Memes

All consumer and enterprise equipment made in the last 10+ years natively support IPv6.

I object to this statement. You can buy name brand routers today that don’t implement it properly. Sure, they route packets, but they have broken stateless auto configuration or don’t respect DHCPv6 options correctly, and the situation is made worse because you don’t know how your ISP implements IPv6 until you try it.

God help you if you need a firewall where you can open ports on v6. Three years ago I bought one that doesn’t even properly firewall IPv6.

I tested a top-of-the-line Netgear router to find that it doesn’t support opening ports and once again doesn’t correctly support forwarded IP DHCPv6, which even if that works correctly, your Android clients can’t use it 🫠 Decades later there’s no consensus on how it should function on every device. This is a severe problem when you are a standard.

The state of IPv6 on consumer hardware is absolute garbage. You have to guess how your ISP implements it if at all, and even then you’re at the mercy of your limited implementation. If you’re lucky it just works with your ISP router. If you’re not, it’s a PITA.

EDITs: spell corrections and clarification.

As Snowden, Assange, and other whistleblowers have shown, in The Land of the Free™ the carriers are in bed with the government. I doubt it’s all that different in other Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes countries.

Wasn’t the point of IPv6 to remove the need for CGNAT?

It's amazing how many internet providers still won't enable IPv6, even though it is hugely beneficial to their own networks (more efficient routing = less router overhead = more bandwidth and less power usage = SAVE MONEY).

IPv6 was pernanently turned on for the Internet in 2011. That's THIRTEEN YEARS AGO.

All consumer and enterprise equipment made in the last 10+ years natively support IPv6. There is no excuse anymore. You can enable dual stack and setup / get your v6 block and go for it. The v6 routing tables are much simpler than the v4 routing tables, as it only has to point to the prefix network for any address, and prefixes are handed out so the ISP gets a contigious prefix block. The routers sort the rest out.

IPv6 has the 2000::/3 range for internet traffic. That's 2^125 ip addresses possible. We're not running out of those even if we have an internet on every planet in the solar system.

IPv6 Prefix Delegation works like DHCP but for IPv6. It's not indecipherable magic runes.

Router asks for a v6 range -> ISP router gives the range -> Router then either further subdivides into subnets, or uses DHCPv6 to give out v6 addresses. Simple.

But of course, nobody wants to do it the simple way... AT&T and your strange subnetting spec-breaking routers.

Odd that Comcast/Xfinity, the company that somehow manages to have even worse service than AT&T, implements IPv6 near perfectly. They give prefixes when your router asks. Their own gateways give prefixes to routers behind when requested. It works. If the arguably worst internet company can deploy IPv6 this well, any company can.

In addition, every device also has its own link-local ipv6 (fe80::/16) that is not routed, but can be called directly and it normally doesn't change, as it is based partly on the network card's MAC address. Need to connect your printer by ip address? Use the link local v6 and stop having to play the DHCP or static IP charade.

Now the ISPs can charge us if we want a public IP, so really this is a win for big ISP... not sure why you guys aren't appreciating that! /s

Privacy fans, choose wisely:

• have CGNAT on carrier side and add little tiny more work to track people
• have public IP, making it easier to selfhost, to build P2P networks, to use anonymizing network like I2P, to host Tor nodes, to reach out to friend without central approved big tech cloud, that you can still hide with your own NAT or by using VPN

ipv6 cgnat is evil

ELI5?

I still dont have ipv6, WHY NOT?! What’s my ISP doing?!

I tried an IPv6 AWS Lightsail instance recently. It had a private IPv4 address, but it's not behind NAT and won't route outside the network.

Which would be fine if all the software packages you need can access things over IPv6 on their servers. One that doesn't is WordPress, because of course it doesn't. That means no plugins or updates except by manual downloads.

But hey, who would ever want to run WordPress on a cheap Lightsail instance?

My university is still mostly on IPv4 for our infrastructure. We got in early on the IPv4 address gold rush, so we got a full /16 block. Not quite MIT's 18.0.0.0/8 block, but enough so there's little pressure to move. It can be a little embarrassing, feeling like an institution that should be breaking ground is instead trailing behind. At the same time, our IT department is chronically understaffed, so I can understand not doing the switch. It's not as simple as just flipping a switch, there are many ramifications of IPv6 that aren't immediately obvious.

Pardon if i dont cry about it

Oh boi i didn’t know ipv6 was this spicy