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mrjay42 6 hours ago

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 others

In 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.

miyuru 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>ALL your services accessible through the tunnel are "down" for your users

Not all.

I operate site with IPv6 only origins behind cloudflare.

During the outage I manged to login to the dashboard after some time and remove cloudflare for nearly 2 hours, and traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.

Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.

dpark 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> traffic level stayed close to 50% during the IPv6 only period.

> Nobody complained: those who did not have working IPv6 probably blamed it on cloudflare.

You described a situation where the outage resulted in 50% of your customers were unable to reach you and you were unable to do anything about it. I don’t think this story is a win for IPv6, regardless of whether your customers blame CloudFlare or not.

patmorgan23 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This has nothing to do with anything inherent to IPv6 and everything to do with the failure of organizations to timely implement it.

dpark 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

I didn’t say it was an issue inherent to IPv6. But it is a practical issue with IPv6.

orangeboats an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Compared to 0% like others?

50% is a very substantial retention rate.

dpark 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Would hand been 100% if his site supported ipv4 natively instead of relying on CloudFlare to do the translation.

The story here is not “ipv6 made my site resilient to CloudFlare outage”. It’s “50% of my customers can’t reach my site even when I turn off CloudFlare”.

orangeboats 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

>if his site supported ipv4 natively

And it's becoming difficult for people to do so precisely because of IPv4 addresses running out...

NooneAtAll3 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

so it turned into a good ol' legacy problems

idk if arma3 does server discovery, but in case of manual ip input there some kind of OS-networking-level adapter should help. Usecase seems too obvious for something like that not to exist

immibis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most 4G networks are actually IPv6-only, with IPv4 traffic being routed through inefficient tunnel systems. This is why Apple and Google require all mobile apps to use IPv6.

bigfatkitten an hour ago | parent [-]

Certainly not all networks. Optus (Australia's #2 carrier) for example does not support IPv6 at all on their mobile network.

dpark 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have fiber to my house and no native IPv6 support. I did some research and it seems there is a way to enable IPv6, but it’s janky and just tunnels over IPv4 so what’s the point?

I would love for IPv6 to actually take off but somehow it feels like we are still a decade away from ubiquitous adoption.

simoncion 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> In almost ALL context IPv6 is seen as optional, additional, additional configuration and is NEVER the default.

Weird. The past two ISPs I've had (Comcast and Monkeybrains) both had IPv6 enabled by default. I've looked at a bunch of SOHO networking gear and IPv6 is on by default. On every Linux and Windows system I've touched in the past ten, fifteen years you have to go significantly out of your way to disable IPv6.

> Some programs do not handle IPv6 at all. Game servers for instance, do not support it...

Depends on the game server. Many I run absolutely do.

Your complaints smell like you tried to run an IPv6-only client network, which would be an absolute nightmare. That's just a stupid thing for a SOHO network (and the networks that serve most corporate client hosts) to do. IPv4-only Internet hosts exist, so it's a no-brainer to provide IPv4 connectivity to clients.

On the other hand, running IPv6-only infrastructure networks can make a ton of sense. One very large such operator is Comcast, a US ISP.