Now currently I’m not in the workforce, but in the past from my work experience, apprenticeship and temp roles, I’ve always seen ipv4 and not ipv6!
Hell, my ISP seems to exclusively use ipv4 (unless behind nats they’re using ipv6)
Do you think a lot of people stick with the earlier iteration because they have been so familiar with it for a long time?
When you look at a ipv6, it looks menacing with a long string of letters and numbers compared to the more simpler often.
I am aware the IP bucket has gone dry and they gotta bring in a new IP cow with a even bigger bucket, but what do you think? Do you yourself or your firm use ipv4 or 6?
We are going full v6 with SIIT-DC (rfc7755) with our next hardware refresh. Our mother site doesn’t but we don’t care what they do as that’s not our problem
IPv6 was “just around the corner” when I was studying 20+ years ago. I kept a tunnel up until the brokers shut down.
I’ve been hosting some big (partly proprietary) services for work, and we’ve been IPv6 compatible for a decade.
My ISP finally gave me native IPv6 earlier this year, which gave me the push to make sure my personal hosting does IPv6 as well. Seems like most big players services support it today. It’s nice to not have the overhead that CGNAT brings.
IPv6 got a bit of a bad reputation when operating systems defaulted to 6to4 translation but never actually managed to work.
We mainly use ipv4, but recent laws that all public sector websites are to use IPv6, we have had to update our stack.
Now we can do IPv6 public endpoints with ipv4 backends.
Both my employer and my home ISP use IPv6 since many years now and so does all my own stuff, it’s wonderfully convenient to have a globally unique address for everything that I connect to the network.
In next 10-20 years everyone will use IPv6
I enjoyed getting the IPv6 certification from Hurricane Electric. Everyone should learn about it! https://ipv6.he.net/
Off topic, but I love Hurricane Electric’s website. Simple, but not ugly. Straight to the point. I find it quite charming in contrast to the hyper designed, but barely functional sites of other companies. (fuck you HPE)
I still have my IPv6 sage shirt somewhere.
Also don’t forget that if you’re stuck on an old network, as long as your router replies to pings you can get a tunnel for a /48 and a bunch of /64s for free. That’s 65536 networks of 2^64 IP addresses to play around with. Make your own traceroute puns! Experiment with routers in virtual machines using real addresses! Make your IP address end in dead:beef:cafe!
And if you complete the quiz, they’ll send you a free t-shirt. That’s pretty cool.
On my local network I want governance over my devices. I want specific firewall rules per device, so I can, for instance, block YouTube only on the kids devices. I want this to be centrally managed, so configured on my opnsense router. I want all devices to use IP6. Unfortunately none of this is possible.
To setup firewall rules I need DHCPv6, not SLAAC so my IPs on my local network that I manage are well known and fixed. Android devices don’t support DHCPv6. And the designers of IP6 were daft enough to set the priority of IPv4 above that of their new protocol. So basically if you have any IPv4 addresses on a device, they’ll be preferred by basically all operating systems - because that’s what the spec says. So you can’t run dual stack in a meaningful way.
TL;DR: IPv6 on a local network has not been thought through at all even though it’s incredibly old, it’s really immature.
Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.
Cloud infra engineer here.
Answer: I don’t think about it. Nothing fully supports it, so we pretend it doesn’t exist.
Which is why “nothing” supports it
Well if you want to be the one who retrofits google cloud to support it more widely, go to town. But I’m sure as hell not going to bother, I have other work to do. And also I don’t work at google.
That’s exactly my experience with it.
Some certificates are even annoyed by IPv6 and they won’t install until i remove any trace of it from the DNS. This should also pretty much be the only occasion I’m forced to deal with IPv6, instead of glancing over it while working on the server configs.
We disable IPv6 often when troubleshooting a network issue. Nothing that I have seen requires IPv6, and turning it off solves more issues than we would expect even today. It’s not the first thing I’m going to try, but I’ll often do it if I have to reboot anyway.
I also uninstall Dell Optimizer and Dell Optimizer Service on sight regardless of the issue because that evil will cause problems eventually. Best to just eradicate it on sight.
You should rather find out why things break with IPv6. The best time to make IPv6 work is now.
Just annoyed when I need to specify port when using IPv6. Needs to add square bracket to workaround ambiguity of colon is kinda bad. How can they decide to use colon instead of another special character??
Another thing that makes no sense is if my ISP provided prefix changes -which it will- this affects the IP addressing on my local network. Ain’t noboby got time for that if you’re managing a company or having anything other than a flat home network with every device equal.
IPv6 is just people shouting NAT BAD, but frankly having separate address ranges inside and outside a house is a feature. A really really useful feature. Having every device have a public IP6 address I’d an anti-featute.
if my ISP provided prefix changes… affects the IP addressing on my local network.
IPv6 is just people shouting NAT BAD… Having every device have a public IP6 address I’d an anti-featute.
If you’re working in IT then you should find a new career.
A lot of networks were designed with ipv4 and NAT in mind. There really isn’t a cost benefit to migrate all your DHCP scopes, VLANs, Subnets, and firewall rules to IPv6 and then also migrate 1000’s of endpoints to it.
Much cheaper to just disable ipv6 entirely on the internal network (to prevent attacks using a rogue dhcpv6 server etc) and only use ipv6 on your WAN connections if you have to use it.
Widespread IPv6 adoption is right there with the year of the Linux desktop. It’s a good idea, it’s always Coming Soon™ and it’s probably never going to actually happen. People are stubborn and thanks to things like NAT and CGNAT, the main reason to switch is gone. Sure, address exhaustion may still happen. And not having to fiddle with things like NAT (and fuck CGNAT) would be nice. But, until the cost of keeping IPv4 far outweighs the cost of everything running IPv6 (despite nearly everything doing it now), IPv4 will just keep shambling on, like a zombie in a bad horror flick.
As an email guy, I would love IPv6, but it just isn’t gonna happen (for me).
