alt Hacker NewsIPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
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true. I am CSE student in third year, and just started learning about networking.
We just take the sheer amount of engineering that went to designing network protocols for granted.
I'd love to have ipv6. The idea every device in my network can have its own unique worldwide address is awesome.
Having said that I still want to have a router with routing rules and firewalls and a network range I can divide into separate protected networks but in reality your home ISP will most likely give you a router with a /64 address.
I don't know about anyone else's reasoning but personally IPV4 works just fine for 100% of my use cases.
I don't have anything against it per-say but I have no reason to use it either.
IPv6 is the protocol of the future. And will be.
IPv6-only is the future for mobile phones, and mobile devices are the future of the internet.
And it is consumer devices (and IoT devices) which are the most numerous and also the most price sensitive, and this is where IPv4 is disappearing first.
Solution looking for a problem is why. No value is why.
Breaks NAT privacy and the extensions do not do enough.
Top down pushed solution NOBODY WANTS.
I think this is the same as : we are a big company that does banking and payment processing for decades. We were planning to switch to golang/rust/C/python whatever for a long time but we still use age old java that has been patched several times with known security risks and no longer supported. Unless we have a huge problem we don’t see the need to fix something that is broken but not fallen apart yet.
Unfortunately, TIL that Linux doesn't use DNSv6 if DNSv4 is available ;(
IMHO:
And it will not be, as long as
* (S|D)NAT are not first class citizen in IPV6 Standards and Implementation * there's no mapping of the IPv4 Adresspace into the v6 space, so people can reroute stuff which is needed.
because only then, we can a) migrate b) rebuild the same structures.
because people will never let go of something.
I was expecting Google's IPv6 availability monitor[1] to show a crossover to a (slim) majority of their users accessing their services over IPv6 sometime soon, though it's sort of fascinating how close it gets to 50% recently without ever actually crossing over:
It's reaching around 50% adoption according to Google stats? Steady growth, though still annoyingly slow. It will need a few more decades at this rate.
It’s all fun and games until your ISP changes your prefix and breaks all your firewall/routing rules. I tried to adopt IP6 with Spectrum internet, but every time the cable modem reboots, my prefix changes and breaks everything. No thanks.
Matter iot devices are IPv6 only.
Apple TV, Amazon Echo/eero, Google Nest are all Thread/Matter hub.
Ikea just started to selling cheap Thread devices. It will soon be mainstream to have IPv6 devices in your home network.
Google's ipv6 stats[0] are stuck in Dec 17.
However, extrapolation suggests the 50% mark might have finally been crossed around year end.
I still don't have IPv6 at home in the middle of San Francisco with Google Fiber / Webpass and have to egress through an HE.net tunnel like it's 2002 again
I run an IPv6 only VPS as a side project to keep an eye on what doesn't work. My most recent discovery: I tried moving from `lego` to the new native ACME `nginx` support. `nginx` refuses to talk to letsencrypt on IPv6; it's not a letsencrypt flaw because it works perfectly on the same server with `lego`.
I have noticed that on my last Windows computer (Windows 10) and my current computer (Windows 11) IPv6 works great for a little while after a reboot, but then just seems to die. I have my house and all internal automation configured for IPv6 first and its great on all my Linux computers and phones.
My work has IPv6, and my home has IPv6.
If I need to connect to my home Fedora machine from work, a simple "ssh fed.nono.io" works just fine — I don't need to activate my Wireguard VPN; I don't need to worry about address space collisions.
IPv6 is an inequality issue. Far too many luddites refuse to learn it because IPv4 works well enough for them. I think it would be a totally different story if the majority of US/European people ended up with CGNAT.
IPv6 might not have taken over the world, but it sure seems to be getting forced on the world.
Even more than IPv4, not knowing enough about IPv6 can introduce a lot of unintended issue, consequence and even security gaps in your assumptions.
Maybe there was an IPv7 or 8 that will be more palatable.
Haven't we been crying about the IPv4 apocalypse and the need to adopt IPv6 since the slashdot days? It's like fetch, it's not happening.
> IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4
I don't think there is any way it could have been.
It is so disappointing to have people who allegedly work with networks and technology act like IPv6 is too much for their delicate sensibilities. From thinking it is more complex than IPv4 (it is in fact simpler), to thinking that NAT is a security measure (the firewall is and routers have an IPv6 firewall on by default), to thinking there are no benefits (the benefits are clearly there), to thinking nobody uses it (loads of mobile devices access the web via IPv6 and lots of enterprise networks are IPv6), and so on, it is anti-curiosity and anti-hacker ethos. Go ask your favorite LLM how it works if you can’t be bothered to Google it but if you start your comment with “it has no use cases” or “it is too complicated” you are just outing yourself as ignorant on this subject.
The article itself is fairly short & fluffy.
Vs. real meat is in the comments on the Register's site.
Well, my ISP dosent support ipv6, and i get a non shared public ipv4, so no ipv6 here.
IPv4 should have been converted directly to IPv6. Every IPv4 address should have been given an equivalent IPv6 address. 192.168.1.1 becomes 2001:00C0:00A8:0000:0000:0000:0001:0001 or 2001:00C0:00A8::0001:0001.
Roughly 40% of the Internet is IPv6. That's not taken over, and disappointing for a 30 year old standard, but it's not nothing. https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2024-10/ipv6-transition.html
I've been using IPv6 via Starlink for months now and it was a big ho-hum when I deployed it. It just works.
The reason being? IP proxy gateways. They obviated the need to move away from the limited address space of IPv4. Which was 90% of the reason to do IPv6.
It's not a failure of IP6 but a failure of society.
We all thought the internet would become decentralized and that everyone should have an IP and a funky website. But instead social media took over, big tech and a few big discussion sites where we all must fit in a digital life and watch ads and share our data to become a good product for all the others to consume.
