Explore: Why No IPv6? (IPv6 SaaS)

Lasse Haugen had enough of the never-ending “we can’t possibly deploy IPv6” excuses and decided to start the IPv6 Shame-as-a-Service website, documenting top websites that still don’t offer IPv6 connectivity.

His list includes well-known entries like twitter.com, azure.com, and github.com plus a few unexpected ones. I find cloudflare.net not having an AAAA DNS record truly hilarious. Someone within the company that flawlessly provided my website with IPv6 connectivity for years obviously still has some reservations about their own dogfood ;)

2 comments:

  1. Well, smart people prefer people food ... :)

    Jokes aside, IPv6 is an unnecessary problem to manage/handle for a general publicly facing service, assuming one is not forced to do so by circumstances.

    Sad reality is that IPv4 hosting is a must for a prime internet provider, so it is just easier to skip the problems the mere existence of an AAAA record can create for users/customers. We had a problem that a hosting provider enabled full IPv6 hosting for an SMB client of ours. Essentially free of charge. A fully working one too boot.

    Very fast the client got bombarded by customer complains of "horrible performance". Some customers had computers by default configured to preffer IPv6 name resolution for some reason and those got horrible performance seemingly at random. Once AAAA was rolled back, issues disappeared. Eventually, this was nailed down to customer being on an IPv4-only networks with IDPS/proxying deployed so tunnelling was triggered, did not work, and a retry using IPv4 took a lot of time to happen as the IPv6 packets were just behing blackholed probably.

    Now, nothing was wrong with the web of the client, of with the DNS config. It was just a common case of their customer systems not complying with standards ... of course the SMB vendor was blamed for "broken system" and very fast instituted a policy of "no-public-facing-IPv6-over-here" right from the CEO level. And I have to admint correctly so. That was 2022. Ahem.

    Not suprise the main online outlets avoid it.

    Replies
    1. I will comment only the last bit:

      > Not suprise the main online outlets avoid it.

      The same site has a (somewhat hidden) list of "heroes" (https://whynoipv6.com/domain?filter=heroes) which includes names like Google, Facebook, Office.com, Netflix, Spotify, Yandex... so I wouldn't say that the "main online outlets" avoid it ;)

      The more traffic one generates, the more it makes sense to invest time into offering the content over IPv4 and IPv6 to ensure consistent customer experience (due to inevitable CGNAT). As always, YMMV.

  2. Please help me understand in simple terms, what business problem does IPv6 really solves ? (Preferably with some math)

    Unless you are telling me that You got to do it because we are running out of addresses?

    If so is the case, any business would have simple response I believe -

    1. Let me know the shortest window I will have, when there will really be no options (NAT etc.)/IPv4 addresses left
    2. Throw some $$$ on consulting a prepare a report covering - Readiness, Value Chain, Roadmap & Tentative cost (HW/SW, Licensing, Services, Support, Training)

    And that precisely summarises why IPv6 sucks.

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