPNing in from a coffee shop that uses the same private IPv4 range will have a
bad time). If you've already gone to the effort of getting IPv6 to the edge,
surely at that point it's worth pushing it all the way through.

~~~
bkor
Not just that, also in the case when a big company acquires/merges with
another big company. The suggestion to have loads of servers on a private
range such as e.g. 10.x.x.x is nice as it should be unique.. until this
assumption breaks due to combining two networks together. It'll result in
conflicts, discovery that lots of places had the IP address instead of a
hostname, etc. It seems much saner to use IPv6.

------
HankB99
I started to read the article but found the font too distracting. tl;dr I
guess.

I see that my devices get IPV6 and IPV4 addresses. Beyond that I don't know
"if it works." From outside my firewall (pfSense) I wouldn't know how to
access resources within (which are walled off in the first place.)

~~~
flyinghamster
Some useful IPv6 tests:

[http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/](http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/) (goes
far beyond IPv6 testing)

[http://test-ipv6.com/](http://test-ipv6.com/)

If you want to see if things on your network are reachable from outside,
you'll need something else with IPv6 connectivity. In my own case, a T-Mobile
handset with LTE works nicely; if I open up a port to an IPv6 host on my LAN,
I can reach it from the phone.

My home IPv6 connection is via a /60 provided by Comcast, but I'm currently
only using a single /64 out of that pool.

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avodonosov
Don't forget you can always use IPv6 as there are gates to 6th internet over
4th internet.

After all the words Inter Net mean this technology can work over and between
any network, be it Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Token Ring or whatever. And of course it
can work over IP of another version.

~~~
andreyv
One particular mechanism is 6to4:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4). It
works through anycast address 192.88.99.1, so you don't need any provider-
specific setup or subscription.

~~~
vbernat
This mechanism is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. [http://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc7526.txt](http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7526.txt)

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unusximmortalis
16 years! And MS Azure is not there yet... ntz ntz ntz

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shmerl
And Verizon still doesn't support it...

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fivestar
I was assured that by now my socks would be addressable.

