Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

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I have not seen a practical way to go IPv6-Only. If I made my DNS, Web, Chat, Time and other servers IPv6-Only I would only be able to access them from a few mobile networks, most VPS providers and a handful of ISP's. One might be tricked into thinking adoption is high, but the VPS and mobile providers really throw off the statistics. Mobile providers due to sheer numbers of clients and being late to the allocation game did not have much choice but to go IPv6 and set up IPv4 gateways/tunnels.

I could see doing IPv6+IPv4 in a corporation and terminate everything on load balancers, allowing anything behind the LB to be any combination of IPv4/IPv6. But IPv6 only? I don't see any big companies doing that in my lifetime.

My ISP obtained some IPv6 space but have not deployed it yet as they are still trying to decide how to subnet and bill for it so I currently have some static IPv4 addresses. I am on a tiny ISP, so tiny all their C-Levels phone numbers and email addresses are still in whois. Most of the US ISP's doing IPv6 also do IPv4 even if sometimes it is CG-Nat.

> I could see doing IPv6+IPv4 in a corporation and terminate everything on load balancers, allowing anything behind the LB to be any combination of IPv4/IPv6. But IPv6 only? I don't see any big companies doing that in my lifetime.

facebook started migrating to ipv6-only datacenters in 2014 or so. i think all of them are converted at this point. they only support legacy ip at their network edge, & use siit (iirc) to facilitate access.

The legacy IP at their edge is what I meant by terminating IPv4+IPv6 at the load balancers.

The tricky part is that almost all datacenters today need to talk out to other datacenters. Not all of them use IPv6 which means they will still need some way to speak IPv4 until all their 3rd party data processors are also doing IPv6 and for Facebook I happen to know that is a lot of 3rd parties. If they are truly IPv6-only in the datacenter then they would have to forward-proxy all outbound connections through something with an IPv4 address on the edge as well and that can not go away until all their partners and vendors are also purely IPv6.

You can do that with NAT64, which you can run as a service in your datacenter rather than needing to deal with v4 throughout it. (In fact it doesn't have to be run in your datacenter -- it could be outsourced to somebody else, which will probably make sense eventually as v4 use dwindles.)

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