It’s that time of the year: lots of my friends and acquaintances went to FOSDEM, which is great, and at least one complained about something not working over IPv6, which prompted me to share once again my rant over the newcomer-unfriendly default network of a a conference that is otherwise very friendly to new people. Which then prompted the knee-jerk reaction of people who expect systems to work in isolation, calling me a hater and insulting me. Not everybody, mind you — on Twitter I did have a valid and polite conversation with two people, and while it’s clear we disagree on this point, insults were not thrown. Less polite people got blocked because I have no time to argue with those who can’t see anyone else’s viewpoint.
So, why am I insisting that IPv6 is still not ready in 2020? Well, let’s see. A couple of years ago, I pointed out how nearly all of the websites that people would use, except for the big social networks, are missing IPv6. As far as I could tell, nothing has changed whatsoever for those websites in the intervening two years. Even the number of websites that are hosted by CDNs like Akamai (which does support IPv6!), or service providers like Heroku are not served over IPv6. So once again, if you’re a random home user, you don’t really care about IPv6, except maybe for Netflix.
Should the Internet providers be worried, what with IPv4 exhaustion getting worse and worse? I’d expect them to be, because as Thomas said on Twitter, the pain is only going to increase. But it clearly has not reached the point where any of the ISPs, except a few “niche” ones like Andrews & Arnold, provide their own website over IPv6 — the exception appears to be Free, who if I understood it correctly, is one of the biggest providers in France, and does publish AAAA records for their website. They are clearly in the minority right now.
Even mobile phone providers, who everyone and their dog appear to always use as the example of consumer IPv6-only networks, don’t seem to care — at least in Europe. It looks like AT&T and T-Mobile US do serve their websites over IPv6.
But the consumer side is not the only reason why I insist that in 2020, IPv6 is still fantasy. Hosting providers don’t seem to have understood IPv6 either. Let’s put aside for a moment that Automattic does not have an IPv6 network (not even outbound), and let’s look at one of the providers I’ve been using for the past few years: Scaleway. Scaleway (owned by Iliad, same group as Online.net) charges you extra for IPv4. It does, though, provide you with free IPv6. It does not, as far as I understand, provide you with multiple IPv6 per server, though, which is annoying but workable.
But here’s a quote from a maintenance email they sent a few weeks ago:
During this maintenance, your server will be powered off, then powered on on another physical server. This operation will cause a downtime of a few minutes to an hour, depending on the size of your local storage. The public IPv4 will not change at migration, but the private IPv4 and the IPv6 will be modified due to technical limitations.
Scaleway email, 2020-01-28. Emphasis theirs.
So not only the only stable address the servers could keep is the IPv4 (which, as I said, is a paid extra), but they cannot even tell you beforehand which IPv6 address your server will get. Indeed, I decided at that point that the right thing to do was to just stop publishing AAAA records for my websites, as clearly I can’t rely on Scaleway to persist them over time. A shame, I would say, but that’s my problem: nobody is taking IPv6 seriously right now but a few network geeks.
But network geeks also appear to like UniFi. And honestly I do, too. It worked fairly well for me, most of the time (except for the woes of updating Mongodb), and it does mostly support IPv6. I have a full IPv6 setup at home with UniFi and Hyperoptic. But at the same time, the dashboard is only focused on IPv4, everywhere. A few weeks ago it looked like my IPv6 network had a sad (I only noticed because I was trying to reach one of my local machines with its AAAA hostname), and I had no way to confirm it was the case: I eventually just rebooted the gateway, and then it worked fine (and since I have a public IPv4, Hyperoptic gives me a stable IPv6 prefix, so I didn’t have to worry about that), but even then I couldn’t figure out if the gateway got any IPv6 network connection from its UIs.
I’m told OpenWRT got better about this. You’re no longer required to reverse engineer the source to figure out how to configure a relay. But at the same time, I’m fairly sure they are again niche products. Virgin Media Ireland’s default router supported IPv6 — to a point. But I have yet to see any Italian ISP providing even the most basic of DS-Lite by default.
Again, I’m not hating on the protocol, or denying the need to move onto the new network in short term. But I am saying that network folks need to start looking outside of their bubble, and try to find the reasons for why nothing appears to be moving, year after year. You can’t blame it on the users not caring: they don’t want to geek out on which version of the Internet Protocol they are using, they want to have a working connection. And you can’t really expect them to understand the limits of CGNs — 64k connections might sound ludicrously few to a network person, but for your average user it sounds too much: they only are looking at one website at a time! (Try explaining to someone who has no idea how HTTP works that you get possibly thousands of connections per tab.)