HN

Comments (455)

• Menu

  10000truths
  It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US.Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.
• Menu

  kyledrake
  I don't like to admit this, but at this point honestly I think ipv6 is largely a failure, and I say this as someone that wrote a blog post for APNIC on how to turn on ipv6.I'll get endless pushback for this, but the reality is that adoption isn't at 100%, it very closely needs to be, and there are still entire ISPs that only assign ipv4, to say nothing of routers people are buying and installing that don't have ipv6 enabled out of the box.A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative "written on a napkin" change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space. It still would have been difficult to adopt, but it would have the benefit of being a simple change to a system everyone already understands and on top of a stack that largely already exists.I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.
• Menu

  pif
  I think 30 years should be much more than enough to realise the idiocy of proposing a non-backward-compatible standard to the general public.
• Menu

  runjake
  > still hasn't taken over the worldMaybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has.In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure.The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.
• Menu

  hinkley
  I get so many Second System Syndrome vibes off of IPv6. Surely other people must be picking it up too.Future proofing it by jumping straight to 128 bits instead of 64. 64 would have been fine. Even with a load factor of 1:1000 by assigning semantics to ranges of IP addresses, 64 bit addressing is still enough addresses for 10 million devices per person.If we become a galactic empire, we will have to replace the Web anyway because every interaction will have to be a standalone app or edge networking that doesn’t need to hear back from the central office for minutes, hours, days anyway. We could NAT every planet and go on forever.
• thayne
  > IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4I don't think there is any way it could have been.
• Menu

  ruuda
  Everything I know about IPv6 comes from this one blog post: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810. It’s from 2017, when IPv6 adoption was 17% according to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html; today it’s close to 50%.
• Menu

  cydonian_monk
  I've been native IPv6 at home for a few years now. That worked flawlessly until a recent Windows 11 update somehow broke IPv6 in ways that I don't entirely understand. All the other Linux and Apple and et cetera things in my house are fine, but the Win11 laptop just refuses to handle certain IPv6 ranges (specifically including the address that the host interface for one of my web servers falls in). 100% contained within the Win11 device and TBH I can't be bothered to dig into it further so I just proxy through some other device that does work. (Guessing it'll get fixed a month/year/decade or so from now.)I agree it's not a failure, but after 3 decades it's still frustratingly annoying to use at times.
• willis936
  I used to like the idea of an IPv4 replacement, but I've come around.A large number of my devices and websites I visit use IPv6. Its success has highlighted the fact that I don't want it. Just today I disabled IPv6 on my router because I suspect it as a vector for tracking.IPv6 offers nothing of value to the user. It might as well be shelved forever.
• israrkhan
  NAT is the reason for IPV6 not taking over.Also it acts as a nice security perimeter. If all IoT devices in a home were exposed to internet, It would be absolute mess.
• Menu

  sedatk
  IPv6 has already won on mobile and been gaining fast traction in IoT space with Matter. The reason IPv4 is still around everywhere else is because we came up with ingeniuous techniques that squeezed the heck out of IPv4 address space. Also, IPv4 addresses are easier to type. That's pretty much it.I had mentioned some of that in my post: https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-af214dd06aa...
• yakattak
  I remember 10+ years ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses and it was the next Y2K unless you adopted IPv6. I was able to get IPv6 for my servers and home, and I thought I was safe!> "In fact, IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere – particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," he added. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most, and must be regarded as a success."Apparently it turns out IPv6 wasn't for me any way!
• mmbleh
  Maybe a different take, but as someone that manages a large public API that allows anonymous access, IPv6 has been a nightmare to try and enforce rate limits on. We've found different ISPs assign IPv6 addresses differently - some give a /64 to every server, some give /64 to an entire data center. It seems there is no standard and everyone just makes up what they think will work. This puts us in an awkward place where we need abuse protections, but have to invest into more complicated solutions that were needed for IPv4. Or we give up and just say if you want to use IPv6, you have to authenticate.Does anyone have any success stories from the server side handling a situation like this? Looks like cloudflare switched to some kind of custom dynamic rate limiting based on like addresses, but it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to do such a thing.
• srwx
  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`.
• Menu

  przmk
  My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.
• Menu

  SoftTalker
  Is there an obvious reason why it would not have worked to just say that all ipv4 addresses are ipv6 addresses with an implicit leading 96 zero bits?
• mprovost
  I was in college when v6 was going through the RFC process. In my networking class we had to learn Netware (IPX) and v6, which have both turned out to be equally irrelevant, for different reasons. At this stage, I fully expect to retire having never deployed a single resource using v6.
• Menu