All those discussions are making it harder than it need to be.
I have ONE static external IPv4 for my network.
I can handle everything I want with it. And block everything I dont want my network to be.
So I just disable IPv6 on router (Mikrotik).
Not interested, not wanting it. That is it. If someone needs it, feel free to use it. I wont support double configurations on my router because of it.
people don't understand how expensive it is to support ipv6, tcam is limited and having to split it in half to support ipv6 is just not an option for a lot of businesses. Route caches exist with software routing - but for larger networks it is not an option
I really don't get why people hate on IPv6.
I'm sure someone will fuck this up for us, but IPv6 should at least in theory enable us to be rid of NAT. Anyone who has ever done NAT traversal for peer discovery is having wet dreams about that future!
I will fully and honestly admit I don't understand much about IPv6 - however, I have a question - why didn't they just add 8-32 bits to IPv4 and call it a day?
Legacy IPv4 would be trivial to support via NAT, and we wouldn't have to deal with address shortages either globally or locally. I'm sure every sysadmin/cloud person dealt with having to arrange subnets by hand, or the fallout when you just ran out of addresses and had to tear down multiple layers of routing just to make more address space.
Computers default to 64 bit integers, I don't see why this couldn't be done on the network.
the other day I had to change my node server to prefer ipv4 dns records because fly.io doesn’t support outbound ipv6 connections but defaults to a dns server that returns them
Meh. IPv4 is used to deliver Netflix to the masses and act as a tunnel for your IPv6 network. It's not how I would have set things up, but since content delivery is the primary use case for most ISPs, they're unlikely to support v6. Contrary to the "Comcast is shit" narrative, I had a GREAT experience a couple living situations ago where I got dual stack from Comcast. It just sort of worked out of the gate and whenever I had to call the support line, I was immediately transferred to someone who knew what they were talking about because I had this exotic / non-standard service.
It's sort of interesting dude says Security and Plug-and-Play weren't available in v6 since SLAAC and IPSec are mandatory parts of the spec. But sure, AH and ESP options are never as simple as they should have been and it's not impossible to pick options for your organization that don't match what a remote organization supports. I still prefer it to the crap-shoot that is TLS ChangeCipherSpec. (Though 1.2 and 1.3 aren't as bad as the old days.)
Contrary to the narrative about your parents not being able to cope with anything technical, my mom was able to configure her mac to speak to the family VPN with no problem. Of course, my mom taught me code in Lisp in the 70s and used a Sun 3/60 as her daily driver in the late 80s, so maybe that's not the best example.
Sure. V6 didn't take over the world, but neither did SNA or IPX/SPX, though I would argue v6 is MUCH more common these days than either IBM or Novell protocols. V6 is used in the corner of the internet by people who want to use V6. Maybe there's a "those who know don't tell, those who tell don't know" narrative here. I've sort of stopped evangelizing. If the main thing you worry about is watching Netflix, MMORPGing and commenting on Reddit, you don't need V6 and it does require a different bit of knowledge than setting up V4.
#OldManYellsAtClouds
In my country, the last big _mobile_ internet provider finished its move to IPv6.
Land lines internet have been IPv6 for more than a decade.
While developping custom IPv6 internet software I am not blocked by NAT anymore, real p2p fiesta, everything works as intended.
The real challenge now is IPv6 with fixed mobile internet address (not random as it is is now, it should be device uniq). That to replace for good the phone numbers (the challenge of international roaming... which is already done for phone numbers). The idea would be to avoid a third party centralized internet account->ipv6 mapping.
Every few months I turn on IPv6 at my house. I try to use it. I find random sites just not working, random delays accessing sites, and so on. Then I switch back to IPv4 and everything works.
I used to be a network admin, so I know how to configure networks. IPv6 zealots accuse me of incorrect config, doing it wrong, etc. Maybe that is the case, but if I, a sophisticated user, can't get it working well, what chance does a non-technical person have?
My assumption is they just deal with the issues and chalk it up to "technology sucks". But I know better. I've experienced the internet when it works, and I know when it isn't working right.
I think IPv6 is better in theory, and I look forward to the day that it is in practice. But today is not that day.
> "IPv6 wasn't about turning IPv4 off, but about ensuring the internet could continue to grow without breaking,"
Then it's failure is by design. I should not want to multiplex/bridge different versions of the network-layer protocol; and certainly not to avoid using the new protocol because the old one seems more usable and approachable.
reminder that in 2026 Microsoft GitHub(TM) still doesn't support ipv6
but if you need maximum AI slop, that's everywhere
Goes hand in hand with dnssec.
Only 30? It feels like it's been ages!
You and me both, IPv6.
My "conspiracy theory" is IPv6's point to point connectivity is inconvenient to anyone except end users. And, rent-seekers can't extract money if the ranges aren't limited. American mind can't comprehend not rent-seeking any new invention.
Aren't all the smartphones IPV6?
Second system effect.
What's up with those comments? Am I still on HackerNews or did I visit Reddit with some HackerNews theme applied?
Internet engineers pre-2000 had some idealistic, heavly mathematically proven ideas that still seem revolutionary today. Due to human nature, not everything got through, but IPv6 is the best of what we have and creating another standard would be XKCD 927.
Under every IPv6 discussion people all of sudden have the urge to manually assign numbers, need to remember their cousin's phone IP and MAC address, forget firewalls exists, argue that ISP fiddling with TCP+UDP selling it as "Internet" is a good thing or that "sender" field on the envelope is a huge privacy issue.
Good enough beats better.
Simple reason it didn't take over: the lack of backwards compatibility with ipv4. Yes, it would have marred the beauty of the new specification. But we will continue paying the price for another 30 years.