Should distributors disable IPv4-mapped IPv6?

Posted Jun 8, 2016 18:20 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Should distributors disable IPv4-mapped IPv6? by paulj
Parent article: Should distributors disable IPv4-mapped IPv6?

> Comcast being one of the most IPv6 geeky

That's pretty much turning this into a "No True Scotsman" argument, if your definition of "geeky" is "supports IPv6" then it is a distinction which doesn't add any value.

Should distributors disable IPv4-mapped IPv6?

Posted Jun 10, 2016 12:02 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think it is unreasonable to think that early IPv6 adopters may have had biases in some way pushing them to that adoption. E.g., having giant internal networks and hence facing exhaustion issues long before anyone else; and/or being interested in technology for its own sake to some extent (i.e. 'geeky').

It's not unreasonable to look at how such biases may affect conclusions drawn from biases. E.g., if IPv6 traffic has increased significantly, is that cause of a general case increase in desire for v6, or a small number of large networks adopting v6 for reasons intrinsic to their large size (which may not transfer to many other networks). If v6 networks are cleaner in some way than v4-only networks, is that cause v6 early-adopters are diferent in some way, or a more general trend (reading carefully - that isn't quite what farnz was saying; but it was an implication I had in my mind when replying).

Considering possible biases is not the same as "No True Scotsman".

Should distributors disable IPv4-mapped IPv6?

Posted Jun 10, 2016 12:27 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The thing is that I'm looking at this from the PoV of a user, wondering what IP version is actually used when I VPN back to work. And I'm seeing more and more that, when I go to a random place with WiFi, or borrow a MiFi type dongle from IT (who give me whichever network's standard kit has best coverage in the area I'm visiting, not whichever kit is best at IPv6), instead of getting an IPv4-only network, I get IPv6 connectivity. I'm explicitly excluding work's network (we've deployed IPv6 already), and networks like my home network, where I know that the network admin is a geek who'll make IPv6 work one way or another.

It's only a couple of years ago that I could reasonably expect that I'd only ever get IPv4 unless I went to special efforts to find an IPv6 network; now, though, I'm seeing IPv6 appear in all sorts of places that I wouldn't expect - heck, even my parents in law (Sky Broadband) have IPv6 at home, and they're sufficiently unbothered about Internet service that they're using the cheapest tier of service that Sky will sell them.

If it were just Comcast, my employer, and geeks like me who had IPv6, I might accept that argument; but it's not. Sky's network is currently small enough to fit within their IPv4 allocations from RIPE, and to allow them to use RFC 1918 space for management (heck, RFC 1918 space is enough for any UK network). Thus, I see IPv6 as starting its serious rollout.

And it took IPv4 a long time to become the dominant computer networking protocol. In terms of the IPv4 rollout, we've reached 1999 - so if IPv6 (which brings no new capabilities over IPv4, unlike IPv4 over the protocols it replaced like Compuserve's proprietary protocol) really is starting to roll out, we're on a par with IPv4.