At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4 but a lot not via IPv6. Will there be a day when this turns around?
That's already the case. IPv6 is often faster because most ISPs these days use cgnat for IPv4.
It's a standard Asus router but it's given me a lot of ire. I hate to say it but it's never a problem when I install windows on the same machines
(I'm currently in the process of trying to completely remove windows from my life)
IIRC, a workaround was to prevent Linux from setting this field, or force-reset it on every outbound packet using netfilter.
It's usually bad configuration done by the router vendors. It doesn't mean IPv6 is bad.
But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections, without any option to configure it, still bad for pure IPv6 bidirectional streaming, gaming or services on home networks.
To your point, IPv6 sought to replace NAT with just having enough addresses but interestingly, that created a problem. If you used NAT and had a service on your computer request a port for incoming connections, that showed intent on behalf of the owner of that service. IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.
So is the bigger address range better? Technically, maybe? But you have to consider defaults and intents of users. And that can take a good technical solution to a bad solution or at least create a whole bunch of problems.
Using NAT as a firewall might work but it brings it's own problems. I find the IPv6 way better.
I also have built cloud infrastructure for multiple SaaS providers with tens of thousands of customers over the past decade. Only one customer I’m aware of has ever even requested IPv6 support. And if customers aren’t asking for it, my employers have never been interested in the full network re-architecture required to truly support it internally.
There are still several basic services you can’t run IPv6-only in AWS, and a handful of AWS service features that don’t support it at all.
As a sysadmin for decades now, I’ve always found IPv6 to be overengineered and in many ways completely ridiculous. But I’d love to be supporting it in everything I do. Only I still can’t, even after 20+ years of being lectured about it; even after complete IPv4 exhaustion has been reached. I don’t think we’re ever going to turn IPv4 off. At best it will be progressively hidden, even from technical users. And folks like me will just have to keep building workarounds to patch the holes where IPv6 still doesn’t work.
They added those new addresses that can store more information.. but this requires a rewrite of old software to make it work.
If they used the old >bolting on top< method by extending ip4 from 4 octets to 8 (or more) octets, then old software could be extended much easier too / probably addresses could be simply mechanically translated too, so ancient software can work.
42.0.20.80.64.1.192.15.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113
is easier to remember than
2a00:1450:4001:c0f::71 (or 2a00:1450:4001:0c0f:0000:0000:0000:0071)
It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?
You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.
The problems, as I observe, are more in network infrastructure, routing, etc.
Ubiquity gateways also seem to not support it sadly. It would be awesome if they supported something like Hurricane Electric’s tunneling.
$ curl -v https://news.ycombinator.com
* Host news.ycombinator.com:443 was resolved.
* IPv6: 2606:7100:1:67::26
* IPv4: 209.216.230.207
* Trying [2606:7100:1:67::26]:443...
* ALPN: curl offers h2,http/1.1
* TLSv1.3 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
Also you made the life better of people who have DS lite. They only get a public IPv6 and all their IPv4 traffic goes through a CGNAT.
2. Most websites assume that 1 IPv4 address==1 household, so you'll often run into rate limits. Or even worse, you might be blocked entirely if your CGNAT neighbours are spammers or otherwise breaking website rules.
Sure Gmail has ipv6 enabled and routable ip6 MX. but sending to those addresses is often rejected and forced to retry over ipv4.
Don’t get me started on gh
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
https://lafibre.info/images/ipv6/202507_arcep_barometre_ipv6...
(2025, from 2024 data)
Reason that Google isn't seeing more is a) some BigCo v4 holdouts b) happy eyeballs sometimes landing on v4 because their v6 is shitty 6rd or something (e.g Free SAS)
I am still sometimes using Google Search. First results are now almost always videos on youtube, aka self-promo. These videos are in 99.9% of the search results I use, totally useless and worthless. Even searching on youtube has recently gotten worse. It is also crap now. I know that because I bookmark various videos, and I can not find older videos anymore either. I can eliminate some results I don't care via ublock origin hero-blocking this Google garbage, but I really think we should no longer allow this de-facto monopoly to worsen the global situation any longer. The USA is protecting these gangsters - it is time to have true legislation that gets rid of that mafia bloc that is Google.
But we have to remember that this is reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 on the public Internet is probably much lower.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#ipv4-vs-ipv6
This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine.
Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this.
Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean. This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this.
Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption.
I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong.
It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense.
The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.
Another such example is SELinux, which would have prevented so many vulnerabilities from being exploited, but whose poor UX also caused everyone to disable it at install time.
SELinux's UX was significantly improved many years later, but already too late to change ingrained opinions. There are a lot of ingrained opinions about IPv6 too.
Randomizing the local address doesn't mean it isn't useful. You can't scan a /64 so that's already a major improvement. The fact that randomly selecting a number is effectively never going to collide greatly simplifies automatic network configuration.
The major issue is that the /64 isn't mandatory from a technical perspective. Being merely a subset of the larger address it's nothing more than a convention. In the end not all providers make it available to you even though supposedly they ought to.
If we're going to complain about anything it should be the godawful notation that so easily breaks parsers. Or the fact that the width is massively excessive which creates a usability nightmare due to normal humans not being able to readily recall 128 bit numbers (let alone how long it takes to type them in).
Nobody includes their MAC address in their public IPv6 addresses anymore, but every IPv6 setup that I've seen still gives every device a unique globally-routable IPv6 address, with no NAT at all.
> One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks.
The nice thing is that a /64 is big enough that clients can just randomly pick any address, and it will almost certainly be available, meaning that you don't need DHCP. This is actually widely implemented, and is known as SLAAC [0].
> Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.
The extra address space only adds 16 bytes to every packet, and it ensures that we will never run out of addresses like we did with IPv4.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...
https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Yes, it is old, many examples are outdated, but the main points still hold. Decades later his suggestions for making IPv6 succeed are still not implemented.
Mobile carriers use it almost exclusively, which is already a huge chunk of the internet, and newer ISPs are switching to it too.
> I'm supporting both because I heard it's good to support both, but I'm not sure what the actual benefit is.
The benefit is that you allow IPv4-only and IPv6-only clients to connect.
From the user side IPv6 is great for me. My ISP is using CGNAT and would bill me ten pounds a month for a static IPv4 address but I automatically get a vast block of IPv6. I'm using that block to allow me to VPN back home when out and about, and if I wanted to I could also host services from devices on my home network without needing any NAT nonsense, I can just open access to the relevant device on the router. (Because this is a world where not everywhere supports IPv6 yet if I'm on an IPv4 only network the VPN endpoint is a dedicated server I rent which forwards the relevant port back to my home router over IPv6)
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