  Ericson2314
  https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html it's still going up (we are in some sort of cyclic downturn right now that I don't understand).Next year that chart will finally cross 50%. It was a mere 30% in 2030. Developing country mobile phone networks will continue to push it higher.All we need to do is start having rich governments mandate IPv6, and also mandate IPv4 downtime as a punishment for those that don't comply / chaos engineering for the system as a whole. Then we can quickly finish the job.
• fitzn
  The problem with IPv6 jokes is that very few people are making them.
• Animats
  IPv6 continues to rumble along, gaining market share, because China. Increasing IPv6 adoption was in the 14th Five Year Plan, and about 75% of mobile in China is now IPv6.
• Menu

  ifh-hn
  I'm genuinely wondering if western governments (UK) will start issuing ipv6 addresses out to citizens as their digital id so they can track them online and offline.Only half joking, some UK MPs might actually consider this a reasonable thing considering how many ipv6s there are.
• Menu

  noahlt
  Yesterday I was required to turn on IPv6 on my router, while setting up some IoT things using Matter over Thread. Apparently that protocol uses IPv6 and doesn't work if your router is only routing IPv4.
• Menu

  redox99
  It was doomed the moment you had to maintain two separate stacks, each with its own address, firewall rules and so on.It should have been ipv4 with extra optional bits, so you could have the same rules and everything for both stacks.I turn it off because it's a risk having one of either stacks malconfigured.IPv6 should've been a superset of IPv4, as in addresses are shared, not that you have a separate IPv4 and IPv6 address for your server.
• mark_h
  Not a counter-point, but: the other day I rebuilt my personal server, finishing by pointing the reserved IP at the new box. I then had a period of confusion because I was still seeing old content, because my browser (etc) was obviously querying the AAA record first, which I hadn't updated.(a while ago I needed to contact support to get an IPv6 allocation at home, but that was a very quick interaction at the time)
• Menu

  p0w3n3d
  Correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't it make you leak your IP outside local network? I'd say this is a great turn off especially nowadays when it will be used for sure for tracking
• Menu

  hypeatei
  I love IPv6 but organizations seem to struggle with it. My ISP, for example, had issues routing it after a backend update so they decided to just turn it off. I'm now stuck on CGNAT IPv4 which results in constant captchas :/
• Menu

  Tractor8626
  Is there yet answer to question "how to get random self-assigned addresses into dns records, firewall rules and switch acls?" ?
• sholladay
  I started looking at self-hosting many applications at home once I realized that IPv6 could enable me to do that securely without any complicated router/firewall configuration that would need to be maintained.The only wrinkle I ran into is that apparently ISPs are still reluctant to give out static IPv6 prefixes to residential customers. So you still need some kind of DDNS setup, which is lame.
• Menu

  throwaway81523
  DJB understood the problem decades ago. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
• Menu

  dannyobrien
  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:[1] - https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
• Menu

  gweinberg
  Can't we just leapfrog to IPv7? or 8 for that matter?
• scrame
  and it never will, because IPv4 has become a defacto reputation system for the exact same reason that IPv6 was created: a limited supply. It wouldn't surprise me to see the continued balkanization of the internet that there is a particular underclass of exclusively IPv6 traffic, but its not going to take over everything because once decentralized systems are now in the hands of a few decisionmakers in the case of, say, email.
• Menu

  nashashmi
  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.
• nojs
  I question the premise that it’s not taking over. Our logs are at least 50% ipv6 now. A few years ago I feel like a barely saw it.
• austin-cheney
  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.
• Menu

  immibis
  It kind of has. The majority of internet traffic is IPv6. The three biggest internet hub regions (USA, Europe, China) have IPv6 mandates. Most apps support IPv6. Google and Apple force them to, od they get kicked off the app store. Almost all mobile networks (which means almost all end devices) are IPv6-only, with slow inefficient tunneling for IPv4. The price of IPv4 addresses is declining.At what point will we be allowed to say IPv6 hasn't failed? When the IPv4 internet finally switches off for good? It feels like no achievement is high enough for those who don't like IPv6 to change their minds. I would've thought making up 50% of internet traffic and 50% of end devices being on IPv6-only networks would be good Schelling points, but evidently they're not!
• Menu

