this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
104 points (94.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43770 readers
2316 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People still use IPv4 because companies are slow to adopt new technologies. They see it as a huge money drain and if there is not a visible or tangible benefit to it then they won't invest in it. IPv6 is definitely a growing technology, it's just taking it's sweet time. For reference, currently the IPv4 has just under a million routes in the global routing table while IPv6 has ~216K routes. About 5 years ago it was something like 100K for IPv6 and not much has changed for IPv4.
I personally do not like the addressing of IPv6. It's not just the length, but now you have to use colons instead of period to separate the octets which leads to extra key strokes since I have to hold shift to type in a colon. It's a minor thing, but when networking is your bread and butter it adds up.
There are also some other concerns with IPv6. Since IPv6 tries to simplify routing by doing things like getting rid of NATing it also opens us up to more remote attacks. It used to be harder to target a specific user or PC that's behind a NATed IP but now everything is out in the open. I'm sure things will get better as more and more people use it and there will be changes made to the protocol however. It's just the natural evolution of technology.
I am very surprised to hear your ISP is not using IPv6. Seems like they're a little behind the times. Unless they just don't offer it to residential customers, which is still a bit behind the times too I guess.
Iv6 doesn't try to simplify routing and remove nat. that's just how things work. Nat is a workaround for ipv4.
Ipv6 is around since 1998. that's not slow to adopt, at that point it is just plain refusal from some because of the costs you mentionend
Time isn't the only factor for adoption. Between the adoption of IPv4 and IPv6, the networking stack shifted away from network companies like Novell to the OSes like Windows, which delayed IPv6 support until Vista.
When IPv4 was adopted, the networking industry was a competitive space. When IPv6 came around, it was becoming stagnant, much like Internet Explorer. It wasn't until Windows Vista that IPv6 became an option, Windows 7 for professionals to consider it, and another few years later for it to actually deployable in a secure manner (and that's still questionable).
Most IT support and developers can even play with IPv6 during the early 2000s because our operating systems and network stacks didn't support it. Meanwhile, there was a boom of Internet connected devices that only supported IPv4. There are a few other things that affected adoption, but it really was a pretty bad time for IPv6 migration. It's a little better now, but "better" still isn't very good.