Hello world,
I was wondering if it would be possible to completely ditch IPv4 in the modern day?
On my Windows laptop disabling Ipv4 link in the adapter settings got me as far as not being able to resolve with my router and not being able to connect to the router page.
Currently I have no Linux machine so I can not test the experience there either. I’d like to know what I should do to get further than this?
Alvast bedankt.
I know at least ten programs that require IPv4, and the various wrapper/adapter techniques do not work reliably/at all.
Good luck with embedded/IoT shit is all I’m going to say. I’m willing to bet that
Source: am an embedded dev, albeit in a small company.
I would say no.
Unless you are fine with cutting yourself off from like half the internet.
Yep. This is like the HTTPS transition except even further from being close to enforced/normalized
If you’re a developer/enthusiast and willing to live with some of the pain of running IPv6 only for some reason…
… then there is this jool.mx thing.
It’s a NAT64 - if you have devices that only speak IPv4 this will give them an IPv6 address… and if you have devices that only speak IPv6 this will give them an IPv4 address… somehow.
DNS64 exists and can fabricate AAAA records for IPv4 only hosts, so web should be fine… mostly. However, DNSSEC, DNS over HTTPS/TLS/QUIC, and people not using network provided DNS servers breaks this somewhat - most major websites are IPv6 enabled so it shouldn’t be a big deal for most people’s majority of use cases.
The remaining problem, as others have pointed out, are various network protocols that don’t really have any support for NAT64 translators. Pretty much any network protocol that encapsulates some kind of IP address, is going to have some issues. Things like crypto DHTs, torrents, ipfs and so on… The client software out there, that is running on IPv6 only machine is going to get an IPv4 peer address, and then what? … it should know how to talk to it over IPv6, but it doesn’t… despite there being standards to enable this. Vice-versa is also a problem and even harder to solve from a technical perspective.
There’s also an issue with lots of technologically progressive folks opting out of IPv6 for whatever reason - they’d setup pfSense at home, or another kind of router and they’d end up with a non-functioning/disabled/broken IPv6 configuration… and they wouldn’t care.
There’s another issue, IOT. Lots of small devices run custom IP stacks that have been very much optimized for size. So much, that even IPv4 implementation is bare bones and TLS is a non-starter and they end up with their own noise protocols instead. Often, there’s a companion phone app that expects mDNS or similar discovery to happen, or they end up phoning home over the internet… and whoever is on the other end is not expecting them to talk IPv6.
These are all technically solvable problems, they’re not hard to solve, but it’d take a lot of effort, and will take a long time. So, unless you’re willing to live with some of the brokenness for the sake of science, and for the sake of actually improving the situation with various pieces of software, don’t do IPv6 only.
If you want to improve, start with jool.mx on your router, for fun, and try to build an IPv6 only LAN segment (e.g. start with a separate WiFi SSID), and see how big you can make that segment before running into problems, and then file bugs for software that is not aware that NAT64 can exist. (e.g. ask that torrent clients and trackers and other P2P apps to implement a flag to contact IPv4 peers over their rfc6052 or rfc8215 address - and/or to discover when they have IPv6 only connectivity and try to get around it).
Is there even a good reason to try and enforce it?
One strategy for dealing with a big “problem” is figuring out how to break it down into smaller pieces that are more easily tackle-able.
If you don’t plan to work on this, there’s no reason to go IPv6 only - you can do private IPv4+IPv6 instead and that’s much better actually (as a user experience).
No, no
Was just wondering what key benefit people are after by using ipv6; have yet to see someone explain why they want it over ipv4
Again, in theory it’s just an optimization that lets you do some things more easily in some cases - with fewer proxies and easier end-to-end connectivity, and in theory for ISPs lower cost and less worry about running out of addresses.
There is nothing that works with IPv6 that doesn’t have some kind of workaround to enable the end-user use case with IPv4.
There’s also nothing that’s currently possible with IPv4, that would be impossible with IPv6, given a workaround.
The difference is that there’s this trend of there being fewer and fewer workarounds required if you’re on IPv6-only and more and more workarounds required if you’re on IPv4-only networks.
Dual stack is where things are at today, and to really know if you care about IPv4 you’d have to invest in some logging (and my bet is that for 50+% of users the answer is no… their bank / utilities company is likely to have an IPv4 only website or a mobile app endpoint).
