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Back in 2018 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced that the IPv6 protocol had become a full Internet standard:
With IPv6 adoption accelerating over the past 6 years, from being a negligible fraction of the Internet (<1%) to recently topping 25% [Ed., now over 42%], moving IPv6 a full Internet Standard could not have come at a better time.
The Internet Standard designation represents the highest level of technical maturity and usefulness in the IETF standardization process. As the relative numbering of the RFC (RFC 8200) and STD (STD86) suggests, there are many protocols that make their way through the IETF standards process to be published as RFCs, but are not Internet Standards. The Internet Standard designation means those implementing and deploying a protocol can be assured it has undergone even more technical review by the IETF community than the typical RFC, and has benefitted from experience gained through running code and real-world experience. This is definitely true in the case of IPv6.
[...] Moving these IPv6-related specifications to full Internet Standards matches the increasing level of IPv6 use around the Internet. The IETF community has steadily worked to ensure that the Internet is ready for the time when IPv6 is the dominant Internet Protocol. Work in a variety of IPv6-related IETF working groups, such as 6man and 6ops, continues, striving to make the Internet work better.
On 02 July the IETF Executive Director announced that they have given up on IPv6 as being too much effort for their own services starting with email:
3. IPv6 for mail
As others have explained, we have chosen to switch, at this stage, to a large commercial mail sender with extensive reputation management rather than continue to send directly and as a consequence that will be IPv4 only. I don't plan to reiterate the multiple trade-offs considered in that decision, but I do want to stress that this was not a simple decision. I say "at this stage" because there are still discussions about whether or not this is the best long term strategy for mail delivery.At a principled level, I agree that if the community says "we must have IPv6 for mail" then the LLC needs to deliver that, but at a practical level, given the cost and effort required, I would want that conveyed in a more formal way than a discussion on this list and us given a year plus to deliver it. However, and this is major however, piecemeal decisions like that are only going to make things much harder and it would be much better to have a broader decision about IPv6 in IETF services (more on that below).
For now at least then, we are going to continue with the plan to move to Amazon SES for mail sending. Once that is bedded down, that will be reviewed, but that will be several months away and the outcome may be to stick with it, unless there has been a community decision that changes that.
4. IPv6 for all services (or not)
If the community wants to develop guidance on the use of IPv6 for IETF services then that would be helpful. More generally, it would be so much better all round, if the implicit expectations that people have about IETF services, were properly surfaced, discussed, agreed and recorded. If that were done, then we would be very happy to include those in any RFP or service assessment.
Will people care if the organization who, for very many years, has been strongly advocating for everyone to switch to IPv6 has now given up on it? At a superficial level it doesn't look great if that decision was effectively made by AWS.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gnuman on Saturday July 06 2024, @10:15PM (4 children)
Nothing makes it hard. But people are lazy and will not move, like a donkey.
* How long was `telnet` the standard way of login in? I remember at univerity, ssh was not even installed. Then admins complained that "hackers" can easily break into this Linux so they better stick with Solaris.
* How long was https:// too heavy for websites? until ISPs starting inserting ads into 3rd party sites, then suddenly it became not heavy
* For how long is DNSSEC deemed as "not important"?
My ISP will not deploy IPv6. Why? Because they have enough IPv4 so why would they bother? Another, more successful ISP around here, doesn't even offer native IPv4 anymore because they don't have the addresses to give out. Carrier grade NAT only for IPv4s, otherwise, IPv6 native.
Finally, it pays to have IPv4 around. ISPs are charging $$$ for scarcity (ie. the server side). This actually is an incentive to keep IPv4 around longer!
Does this answer your question?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2024, @06:48PM (3 children)
If you are providing a service of any kind on the internet, you basically have no choice but to make it accessible via IPv4. It remains extremely inexpensive to do so, so literally every service of any value on the internet is available on the IPv4 internet.
There is no actual value today in having a connection to the IPv6 internet. So there is no reason for an ISP to provide it, except as a mechanism to access the IPv4 internet and perhaps to appease a handful of computer nerds (which might work to generate some business, but otherwise is probably not something to spend a lot of resources on).
ISP customers as a whole will demand IPv6 access only when there are significant internet services which are only available via IPv6. If that ever happens, then IPv6 will suddenly become very important. But until then, it is actively counterproductive: everything works better on IPv4, and having a fully dual stacked connection to the internet can certainly introduce problems but does not solve anything.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday July 07 2024, @07:28PM (2 children)
I am guessing that you are in the USA. Here in Europe most things are IPv6. The websites that I access, the email servers that I access in UK, France and elsewhere. My entire home network is IPv6. For me, it changes when I want to access this site. At some point the routing usually goes to Paris and then it is converted to IPv4 when it goes outside Europe (I think). If I query 'WhatsMyIP" it gives me an IPv6 response.
There is probably a technical name for this conversion at a gateway of some sort set up by Orange.fr, but for me I don't need IPv4. If I type 'ip a' at the command line I get lots of IPv6 information, but nothing that is IPv4.
Internally our whole SN site is IPv6 enabled and has been that way for at least 5 years, although our servers still seem to have IPv4 addresses too. For example, a France-wide supermarket chain (Carrefour.fr) gives me the following.
I am still on ADSL.... Fibre is some 3-5 years away from rural France although every significant town and city has it. Just not us country yokel types.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08 2024, @10:19PM
I did not mean to suggest that there is nothing at all on the IPv6 internet. Obviously there are lots of sites out there that can be accesed with IPv6. The point is that nobody actually cares about IPv6 connectivity, because every service anyone cares about is also on the IPv4 internet, and only computer networking geeks are going to care one whit whether that connection was done over IPv6 or IPv4.
Yes, exactly.
If you deleted the AAAA records for soylentnews.org today and then (later) turned off IPv6 support on the servers, you would not cause any noticeable problem for any real visitor to this website.
The reverse is not true. If you deleted the A records you will suddenly have a lot of users with connection problems.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday July 09 2024, @04:56PM
janrinok: nope.
I'm forced to use two different ISPs in two different European countries (due to the blocks of flats having a management group that choose the ISP that serves the block).
In one country, the ISP stopped offering IPv6 late last year, with no timeline for reinstating it.
In the other country, the ISP renumbered IPv6 without telling me, cutting me off from remote access to my router. They, by policy, provide no help in connecting up my own router again, saying they support only their own router (which is managed/backdoored by TR-069) - they also look to have gone down the path of offering only a /64 to 'customers'.
I'm spitting feathers.