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?
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
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.
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.
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.
a teammate implemented it because he thought it would be a good resume project. it added more maintenance work to a lot of pieces, forever. there is no measurable benefit to the business
I 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.
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.
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 -
Both my employer and my home ISP use IPv6 since many years now and so does all my own stuff, it’s wonderfully convenient to have a globally unique address for everything that I connect to the network.
With NAT existing, I’m not sure there’s a significant reason to switch anymore.
Plus the “surprise” privacy and security benefits of just… not having every network connected device directly addressable by anyone else on the global network. The face of the internet and networking in general, plus the security and safety concerns around it, have changed dramatically since v6 was first created.
NAT is just security by obscurity and actually not really security at all. What’s protecting you from incoming scans, etc is your network firewall. That firewall works just the same for IPv6. Blocking incoming traffic for your home network is usually the default setting in your ISP issued router anyway.
Working as a network engineer, NAT in a large scale customer environment can quickly devolve into a clusterfuck. Many times we had week long reachability issues due to intermediate ISPs NATing unexpectedly.
My nemesis is GCNAT, which adds another layer of NAT because some ISPs don’t have enough public IP space for all their customers to go around.
I have a customer where their ISP just assigned one of their locations public IPv4 addresses. Neither the customer, nor the ISP owned that address space. Their logic was that this address space is registered on a different continent, so it’s basically fair game to use it themselves. Granted, they only route it internally for a MPLS network, but still…
What I’m getting at is that NAT increases complexity and breaks properly routed end to end connections. Everyone kinda fucks up with NAT, especially ISPs (in my opinion anyway).
I can really recommend the IPv6 study material from the major internet registries (took the v6 courses from RIPE NCC myself).
IPv6 is so much simpler for subnetting, writing firewall rules,… IMO the addresses just look kinda clunky.
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In next 10-20 years everyone will use IPv6
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.
You can pry my v4 addresses from my cold dead hands.
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??
ipv6 isnt real.
Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.
We turn it off in our office. It doesn’t benefit us.
You could also make the argument that ipv4 through NAT is better for privacy since it obfuscate what, and how many devices are connected to where.
IPv6 has privacy addresses, though. Stuff on my network generates a new random address every day and uses that address for outgoing connections, so you can’t really track individual devices inside my network.
You can just look at what addresses from that range have left the network in any given 24 hour window.
If AAAA is constantly reaching our to aussie.zone one day, and the next day AAAB is reaching out to that address you can pretty easily connect the dots.
But privacy addresses aren’t incremented numbers. And it doesn’t really matter if you can connect the dots, every /64 is the same as a single IPv4 address anyway. Especially for something like Lemmy where the browser will maintain a QUIC connection for ages if you want to track sessions. Besides, you have the session cookies to associate the other end even if they turn off WiFi and move to mobile data.
When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I’m guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There’s a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.
With modern IPv6 (say, Windows 7 or later?) IPv6 privacy extensions solve this problem. Basically, you get a whole bunch of addresses. One based on your MAC address so you can port forward/allow incoming connections in the firewall, and then a bunch of rotating random addresses used for outgoing connections. People that know your prefix and MAC address can find your listening PC, but websites won’t get your MAC address.
As for fingerprinting, thanks to NAT slipstreaming you can choose between “video calling software breaks” and “every malicious ad can access any port on your device” or in some extreme cases “every malicious ad can access any device in your network”. Some websites have also been caught scanning IPv4 networks to figure out where your router lives using standard Javascript, so your IPv4 network isn’t any better protected. At least with IPv6 a website can’t take ten seconds to scan 255 addresses and figure out how many devices are on your network!
Noobie question, wouldn’t the ISP decide what your outgoing IPv6 address is? Like they do with IPv4? I mean no matter how many times I restart my router, my public IP remains the same so I always thought it was assigned by them.
That was so insane - “we need a unique number, let’s just use the MAC” - it was like people didn’t even think through any of the implications when making ipv6 address schemes.
Similar with the address proposals that ignored the need to minimise the size of core internet routing tables so that they would fit in routers’ memory.
That proposal was made when every computer hooked straight into the internet without a firewall. Every device already had a unique IP address that was globally routable and you needed to race to a firewall download page before a scanner would infect your computer (you had about five minutes, much less if you had the network cable plugged in during setup).
The routing table size reduction has always been stupid. The protocol should not be adjusted to help the penny pinchers save on RAM. And the same problem happened to IPv4 a few years ago, because nobody learned their lesson.