RemindMe! 20 years
The thing is, this is like touchscreen phones but the Nokia alternative universe in where it takes more time to pick up. But if one is an IPv6 technician or has some quality experience andor knowledge, it will be greatly beneficial. As time goes on we need to start the transition, and it begins with pitching it at the corporate level.
Also, I’m so done with NAT incompatibility when trying to play with friends.
And also the increased security having a changing address, rather than an area code.
I’ll talk to my ISP and see how it could be done. Right now my router support IPv6. I just don’t know why my PC couldn’t access the internet.
As far as I know IPv6 to IPv4 and vice versa translation exists. Still I can login to remote machine and access it from there.
I am wondering how Microsoft went IPv6 only. I want to try it on my personal network and the corporate network.
Basically yes but there is still a portion of the interwebs that doesn’t have ipv6 fully implemented.
Now days most isp’s provide dual stack or dual stack light configurations depending on the said isp.
But in a few years time i would say that the vast majority of internet,
is likely transitioned to ipv6.
We’re doing industrial control at work, a small company. When I tell my colleagues to support IPv6, they reply that we just don’t have resources to enable and test it. My Linux code interfacing with them should be IPv6 ready but obviously no tests. But industrial is a different ball game - even in slow processes any sort of IP is only just coming to market. Honestly? I’m excited for 10BASE-T1L and 10BASE-T1S. Yes, we’re seeing new 10 Mbit Ethernet standards in 2020s. You’re right about code size though.
I have the same question
Can you do an IPv6-only LAN? Easily, just turn off DHCP and only allow IPv6 Router Advertisements. However some broken client devices require an Ipv4 address to configure an IPv6 address, so your mileage may very. At least Windows and Linux are happy enough with just an IPv6 address. I’ve previously run an IPv6 only test network, basically everything worked as expected.
Most applications establish network connections using DNS names via OS / standard library APIs, and often don’t even look at what IP address they actually connect to. This means most applications support IPv6 out of the box with no changes. It’s only older programs, and those that make assumptions about IPs that can break. However that’s quite rare these days.
The internet is where it gets a bit harder. Most of the big sites support IPv6, but there is still far too much out there that is IPv4. However that’s where DNS64 and NAT64 come in. In short your DNS server can return fake AAAA IPv6 records for domains that don’t support IPv6, embedding the IPv4 address in the IPv6 address. Then any connections to that IPv6 address go to a NAT64 gateway, and are translated to their IPv4 counter part. So you can setup an IPv6 only network where clients can still transparently communicate with the IPv4 internet without issue. One such proxy that runs on linux is called Tayga.
The story gets more interesting though, most newer mobile networks are IPv6 only. Clients can use a technology called 464XLAT to transparently tunnel IPv4 traffic over IPv6, by once again embedding IPv4 addresses in Ipv6 addresses. The traffic then becomes IPv4 at gateways in the ISP. Though DNS64/NAT64 is still very popular and can be run side-by-side with 464XLAT. The sites that mobiles tend to visit frequently (google, apple, facebook) are running IPv6 already anyway, so it makes even more sense for mobiles to be IPv6-only.
I don’t have any sources, but I’ve heard stories of IPv6 only networks popping up in countries like India and China. With huge booming industries the IPv4 address exhaustion could definitely have an affect on what’s being offered there.
Not half. Like a small fraction
Almost everything has 6. Everyone still using 4 is just legacy
Like he won’t be able to access newegg but thats only one notable sight
When I disable 4. I lose 2 websites thats all.
Ask Apple to do an IPv6 only. Everyone else will follow.
I’m not employed there, but my company has 100 000-500 000 employees so, might start pitching it there.
Some networking hardware that can handle IPv6 for Data-(V)LANs can only do IPv4 for management and RADIUS/TACACS. It is actually infuriating.
Like others said, industrial and test gear really is happy with RS-485 to send their 1kbit/s to their SCADA or log-writer. That fancy Base-T is only very slowly making its introduction.
My personal problem with IPv6 is that it is very close to non-human readable. Good luck memorizing 2001:DB80:4C31:5400::2 instead of 192.0.2.2.
Almost everything has a bodge-job “got to make the feature list” implementation of IPv6. Occasionally you run into proper IPv6 stacks on software, but it is rare.