Comment by crawshaw
4 days ago
(exe.dev co-founder here)
IPv6 does not work on the only ISP in my neighborhood that provides gigabit links. I will not build a product I cannot use.
Even when IPv6 is rolled out, it is only tested for consumer links by Happy Eyeballs. Links between DCs are entirely IPv4 even when dual stacked. We just discovered 20 of our machines in an LAX DC have broken IPv6 (because we tried to use Tailscale to move data to them, which defaults to happy eyeballs). Apparently the upstream switch configuration has been broken for months for hundreds of machines and we are the first to notice.
I am a big believer in: first make it work. On the internet today, you first make it work with IPv4. Then you have the luxury of playing with IPv6.
> IPv6 does not work on the only ISP in my neighborhood that provides gigabit links. I will not build a product I cannot use.
Cool.
Somebody else will, and will likely have a better price (due to the abundance of ipv6 addresses) and you’ll go out of business.
> because we tried to use Tailscale to move data to them, which defaults to happy eyeballs
Not gonna lie, to me that reads like “because we don’t know how to use ipv6”
Whenever I see a comment that says "if you don't do the thing in the most efficient way possible, someone else will steal your lunch", I think that people vastly overestimate the likelihood that this will actually happen.
It's similar to "open source is the most secure because it has the most eyeballs on it", but in reality security bugs will exist for years with no one noticing because people vastly overestimate how any developers will actually spend their time analyzing any given open source software.
Sure, bugs are more likely to be caught in open source and it's more likely someone will take your market share with a more efficient and competitively priced product, but you're overblowing the likelihood of both by a large margin.
> "if you don't do the thing in the most efficient way possible, someone else will steal your lunch"
Well you’re leaving behind both a serious pain point for your users AND you’re leaving in the open a clearly more compute- and money-efficient way to achieve the objective on the table.
It’s literally giving your eventual competitors (because there will be competitors, eventually) a competitive advantage.
Then sure, the market is very wide but… just look at stackoverflow vs chatgpt. As soon as a better alternative came on the market, stackoverflow died to irrelevance within months.
A service that only does IPv6 is not "working" any more. I'm not saying to go v6 only, but there's no excuse to not support IPv6.
Have you looked at each service running through a cloudflare tunnel or (HE offers something similar too)?
(PS: I use exe.dev quite a lot whenever I want to have a project and basic scripting doesn't work and I want to have a full environment, really thanks for having this product I really appreciate it as someone who has been using it since day one and have recommended/talked about your service in well regards to people :>)
You can get this effect today by installing Tailscale on your exe.dev VM. :)
The reason we put so much effort into exposing these publicly is for sharing with a heterogeneous team without imposing a client agent requirement. The web interface should be easy to make public, easy to share with friends with a Google Docs-style link, and ssh should be easy to share with teammates.
That said, nothing wrong with installing tunneling software on the VM, I do it!