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Comment by andix

21 hours ago

IPv6 got some real traction in the last decade. From around 10% adoption up to 50%. It's not dead, like many are claiming. It works fine, just keep implementing it.

56 comments

andix

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throw0101c  21 hours ago

> From around 10% adoption up to 50%.

Google sees 70-80% from some countries:

* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

usui  19 hours ago

I keep IPv4 off on a media computer all the time out of curiosity. IPv6-only is still unusable because only about 5% to 10% of top sites that I find during a Google Search work. It's almost guaranteed that a website will not load on all the top results.

So even if it's true 50% of clients support IPv6, only about 5% to 10% of website hosts do.

Sure a person can do a dual-stack setup or do some IPv4-IPv6 translation, but seriously IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.

  • andix  18 hours ago

    Cloud providers and hosters seem to have the least interest in implementing IPv6. Sitting on a huge supply of IPv4 addresses gives them a competitive advantage. So they try to disable IPv6 as a default.

  • simoncion  15 hours ago

    > ...IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.

    The obsession about "IPv6 only" has never made sense to me. Any decent firewall software will let you write rules that apply regardless of IP version. The "software complexity" argument is bunk... you already have v4 and v6 IP implementations in your OS, and every major OS has provided IP-version-agnostic socket interface code for much more than ten years. If you are using software that is IPv6-capable, it's very likely that it's using IP version agnostic library functions.

    Unless stewardship of the Internet is wrested from the hands of the responsible, level-headed type of folks that run it now and transferred to the hands of folks who think nothing of making backwards-incompatible changes every six months, IPv4 won't stop running across the Internet within the lifetime of anyone who's currently reading HN. This delay is fine. The only thing about IPv4 that's a problem is that its address space is 32 bits wide. Had it been defined with a 128+ bit address space, we wouldn't have seen another version of IP on the Internet. Now that IPv6 is around to reduce address pressure, there's no big need to do anything about IPv4.

    • ebiederm  13 hours ago

      I believe the folks worrying about IPv6 only are just looking ahead to a possible future. Especially when they are looking at the question of do all the pieces work locally, vs do popular domains support it.

      There are domains like T-mobile US that are IPv6 only already. T-mobile runs NAT in the network so that all of IPv4 is NAT'd to IPv6.

      I do think it is reasonable to expect there will become a time when IPv6 is pervasive enough, that new deployments will target users with IPv6 rather than IPv4.

      Once IPv6 becomes the choice to support to get new customers, it is reasonable to expect that IPv4 support will start deteriorating and will eventually fade away.

      I will be very surprised if we don't hit that tipping point in my lifetime. Say the next 30 years.

      1 reply →

    • spauldo  10 hours ago

      I can totally understand why. IP addresses are hard to get for a large chunk of the global population. There's twice as many people as there are IP addresses.

      Plus dual-stack means more work, and more possibilities for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your network. It'd be way easier if you only had to worry about one or the other.

      I live in the US and my ISP gives me one address I have to share across all the machines in my house. That's a tragedy - by all rights I should have a subnet or two. You can't directly address any of my servers from the outside on IPv4 which means I have to do hacky crap like port forwarding and can't use a lot of the older protocols that aren't NAT friendly. And I've got it good compared to most of the world!

      IPv6 gives us back a large chunk of the original premise of the Internet - that all nodes are peers. IPv4 hasn't been able to do that for decades, and it's warped the way we think about networking by separating everyone into consumers and providers.

      4 replies →

  • cowlevel  17 hours ago

    That's very surprising. Cloudflare supports ipv6 and it would be surprising if only 10% of websites you visit use Cloudflare.

    • andix  16 hours ago

      I guess a lot of sites just turn it off. Even if Cloudflare proxies it over IPv4 the IPv6 source address still shows up in server logs. Features like geolocating users or fraud prevention might need additional work for IPv6.

cyberax  16 hours ago

IPv6 is dead. Nobody cares about it.

I will believe otherwise once even one US hotel chain supports it. I have _never_ seen a hotel in the US with IPv6 WiFi. Not once.

And I once stayed in a hotel (in Mountain View, CA) that gave out public IPv4 addresses.