Comment by cyberax
16 hours ago
Exactly my point. IPv6 failed to reach the "boring, just works" level after 30 years of deployment. So much so that we are now deploying solutions with 10+ years of expected service lifetime that do not support IPv6.
Meanwhile, CGNAT really solved most issues with IPv4. Yes, even the voice/video chat issues.
Want another fun example? Try to find a SIP telephony provider in the US that supports IPv6. Go on. I do this exercise about once a year.
> IPv6 failed to reach the "boring, just works" level after 30 years of deployment.
/me glances over at my phone, which only has an IPv6 address when connected via cellular modem.
/me thinks back to the decade+ of incredibly boring IPv6 service from the residential ISPs I've used.
Sure.
If an ISP wants to provide only IPv6 addresses to CPE, they can set things up so that happens. But if you won't be satisfied until IPv4 no longer passes over the Internet, then you're going to die unhappy about that. The goal for our lifetime is one where every residential site has a global /56 and is behind IPv4 CGN, and servers hosted by commercial entities get to choose whether they assign IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, or both to their servers.
/me searching through all the mobile network providers in Switzerland (a technologically advanced country) and not finding any.
Seriously, this drives me mad. There is NO WAY to get IPv6 on mobile networks in Switzerland. Neither Swisscom, nor Sunrise, nor Salt, and of course no reseller.
And Android handles this particularly poorly. I have some servers set up in my tailscale network on private IPv6 addresses, but android doesn't query AAAA addresses if it has no ::/0 route, so I HAVE to route all my traffic through my VPN which often creates other complications (with corporate wifi etc.)
I am in the same situation. However, I have found that there's a workaround/hack to make Android 'think' it has IPv6 connectivity. Instead of routing ::/0 through your VPN, simply add these two routes to your devices:
They don't need to be actually accepted by your VPN. They only need to exist in Android's routing table for it to start using AAAA lookups.
The drawback is that this breaks happy eyeballs, and you may notice slower response times on requests (since now your phone will start by quering AAAA results first which always fail for sites not on your VPN, and then fall back to the A result). In practice however I haven't really noticed any difference.
I get your frustration. But not having access to IPv6 personally does not mean IPv6 is dead. It's very much alive and handles considerable amounts of traffic.
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You're welcome to try to solve the challenges from my sibling post. Both of them are solved in IPv4 by a $100 router from a nearby store and with zero configuration.
> You're welcome to try to solve the challenges from my sibling post.
Check my reply to your post. [0] I wrote it up before I noticed your message here. ;)
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295293>
https://doc.didww.com/voice/outbound-trunks/outbound-sip-inf...?
I don't get your point. IPv6 is at "boring, just works". The majority of the worlds devices run on it dual-stack and it handles a considerable amount of traffic. A lot of 5G networks run on IPv6 single stack with IPv4 compatibility on top.
IPv6 is very much alive. And it's so boring and working so well, that you don't even notice it.
> I don't get your point. IPv6 is at "boring, just works". The majority of the worlds devices run on it dual-stack and it handles a considerable amount of traffic.
Most of the world runs on IPv4. If we shut down IPv6 on the core routers tomorrow, pretty much nobody is going to blink an eye. And now I believe that we should do it and start again.
The 50% stat is really mostly mobile phones on cellular networks, which remain the _only_ major success story for IPv6. Mostly because there's not enough private or even squattable IPv4 space available for many large mobile phone operators.
> IPv6 is very much alive. And it's so boring and working so well, that you don't even notice it.
Sigh. No, it's not. In a thread a couple of weeks ago, I gave several examples:
1. You're a SOHO-type business. How can you do multiple WAN uplinks with IPv6 without NAT?
2. How do you prevent your printer on IPv6 from breaking when your Internet connection goes down?
For context: I deployed IPv6 in my networks in 2006. I have war stories.
> How can you do multiple WAN uplinks with IPv6 without NAT?
Advertise the addresses offered by the primary uplink, then retire those addresses [0] and advertise the secondary when the primary fails. Or are you talking about load balancing, which is its own thing? Either way, this situation is inherently not boring, so the way you solve it is going to be quite a bit more complex -regardless of IP protocol version- than the very boring single-upstream situation.
> How do you prevent your printer on IPv6 from breaking when your Internet connection goes down?
I'll flip this around on you:
How do you prevent your printer from "breaking" when its ISP-provided DHCP lease on its globally-routable IPv4 address expires? How about when the ISP refuses to renew the lease on the printer's current globally-routable IPv4 address and forces it to get a new one?
Obviously, you use the ISP-assigned globally-routable IPv4 address and also assign an RFC 1918 address to the printer.
How to solve this with IPv6? Use ULAs! They're the equivalent of 1918 space in the IPv6 world. Just like in IPv4, IPv6 globally-routable addresses are for global communication and can be used for LAN-local communication. And -just like 1918 addresses- ULAs are for LAN-local communication. Just like with IPv4, if you can't control the addresses that you get from your upstream provider, and/or if your router is set up to retire your upstream provider's delegated address space when your upstream link goes down, then you use ULAs. [1]
I know that OpenWRT has a setting in LuCi to enable advertisement of a ULA prefix, and fifteen seconds of searching revealed that at least some Linksys combination router/APs seem to just generate and advertise a ULA prefix by default. [2]
So, if you're not configuring your LAN this way and upstream provider renumbering is getting in your way, then you really should bother to.
[0] ...by advertising their valid lifetime as zero seconds...
[1] ...or if you happen to like to be able to assign fixed IP addresses to certain pieces of hardware...
[2] <https://support.linksys.com/kb/article/3744-en/>
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> The 50% stat is really mostly mobile phones on cellular networks, which remain the _only_ major success story for IPv6.
The largest ISPs in the US are Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, T-Mobile, Starlink, and Google Fiber. They all support IPv6. The only top-10 US provide that didn't support it is Frontier Communications, who is rolling it out.
In other words, the biggest companies who actually do this for a living all demonstrate that you're wrong.
As to your questions, read up on IPv6 ULA which solves all of them. None of the hosts on my LAN depend on having an outbound connection.
> For context: I deployed IPv6 in my networks in 2006. I have war stories.
Early IPv6 was a mess. It took a surprising amount of time for IPv6 to become mature and usable.
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