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The IPv6 Transition

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215 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 05:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | 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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lmm ◴[21 Oct 24 03:42 UTC] No.41900489[source]▶
> 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.

A couple of other practically useful things:

- You never get address collisions when connecting to someone else's VPN, or connecting to your home network via VPN from someone else's private network (if you've set that up)

- If there are two people living in your home, they can play online games against a mutual friend who doesn't live in the home without anything breaking

I think you're right that IPv6 isn't a game-changing improvement for most people. It gets rid of some annoyances, it's the obviously correct thing to do for new networks (and cheaper than setting up CGNAT), but fundamentally the pile of hacks on IPv4 is "good enough" for most use cases.

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ktosobcy ◴[21 Oct 24 06:23 UTC] No.41901187[source]▶
so for anyone that "just browses the web" (which is overwhelming majority) there is virtually no difference/benefit?

I don't play online games, don't use VPN, have a couple of services on my local RPi that has port forwarded on router and that's it...

ipv6 could be handy when testing some service on my laptop and trying with external services but this happens so rarely that it's not an issue... on the flipside, whenever I enable ipv6 I usually run into problems :|

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1. James_K ◴[21 Oct 24 23:13 UTC] No.41909535[source]▶
It's likely the web itself has been shaped by the technology underpinning it. The article would seem to suggest something similar. Look at email. Now we all connect to the central email servers at Google and they handle most of everything else. Perhaps on the IPv6 internet, you would be able to buy a USB stick that handles all your emails for you. No more centralised mail, you just have a small server in your house that does it for you. The same of social media, etc. It would be feasible to offer an entire plug-and-play P2P internet in the form-factor and cost of a small HDD.

Would people want to own such a server? I don't know, but as it stands currently, only the centralised players in the internet sphere can afford to serve content. Perhaps our relationship to these companies would be different if there was no barrier to entry for competition. Perhaps our entire conception of the internet would be different without that fundamental limitation. Or perhaps nothing would change. The central model has its advantages, but I'd also like to be able to own my own website.