> I could see doing IPv6+IPv4 in a corporation and terminate everything on load balancers, allowing anything behind the LB to be any combination of IPv4/IPv6. But IPv6 only? I don't see any big companies doing that in my lifetime.
facebook started migrating to ipv6-only datacenters in 2014 or so. i think all of them are converted at this point. they only support legacy ip at their network edge, & use siit (iirc) to facilitate access.
> Part of the motivation for this was to use (mostly) unique MAC addresses (48 bits) as your identifier and that fits in 64 bits. Of course this became a massive PII leak and a tracker's dream so it never happened but we're still stuck with /64 blocks that we absoultely do not need.
please read about rfc4941 privacy extensions & how prevalent their use is before continuing to regurgitate decade-old, outdated privacy alarmism about MaC aDdReSsEs.
ipv6-only web sites are borderline nonexistant, because no one who needs to maintain a profit dares to cut off a revenue stream from legacy ip only users (yet).
> I don't see any "dash" to support v6 in our future, when the option to just keep working around issues with v4 is so much easier and cheaper in the moment.
30-40% global adoption in ~10 years may or may not be a "dash", but it's also not nothing.
"easier and cheaper" is very much not the case at larger scale. legacy ip space is only growing more expensive, & cgnat platforms are not cheap. even if a carrier HAS TO deploy cgnat, deploying ipv6 first means you don't need to buy cgnat capacity for any v6-native traffic (which is a non trivial volume)
> Really, what does anyone have to gain by switching to v6?
the above, & also a future-proofed, infinitely scalable network. any org's that do alot of m&a don't have to play as many stupid rfc1918 integration games.
if you don't deal w/ scale, yea, hard to see the benefits. fair.
by what definition would you call ipv6 "mostly a failure"? 30-40% global eyeball network (to the end user) adoption after ~10 years of active deployment, against very vocal opposition seems commendable enough to me.
> It was relevant then -and it is relevant now- because there are good lessons in how to migrate from thing A to thing B, even if some of the then-missing necessary bits are in place now.
it's irrelevant now because there are smoother approaches to migrating to future-proofed networks than existed at the time. the fact that it persists on the internet, unamended, to be regularly presented (two decades later) as some semblance of current realities of the challenges to ipv6 deployment is a disservice to the internet.
> Still, it's almost certainly the case that DJB's rant had no real effect, and that the necessary steps were bound to be taken as the cost of sticking with IPv4 rose.
i would maintain that "ipv6mess" had a NEGATIVE impact on ipv6 adoption overall, as people who saw djb as a tech god accepted his word as gospel, despite it fundamentally being a crybaby rant, & proliferated the misconceptions & opposition therein.
the fact that he explicitly rejected ipv6 patches to qmail & djbdns (resulting in a fork to at least qmail) should not be understated - he didn't just complain about ipv6, he actively sought to undermine its adoption.
anyone who thinks "ipv6mess" is still relevant in 2022, doesn't understand the problem space it describes.
part 1, interoperability failure/incompatibility: nat64+dns64 has been viable since 2008
part 2, incoherence: dual-stack was the transition plan, & was clearly communicated from the start (to anyone who listened). that turned out to not be so effective since so many ppl ignored the realities of legacy ip depletion. at this juncture ipv6-only (w/ nat64) is becoming a more preferable approach, since you only need to maintain a single protocol in the majority of your environment (as evidenced by org's like tmobile us, facebook, etc).
part 3, distractions: one could argue that rants like "ipv6mess" are the biggest distractions to ipv6 deployment.
"no one is asking for ipv6" is a lie writ large in the provider space; i've seen plenty of examples where a provider has told multiple customers "you're the first person to ask for ipv6 support!" - the problem being is that most org's don't actually keep track of such requests in a unified place, & so every customer is pushing for it alone, so far as the provider is concerned.
but there are waitlists to fulfill, so...you're probably still right.
(tl;dr: "repatriate the poorly allocated legacy ip space" is a losing proposition)