This question is only for the true geeks and nerds out there as we seem to be the only people playing with this:
* How many of you are IPv6 enabled yet? *

I've had my internal LAN setup for dual-stack for a long time and earlier this year i removed IPv4 entirely leaving a single 6-to-4 translation on my gateway, today i've changed my router to only use IPv6 and it works very well except for the serious lack of sites that are available on v6 only, so i've had to use v4 DNS resolvers at my perimeter firewall which is a right pain in the ass.

I'm sticking with v6 as it's the way forward and to anyone who thinks i'm nuts, but i'd be interested to know what experience others have had with this wonderful (and yet strange) world of IoT we're going in to.

Thanks, Katie

The Mothership is still on V4 for the immediate future. We have a /23 from our upstream (Frontier Fiber) who does our BGP and routing.

Our major gripe is that we were not really big enough for direct Arin V4 allocation (and running our own BGP) and they won't give you a direct V6 allotment unless you are already have (and use 85% of) a direct V4. Small business uptake is going to suffer unless/until they change that. V4 will not be going away in my lifetime, so unless I get my OWN fully portable V6 /64 or /48, I'm probably not going to bother for awhile. It's just not worth the effort. I can get a V6 /64 from the upstream, but if I change backbones, I'm back to changing every IP on every server again, just like I have to do with V4. There's no business case for making the change.

Another annoyance is the use of colons in V6 addressing. That screws up all my existing scripting tool chains for V4 addressing and creates "escape hell". I already have enough to do around here without having to rewrite everything for no actual benefit.

Big ISPs killing the small technological pioneers with BS restrictions... I laugh when i think about small businesses trying to fund (let alone use) 85% of a v4 block!


That's a good point for larger businesses, it's a lot of work and planning (as well as convincing management to approve it). I know from past experience that some companies would rather just replace like-for-like but bigger and faster; it's been rare for a company to say "This is the latest and greatest, it's been road-tested and we're going to be using it". On the times its happened i've seen the sparkle in the engineers eyes like all their Christmas's came at once.
I can't think of the problems with using colons since i've only just started with C+/C# and never had problems with VB/Powershell, but if you say there are i don't doubt you.

But more about home connections? I know you Americans have had IPv6 widely available long before us Brits could lay our sticky mitts on it, and i literally got it turned on just 48hrs ago (nice little /48) from my ISP completing that last link between me and the outside world.
Surely there must be people who've been trying it out on their home networks?

Thanks for your reply Soundguy!

Regardless of platform, one irritation is that the colon has always indicated "the IP is to my left, now here's a port number to my right"


The majority of the US currently gets broadband from a handful of large cable TV companies, the rest being various DSL technologies, with a smattering of Fiber optic and the occasional 3G/4G/LTE wireless service. Comcast is the largest CATV provider and I think they are at about 18% rollout right now.

I personally don't have residential service. I bought my current house entirely because it was in the footprint of a fiber optic rollout about 8 years ago. Initially, I had a basic business account and eventually went to high end "Metro ethernet", which is a dedicated fiber directly to the regional backbone hub in downtown Seattle. The upstream says they can turn on V6 any time I want it, but so far I just haven't had the time to even think about it.

I do have an LTE "Hotspot" from T-Mobile for emergency access and the few times I've checked, it does seem to be reporting a V6 address, so I'm guessing the company ran out of V4 before they rolled out the new system

Ah that's why i couldn't see the problem, i've always specified the IP and port as 2 independent variables (as i said, i'm new to some languages and haven't learned fully how to pull system/built-in variables)
Also PowerShell is very accommodating when it comes to IPv6

But if you can get v6 and can run dual-stack i would really recommend it as v6 routes around the internet appear to be quicker and shorter
This is only based on my initial testing of simple HTTP/S traffic.

I've just bought a new main router to upgrade the Hall's internal networking to gigabit, and that supports v6 but at the moment we see no urgency to migrate, and will stick with v4. I've been hearing about v6 since 2002, when I attended some talks on it at BT's Adastral Park down Ipswich way, but it seems to be permanently stuck in "it's coming tomorrow", while NAT has largely removed the necessity for urgent adoption even though RIPE ran out of v4 addresses several years back. There's also a thriving market for "second hand" v4 IPs, with organisations that formerly had large allocations switching to NAT and selling off the extra space.

We tend to run hardware for a very long time - the staging server that rsyncs new releases to our main webserver was assembled from scavenged parts back in 2004 and everything bar the disks was old even then, and the internal core switches I'm about to replace date from 2002. It's slow (the network card in the staging server doesn't even do gigabit) but works, and I've a tendency to very much stick with things as long as they work unless there's an actual urgent reason to change - in our case it's the eventual switch to filming in 4k that's driving the upgrade.

The datacentre where our main webserver is hosted is fairly newly built (5 years or so) and so almost certainly has v6 capability but when we put the server in all the discussions were on v4 addressing, I don't think v6 was mentioned.

I just finished RHCE training a few weeks ago which made much more extensive use of IPv6 networking than the last time I ran through it for RHEL 5. I still have trouble with knowing where it's safe to collapse colons/zeroes but I appreciate the [address]:port notation, at least that helps slightly

At work we used to have to turn off the ipv6 kernel modules on some of our old systems due to issues with old software. These days a lot of our systems are in AWS, and AFAIK they still don't support it on anything other than load balancers.

I do use it semi-regularly myself, since Apple's Back-to-my-Mac service runs over it, but I'm not setting IPs or anything there.

My home network and internet connection are both dual-stack. (I use A&A for my internet connection, so it's native/pure IPv6 rather than a tunnel.) Eventually I'd like to get rid of IPv4 on the LAN, but I'm not quite brave enough to do that yet!

Congrats on making the leap into the unknown!
(BTW: Good choice using A&A they're the tits! If i could afford luxury-grade internet i would, but i'm using Zen so it's somewhere in the middle )