
Ask HN: So why does IPV6 appear to be irrelevant? Will this change? - hoodoof
As a user, developer or sysadmin, I appear to be able to completely ignore IPV6.<p>Is this likely to change any time soon? When will it start to be something that I must pay attention to?
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moreentropy
IPv6 is (getting more) relevant in parts of the world, because (duh) we're
running out of IPv4 addresses. All the backbones and most data centers are
already fully IPv6 capable, don't know about cloud providers though. If I rent
a bare metal or VPS i can expect full IPv6 connectivity, at least with all the
big vendors here in Germany.

We have ISPs here (Unitymedia, one of the largest German cable companies) that
have run out of IPv4 and started handing out IPv6-only contrancts to all new
customers. Those customers have to access IPv4 resources using DS-Lite /CGN
(carrier grade NAT), which is a horrible workaround with a lot of issues.
Funny enugh, the same ISPs won't give IPv6 to existing customers because every
change will probably lead to increased support costs and make the customer
unprofitable.

There was a great talk by a Cisco guy at last year's FOSDEM explaining what to
expect with IPv6 and why CGN really, really sucks. Video:
[https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/no_more_ipv4/](https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/no_more_ipv4/)

So yes, everyone who serves stuff on the internet should care because you
already have or will soon have customers that only have native IPv6 and are
best served reliably over IPv6.

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andypalmer
Facebook are now using IPV6 only for all their internal networking (
[http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/03/facebo...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/03/facebooks-
extremely-impressive-internal-use-of-ipv6/) )

While it's possible to get by on IPV4, most of what we're doing is
workarounds. DHCP is a workaround (although a useful one), NAT is a
workaround, at least some VPN use-cases are workarounds (e.g inter-office
connection between private subnets)

A lot of problems go away when you have essentially unlimited address space to
play with.

The downside so far is that very few providers offer native IPV6. This is
frustrating but manageable. There are tunnelling providers such as Hurricane
Electric ( [http://tunnelbroker.net](http://tunnelbroker.net) ) and SixXs (
[http://sixxs.net](http://sixxs.net) ) Hurricane Electric are great, and they
offer free self-study and certification. I was unable to open an account at
SixXs.

My advice would be to start experimenting with it now. This will give you a
headstart over the rest of the field as IPV6 becomes more popular. If you're
working with new infrastructure, experiment with IPV6 only. If you can solve
those problems, your skills will be in high demand

~~~
zumtar
> My advice would be to start experimenting with it now. This will give you a
> headstart over the rest of the field as IPV6 becomes more popular.

I remember specifically a coworker of mine in 1996 saying that I had 4 years
to learn about _IPng_ as it would be replacing everything by the Year 2000.

I guess the work we had to do stopping planes falling out of the sky and
holding back the Y2K zombie apocalypse delayed that somewhat. :)

------
runjake
You can ignore it because you are blissfully ignorant. This is a good thing,
because it indicates that most cases the transition to IPv6 is fairly seamless
and unnoticeable.

Meanwhile on the network engineering side of things, most of our traffic is
IPv6 _[1]_. I deal with it daily.

 _[1]_ Disclaimer: This varies by provider and client base, but is true in my
case.

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nedludd
I work for a very large company that is supposedly "leading the charge" in the
IPv6 space.

Three years ago all groups were supposed to have converted completely to IPv6
by the end of the year. Never happened.

Back then the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses was "any day now". I guess someone
must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.

I think for us operations types IPv6 is still too complicated. I mean when
someone says "hey, what's the IP of that web server?", saying "192.168.13.129"
is easy. You can even memorize an address like that.
"fe80::2bdd:d4c5:f093:300a", not so much.

Besides the IPv4 address exhaustion problem I don't think anyone has made a
compelling argument for IPv6 yet. At least not on the ground.

~~~
smeyer
>I guess someone must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.

I lived in such a closet one summer a couple of years ago. If I'm getting this
terminology right, they had an entire 16-bit block to themselves (65k
addresses).

~~~
mrbill
Company I just left after 12 years had an entire /8 _and_ a /16\. One of the
projects I worked on in 2014 was moving a lot of the stuff out of the /16
(which had been owned by a subsidiary that was bought almost 20 years ago) and
into the larger subnet.

I heard rumors that they were going to renumber out of the /8 and start using
RFC1918 addresses for all "internal" (non-Internet-facing) stuff in the next
couple of years.

------
forgottenpass
_When will it start to be something that I must pay attention to?_

As long as you're not doing anything sufficiently interesting from a network
perspective (a home LAN and hosting webapps at VM providers do not count)
you've got a least a decade more. No matter how far things advance, in 10
years we'll probably still be supporting stragglers with the ever increasing
ball of complexity we use to avoid going v6-only.

------
wglb
There is just a small issue:
[http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html](http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html)

------
api
For the most part if you're using modern software you can ignore it and it'll
just happen automatically. Your software probably already supports it, so if
you just turn it on it will just work.

The main user-facing and developer-facing difference is a /128 address space.
The rest of the differences can _mostly_ be ignored or learned slowly by most
people who aren't hard-core network admins.

------
midnitewarrior
> When will it start to be something that I must pay attention to?

As soon as people like you decide it is. Chicken and the egg. As long as
things keep working the way they are, don't expect people to move too quickly.

