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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

What, besides DNS, is preventing the migration to IPv6? Is it old technology still in use? My house is completely IPv6 and not intentionally so.

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For myself, IPv6 address are just to annoying to deal with as a human.

It's as much of a mental shift as replacing street addresses with Latitude/Longitude coordinates.

So I've avoided IPv6 as much as possible.

To extend this analogy a bit... wouldn't 'street addresses' be DNS and lat/long coordinates be IP addresses?

Can you elaborate a bit? Where do you find frustration with IPv6? I've been using IPv6 for probably close to 10 years now, and I can't say it's been frustrating

As someone who thinks they are pretty savvy with "network stuff", I find the whole thing daunting. But my ISP also doesn't support IPv6 yet either, so I have no easy way (or need) to experiment with it yet.

Years ago I used to have an IPv6 tunnel provided by SixXS. That let me get my feet wet by moving to v6 capable hosting and being able to send traffic to my website over the SixXS tunnel.

At this point, though, you may be able to find an IPv6 capable ISP and just switch to them. Your phone might also have IPv6 too, especially if it's 4G/LTE.

Any amount of exposure is better than none. If you're using AWS, I can help you setup IPv6 in your VPC and use it with EC2 which can let you get some first hand experience. My email is in my profile if you want to take me up on that offer.

That's a good analogy. Nobody writes lat/lon. So, your analogy is perfect enough to largely disqualify stylistic arguments.

Lat/lon is a data set primarily used by applications. IP addresses are much the same way aside from private networks and experimentation. If you need to describe a private space in IPv6 you have link local addresses that begin with fe80.

Modern routing tables are primarily defined by dynamic protocols, such as OSPF. If you really need to express a static IP address directly, such as for remote access to a switch, the IP address will be provided to you. This is why Cisco now requires Python for the CCNP.

Isn’t that what DNS is for? I get that 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 is easier to remember than an IPv6 address. But once you use 82.54.132.87 addresses - is it really that different from either saving an IPv6 in your ssh config file, or resolving it with a domain name?

I feel the same. Nice analogy, going to use it.

You can’t run an email server on ipv6, as most email service providers still use IP blocklists to score spam. Blocklists on IPv6 are not feasible.

You can. Gmail and Migadu both support IPv6:

    aspmx.l.google.com. 293 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:400c:c07::1b
    aspmx1.migadu.com. 600 IN AAAA 2001:41d0:2:4a6f::

IP blacklists are possible for IPv6 based email. I have heard many work by blacklisting the /64 or bigger subnet. Sometimes also adjacent subnets.

Perhaps with SPF+DKIM and other measures we will be able to rely less and less on IP reputation anyway?

Many email receivers do not support v6. You must have an IPv4 address to send email universally.

We're still transitioning to IPv6, so yes - for now - one needs an IPv4 address to reach the whole Internet.

That doesn't make "You can't run an email server on ipv6" correct.

Yes it does- imagine an email server that can’t send/receive email from everyone with an email address.

At best it’s broken at worst it’s not an email server

By that logic, basically nothing supports IPv6.

There's nothing that prevents email from working over IPv6. The sender and receiver just need to have IPv6 connectivity.

Every email provider that supports IPv6 will also support IPv4 (for the time being). To use Gmail as an example:

    aspmx.l.google.com. 293 IN AAAA 2a00:1450:400c:c0b::1a
    aspmx.l.google.com. 293 IN A 173.194.76.27

There is both an A and AAAA record. You can send emails over IPv6 or IPv4 to Gmail addresses.

Did you mean you can't exclusively use IPv6? Because that is also true for browsing the web - because so few websites support IPv6, a lot of links will just not work.

Yes, you must have an IPv4 address for your mail server for the foreseeable future unless you want to only be able to send to IPv6 receivers.

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