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296 points jmillikin | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.791s | source | bottom
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simonjgreen ◴[] No.44411529[source]
Slightly misleading title, this is more “getting to the IPv4 internet via an IPv6 tunnel through a VPS”. Also just called 4in6.

Interesting nonetheless!

We find at our ISP that if we break something with IPv4 we experience a very different type of support issue to if we break IPv6. Breaking v4 results in, broadly, a pretty hard “down” state. While folks are unhappy, it is at least simple. Breaking v6 results in weird, and a partial down, which manifests for the users as partial outages, slow starts due to fall back, etc. Especially if their gateways believe there is v6 when there isn’t.

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msgodel ◴[] No.44413734[source]
Most ISPs still just block IPv6 altogether because most small businesses seem to try IPv6 once and then forget to eg update their AAAA records so to the user it looks like their favorite niche thing works when they're on <low quality ISP at friend's house/coffee shop> but not on the one they're paying for which creates problems.

It's kind of a weird issue, I don't know if there are nice solutions other than hoping IPv4 just goes away eventually. Happy eyeballs was supposed to solve this but often the problems manifest way up in the application layer and there's no general protocol for solving that without some kind of very leaky abstraction because the application can do anything.

The compromise I personally have to make things smooth is enabling ipv6 in the network and then disabling ipv6 DNS on all of my browsers which is pretty unsatisfying.

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1. umanwizard ◴[] No.44414641[source]
> Most ISPs still just block IPv6 altogether

That’s increasingly not true, at least in developed countries. Traffic to Google in the US has been majority IPv6 since a few months ago.

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2. bombcar ◴[] No.44414813[source]
Majority mobile and majority ipv6 are basically the same thing.
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3. immibis ◴[] No.44416458[source]
And developing countries don't have much choice since they have to share about 5 addresses per city.
4. snuxoll ◴[] No.44418215[source]
I mean, basically every major mobile in the developed world adopted IPv6 when they were rolling out new core infrastructure to handle LTE (T-Mobile USA being notable as one of the first to go IPv6 only). When you consider the deployment of VoLTE (and now VoNR for 5G networks) in particular, rolling out IPv6 internally removes a lot of nastiness that SIP/IMS have with NAT (and CG-NAT in particular), so it's little surprise that it happened.

What surprises me more is the very mixed state of small to midsized ISPs. Sparklight (regional cable provider) still does not support IPv6 in any fashion even though it would be financially beneficial to auction off a significant portion of its v4 holdings (nearly 1.3mm addresses), deploy DNS64+NAT64 (plus CG-NAT as a fallback) and hold onto a chunk for their business customers who still need inbound v4 connectivity. My local fixed-wireless ISP that's my only real option (love them, but this is a bugbear of mine) since I moved last year only offers CG-NAT, and I know their equipment can handle v6 fine which would save them some resources (no expensive state tracking on edge equipment or dedicated CG-NAT gateways) and provide a better customer experience (multiplayer games, VoIP traffic, etc.)

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5. xcrunner529 ◴[] No.44418661[source]
Astound still doesn’t either and they are large.
6. jeroenhd ◴[] No.44423485[source]
My mobile carrier here in the Netherlands doesn't do IPv6. Mobile traffic doesn't automatically mean IPv6, unfortunately.

I have my VPN permanently enabled for Pihole reasons anyway, so my IPv6 access works that way, but it's pretty stupid.

7. umanwizard ◴[] No.44439064[source]
It's not just mobile. My previous (Verizon Fios in NYC) and current (Cox in Tucson) home ISPs both support IPv6.