[yjftsjthsd-h]

> IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production.

Is it still? I know this was true for a while, but things seem to have been ironed out. I only occasionally have IPv6 (my ISP is doing something weird), but when I do it all seems to work fine.

[labcomputer]

No. You are correct.

Good IPv6 host support has been a thing in almost all consumer OSes for over 10 years now. All currently supported versions of Windows, MacOS, Android[1][2] and iOS support IPv6 natively.

And, as I keep reminding HN, Windows freaking XP supported IPv6 (albeit not as a transport for DNS queries).

The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).

[1] There have been various blog posts about how android is “broken by design” because it expects to configure host IP via SLAAC and receive DNS servers via RA, instead of DHCPv6. This is utter nonsense.

[2] Android did, until about 5 years ago, not like to use DNS servers with ULA prefixes (the IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 private network ranges). That’s unfortunate, but hardly a “dumpster fire”.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Good IPv6 host support has been a thing in almost all consumer OSes for over 10 years now. All currently supported versions of Windows, MacOS, Android[1][2] and iOS support IPv6 natively.

You probably need to care about the last couple unsupported versions, too; 5-year-old Android versions are still in the wild. Thankfully, it's a rolling window and the stuff with poor support is dropping off.

> The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).

The problem, speaking as someone who spent some weekends worth of time on it, is that the technology, which has only been relevant for the last handful of years regardless of when it was first released, is not nearly that simple and works just differently enough to trip you up. (And you can't just do a full replacement and drop v4, so the differences will keep tripping you up)

[WorldMaker]

As far as we can tell from aggregate statistics, consumer devices have been leading IPv6 adoption, not lagging it.

Charts of IPv6 usage such as Google's tend to still show a strong "bathtub curve" with a very noticeable decline during 9-5 work hours making a pretty clear case that corporate/enterprise devices are the ones (greatly) lagging behind.

Consumer devices most directly feel the effects of NAT/CGNAT and feel much more pressured to route around that IPv4 "damage" with IPv6. Some consumer networks, especially mobile carriers in every part of the world, have moved to IPv6-predominant (if not "IPv6-only"; depending on how you feel about IPv6 to IPv4 gateways). The "Happy Eyeballs" algorithm has been in play on most Consumer OSes for several years now and consumer devices generally strongly prefer IPv6 services over IPv4 when given a dual-stack choice.

[kevin_thibedeau]

There are a ton of IP connected devices that aren't running a sophisticated OS. IPv6 may not be available or, even if it is, the codebase is fossilized around handling and storing IPv4 addresses.

[kstrauser]

BTW, the new Thread stack for controlling IoT stuff in your house is IPv6-only. That is, my light bulbs now run on IPv6.

[jandrese]

Consumer device support is not a major problem, it is ISPs that are the major roadblock. Corporate oriented devices are also a slow to adopt however, which is one reason ISPs have not made the switch.

[labcomputer]

Can you name some of these devices?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Not them, but probably things like deep packet inspection and ancient firewalls (that probably should be replaced but, y'know, enterprise)

[jandrese]

I know Fortigate SSL Inspection was/is broken on IPv6, which killed IPv6 for some corporate users.

[commandersaki]

I don't know the state of IPv6 on consumer devices, but I can imagine from an ISP point of view it's a massive support burden.

IPv6 excels on smartphone handsets since the telecom company has full control of your network/IP stack. Simple to support and manage.

However consider a home network situation, you have the consumer router, and attached to it is a bunch of devices, some which have iffy support for IPv6. They all speak IPv4 well. From an ISP perspective supporting IPv4 only makes sense because it still works and you can count on downstream devices in a home network to support it. With the impending depletion of public IPv4 addresses, ISPs can rely on CGNAT. Less burden.

[toast0]

My sample size of two DSL modems that my ISP supports says yes. The old one would reboot if it received a fragmented IPv6 packet. The newer one is better, it doesn't crash, it just delays more or less all packets for a second if IPv6 was in use.

Wireless router support for IPv6 is iffy too, from what I've heard.

[creeble]

It’s pretty hard to tell how many “devices” are capable of ipv6 because they typically just ask for ipv4 DHCP addresses and get them from routers.

My guess is that it is still a tiny minority of non-computer devices that will use ipv6 on the LAN side of a router.

[dsr_]

I have a properly set up house network with IPv4 and IPv6 support infrastructure. In December, we used 1.22 TiB total traffic, of which 722.96 GiB was IPv6.

IPv6 traffic has been at least 50% for at least the last year (based on the most convenient statistics I can grab).

[lanstin]

At my house with about 10 online devices now i have 42 ipv6 entries in the nat table out of 272 total. I have at&T adsl but would see similar results with Comcast business (which i had until a month ago). I have either linux or newish commercial devices and they have slipped ipv6 in over the past few years. no more HE tunnels for me. I suspect if more websites put it in the DNS it would just work. I am just waiting for ipv6 only VPCs in AWS.