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The IPv6 Transition

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215 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 05:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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hairyplanter ◴[20 Oct 24 07:13 UTC] No.41893537[source]▶
I have fully implemented IPv6 in my home network.

I have even implemented an IPv6-Only network. It fully works, including accessing IPv4 only websites like github.com via DNS64 and NAT64 at my router.

The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6.

Other than this one use case, IPv6 does nothing for me.

It doesn't work from most hotels, nor from my work lan, nor many other places because most "managed" networks are IPv4 only. It works better at Cafes because they are "unmanaged" and IPv6 is enabled by the most common ISPs, like ATT and Comcast and their provided routers.

Based on this experience, I think IPv6 is less valuable than us HN audience thinks it is. Private networks, NAT, Carrier Grade NAT are good enough, and internet really doesn't care about being completely peer-to-peer.

I think the adoption rate reflects this--it's a linear growth curve over the last 25 years. It should have been exponential.

I think cost of IPv4 reflects this--it is now below the peak, and has leveled off.

As surprising as it seems, IPv4 exhaustion has not been a serious problem. Internet marches on. IPv6 is still a solution looking for a problem, and IPv4 exhaustion wasn't one of them.

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BrandoElFollito ◴[20 Oct 24 07:37 UTC] No.41893647[source]▶
I had to reluctantly deploy ipv6 on my home network because of ISP requirements + will to use pihole.

Ipv6 is hard. I had to learn quite a bit to make it work and not only I see no value, but it is significantly more difficult to use dire to the address length.

I think IPv6 is a missed opportunity, it was probably designed by experts that did not take into account the population that will use it (not the one users who do not care, but the layer above them)

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qwertox ◴[20 Oct 24 07:50 UTC] No.41893708[source]▶
What requirement could an ISP impose on you for you to be forced to migrate the intranet to IPv6 (because of PI-hole)?

You could always place a small NAT-enabled router between your ISP's device and your home network.

The only problem I could see would be the lack of a (semi-)static public IPv4 address, which one could solve by renting a VPS.

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1. BrandoElFollito ◴[20 Oct 24 08:07 UTC] No.41893775{3}[source]▶
My ISP is the French "Free". They provide a router that is difficult to swap with my own (it is possible, but it is way easier to switch it to a bypass mode). With this router comes a TV box that requires IPv6 to work.

When I replace DHCP/DNS with Pihole I need to account for that. While this is not a complex setup once you understand IPv6 you still need to learn it.

I work in IT so I tried to get myself to IPv6 several times but never had any reason to do so (despite self-hosting a lot and generally being a nerd). I had to do that this time and my uninformed opinion is that it could have been done so that it is much simpler for advanced users (but not yet networking experts)

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2. albuic ◴[21 Oct 24 09:30 UTC] No.41902249[source]▶
So you had to learn IPv6 the same way you learned IPv4. The question is: was it harder ? It seems you wanted to know IPv6 without learning it because you thought it would be the same as IPv4. And yes the Free boxes are hard to work with if you don't want to mess with vlan and still have TV services.
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3. qwertox ◴[21 Oct 24 16:14 UTC] No.41905663[source]▶
I think this misses the point. An IPv4-only home network has a lot of benefits, simplifying whatever you to in it which relies on IP addresses which you'll have to handle manually in code and databases.

His scenario is really a PITA, where he's basically forced to migrate to IPv6 only because of IPTV. There might have been a solution by creating an IPv6-only VLAN just for the TV, while keeping the rest at legacy, but it's not really trivial.

IPTV with Deutsche Telekom is also a pain, because they feed it in a separate VLAN and the routers and switches need to handle IGMP messages properly (IGMP proxy, IGMP snooping).

4. yjftsjthsd-h ◴[21 Oct 24 16:49 UTC] No.41905977[source]▶
I think the main difference is that when I learned IPv4, pure-v4 was sufficient. Today, you can't run a pure-v6 network; you have to deal with both. The closest you can get is NAT64, which 1. doesn't always work, and 2. is still annoying to manage. (Which sucks, because doing just v6 would be nice)