  mrjay42
  Contrary to some other comments: no, IPV6 hasn't taken over the world at all.In my case, I administrate a small server at home, where I self host many services that are made available to myself, friends and families, over the internet.In that context, IPv6, is SADLY (please note that I have NOTHING against IPv6), a limitation, even a nightmare to use.Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it, the one that I think about is: Arma 3. But there are many othersIn 2025 (and 2026 too?), 4G (5G?) operators do not all route over IPv6 -> which means that if your domain only has a AAAA record, some people using 4G will not be able to access ANY of your services. This issue forced me to beg my ISP to obtain an IPv4 "fullstack" as they call it.Without that IPv4 you have to go through some kind of tunneling (like Cloudflare) -> and guess what? Cloudflare sometimes crashes (it happened super recently remember?) and in that situation -> ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users. Plus, it is EXTREMELY unsatisfying to rely on an external private-owned service for a selfhosting project.In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default. NEVER. Which means: more configuration, possibly more struggle.
• Dwedit
  Aren't all the smartphones IPV6?
• wewewedxfgdf
  Good enough beats better.
• bhouston
  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.
• anal_reactor
  Evolution is the survival of good enough. IPv4 is good enough.> but IPv6 is betterIt doesn't solve any life-changing problem.
• PunchyHamster
  should be just about done by 2050 at that rate
• anon
  undefined
• GalaxyNova
  btw it's only been getting seriously deployed since 2010
• j45
  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.
• jmyeet
  IPv6 is the poster child for the second system effect (or solution) [1].IPv4 really only had 3 problems that anybody cared about:1. Address space size;2. Roaming; and3. Reliable connectionless delivery; and4. The problems created by the at most once delivery under TCP when what we really needed was at least once delivery in many, many cases.Even the address space size problem is less of an issue than originally predicted because of improvements in NAT, up to and including cgNAT for cellular network providers (which also somewhat addressed (2) in a limited way).Interestingly, some of the larger companies have networks simply too large for the 10.0.0.0/8 address space.By "roaming" I mean maintaining a consistent connection while moving between networks.(4) has kinda fallen on QUIC (now HTTP3) but this should really be core TCP/IP Layer 3.You could also say that TCP congestion control is pretty outdated. It's not surprising. It was designed at a time before megabit (let alone gigabit) networks. And, more importantly, latency kills throughput. Some efforts have been made on this, such as Google's BBR [2], but other problems remain like MTU windows being too small for modern networks.So what did IPv6 do? It only solved one problem, address space, and it did it in a way that kinda created new problems. First, the address space is too large (128 bits) and the last 64 bits are kinda reserved for the job that a 16 port used to do. And why was that? Originally, it was intended that the lower 64 bits were derived from a 48 bit MAC address (as used by Ethernet and later Wifi) but they realized this was a huge privacy problem so it never happened.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect[2]: https://github.com/google/bbr[2]: https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-knowledge-base/und...
• shmerl
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  spullara
  they should have made it backwards compatible. they were forever doomed by not make it a superset of IPv4.
• halyconWays
  IPv6 addresses are ugly and hard to memorize. IPv4 addresses are pretty and easier to memorize. That's about the end of the discussion as to why it's basically a failure.
• bell-cot
  The article itself is fairly short & fluffy.Vs. real meat is in the comments on the Register's site.
• almosthere
  Is IPv6 going to see it's epitaph instead of it's takeover soon?
• Menu

  blibble
  reminder that in 2026 Microsoft GitHub(TM) still doesn't support ipv6but if you need maximum AI slop, that's everywhere
• anon
  undefined
• singpolyma3
  Except it has
• Menu

  einpoklum
  > "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.
• Menu

  RicoElectrico
  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.
• Menu

  knorker
  For Google connecting clients it's only half the internet.Half. The. Internet.What a failure. /s
• Menu

  exabrial
  Still disabled on all my networks and will be forever. Incoming HN downvotes because I'm not using the coolest latest technology.ipv4 accidentally provides "casual anonymity" and "one ip does not identify device", which is incredibly important in this age of overbearing surveillance by government and private companies. ipv6, even with the "privacy extensions", is one subpoena away form directly identifying your individual device. ("ISP X: who did you assign this block of ips to on Y date?")ipv4 has a boatload of issues (the worst of it is probably the unused and 'dangerous' flags), and ipv6 offers a boatload of cool features (The most beautiful is probably the flow state tracking).However ipv6 was designed in a naive vacuum where no one possibly imagined the internet being abused to destroy an individual's inherit right to anonymity.Oddly enough, the people most hellbent on spying on you: Facebook, Google, etc are the ones screaming for ipv6 the loudest.
• singularity2001
  sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi ; sudo networksetup -setv6off Ethernetto protect your privacy