I am going through the process of requesting an IP address block, and it’s looking like IPv4 just isn’t going to happen.
Luckily ARIN is handing out IPv6 addresses like candy. It got me thinking though, what would the feasibility of running all my services on IPv6 only be? Will everyone (including me at my office, I suppose) just be SOL when trying to hit that network?
I think it’s more about the learning curve than technical feasibility. Could be wrong though since I have completely avoided it…
It just depends on what networks you generally use.
I would be fine with IPv6 only services for the most part. My home network has working IPv6 and my mobile phone uses it too.
It would cause problems if I wanted to use hotel WiFi while traveling or while at a friend’s house where his network is only IPv4.
One way around the problem is to use an IPv4 forwarding proxy, load balancer, or VPN. Put it wherever you can get an IPv4 address. It will be slower but it will work when you need it.
Do you really need a block of ipv4? You can usually host multiple sites and services using reverse proxies and SNI.
e.g. I don’t have IPv6 at home
That is the big question. Ideally yes, because I live in rural Idaho and the local ISPs can’t be bothered to update their stuff. If there was some magic way for IPv4 clients to talk to IPv6 services though, that would do the trick.
Its kinda strange how we are being pushed so hard to migrate to IPv6, but have to leave so many customers behind.
– EDIT –
Especially given that we are only seeing about 3% of internet traffic over IPv6 anyways. Check out this graph from the Seattle Internet Exchange:
I meant as opposed to just one or two IPs from a range.
The other thing you could do is get ipv4 addresses from some cloud ISP, and bring the traffic to your servers through a tunnel.
The problem here is the local ISPs wont announce routes to IP ranges I don’t own without written agreements with the actual owners of those IP blocks, and these cloud providers have no interest in letting that happen. In fact, none of the ISPs I have talked to have been interested in writing agreements to allow other ISPs to route addresses I am leasing from them.
This would mean that any traffic over IPv4 would need to be over a VPN tunnel. Although possible this means I that traffic originating from the local ISPs would need to go to my VPN then transit back to rural Idaho to get to me, rather than just hopping over a peering connection from the ISP to me.
I might have a 10G peering connection to the ISP that the traffic is originating from, but I would be limited by the 100Mbps uplink.
Dear forum members,
These kinds of posts always make me gigglish. Having an IPv6 only network shouldn’t be a problem in 2021, yet, it sort of is. What I’ve noticed over the years is the following trend:
Good ISPs in developing countries are now deploying with no IPv4 support whatsoever. Mainly, because the organizations in these countries responsible for address space allocation DON’T have anymore addresses to give out (and when they DO, the prices are VERY high). Retarded network operators don’t even get to partake or start such ISPs either, because they can’t into v6 or they think it’s a gimmick.
Bad ISPs in developing countries managed to snag some leftover /24s and /31s at the end of 2019 and are operating v4 only sometimes and relying on CGNATTING with 1 to 100 setups sometimes. Talk about a disaster.
Source: https://twitter.com/ayubio/status/1370088564093022217
Pedido de IP
Then you also have countries like Angola, with a huge v4 address space allocated to them, yet they’re not even close to using all of it. This makes them think twice before ever adopting v6.
On the topic of countries with too many addresses, you have people like a friend of mine in Finland whose ISP gives you 5 IPv4 addresses if you so request through DHCP.
Source: Roteamento de Ideias - Entrevista sobre as redes e IXs internacionais com Darwin Costa da DE-CIX by Camada 8 • A podcast on Anchor
Now, out of the topic of internet access to the end user, let’s talk about accessibility to huge parts of the web.
E-mail: A huge amount of mail server operators out there have 0, I repeat, 0 v6 support. Boggles my mind. So, in such a case, your users would straight up not be able to send e-mail to certain recipients. Not good.
WWW: Big sites like reddit, twitch and discord don’t support v6 yet. What a joke.
Security: Most DVRs I came in touch with and IP cameras have barely working support for v4, as in, their networking is complete dogshit. They have no v6 either. I’m talking about newish devices from only upwards to 2 years old.
Gaming: Xbox one does v6 just fine. PS4 and 5? None. Nintendo Switch? No clue.
Now, what’s gonna happen in the future? I’m thinking two possibilities:
A: We stay in this hellhole of natting with no v6 widespread in the foreseeable future.
B: With more v6 only ISPs coming up, people launch services to compete with the existing ones that are v4 only. Or, some huge service like Netflix goes out of their way to go v6 only even if just for a day. This would have ISPs running around the clock to implement v6. It would also give quite a few laughs.
This post was written while eating a pizza and laying back as further as possible in my chair. So, sorry for the schizophreniac-like contents and their order. I’m thinking of one day doing a general v6 post in the forum with a bunch of info.
Best regards,
vhns
Good write-up. I went ahead and applied for a /24 block of IPv4 address space anyways just to see if I get lucky. I really want to push for IPv6 only, but if I have to bridge then i’ll need both address space to make it happen. What a pain.
Judahnator,
Again, I’m eating pizza and laying back, today is my lazyday.
You could always setup a limited company or something in a small country and ask for v4 addresses with their address space allocation organization. Then, you could just announce those addresses you snagged yourself. There’s also a thing called remote peering in case they require you to operate out of their country.
Best regards,
vhns
Just to chime in with another piece of information:
Seatle’s IX isn’t the whole world 
https://www.facebook.com/ipv6/?tab=ipv6
https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/
That’s the idea, yes. You can stick IPv4 into IPv6 tunnel, no big deal, and I don’t see why you’d limited to 100Mbps, most cloud ISPs have open peering policies. Albeit depending on total volume / month it might be expensive to relay through a cloud provider.
Then again RFC6724 would make most of your traffic that’s able to use IPv6 actually use IPv6.
The other thing is dos protection - usually whoever provides this for you does L4 proxy-ing to you, whether it’s v4/V6 doesn’t really matter. Same with outgoing email, if you want your IPs to stay not widely advertised to the world to avoid getting dos-ed.
This should be very feasible, save for one thing, and that is that your router would need to do some IPv4 translation for legacy sites. I think there is an IPv6 range out there already that is mapped to the entire IPv4 space though. Could be wrong.
Other than that IPv6 internally should Just Work™ but it all depends how well people have written their applications to interpret IPv6. A lot of proprietary software still use IPv4 and has nothing else to communicate with. This maybe could be faked internally somehow though…
Just so this doesn’t seem as something otherworldly here is the RFC with said address space rfc3056
