For those of you who have IPv6 capable networks, does it work?!

I received a new router from Comcast and being the nerdgeek that I am, I was excited to experiment with IPv6. I quickly discovered that, at least in my situation, it does not work.

None of Google's services will load, except the Google search page.
Facebook will not load
Any sites that use Google's web services (like AdSense or their various tracking tools), which seems like 99% of websites out there, are completely crippled.

Things are basically clunky as hell.

If I disable IPv6 on my client (MacBook Pro running Mavericks), Internet access is nice and speedy.

I can ping Google, Facebook, and whatnot over IPv4 without issue. However, I cannot ping them via IPv6.

Do you think this is a client specific issue (I have not tried a Windows or Linux client yet), an issue specific to the router, an ISP issue, or an IPv6 issue?

 

Hmm. After some fiddling (turning IPv6 on and off, basically), it seems to be working now. I can ping6 Google and the like and now get a response. Weird...

 

Annd, now it's not working again. Interesting.

 

Is that a bad thing?

 

They never should have moved form IPv5 to IPv6...

 

No, lol. It was just a site I was using as a test.

After a lengthy chat with a tech support person, they seemed to manage to push some buttons and it's working now.

 

Do you mean IPv4? IPv5 was an experimental Internet stream protocol that wasn't what we know as IP. IPv6 is named as such to prevent confusion.

IPv6 is necessary as IPv4 address blocks have been exhausted (the last remaining block was assigned sometime in 2011, which means autonomous systems operators/network providers can no longer obtain additional IPv4 addresses). Simply put, we're running out. Given the growth of Internet enabled devices, IPv6 is necessary...unfortunately.

I much prefer IPs like 65.220.45.9 as opposed to 2607:f8b0:4005:800::1001

 

So, shortly after my last post IPv6 stopped working. What was happening was only one IPv6 interface would function, whichever was detected first by the gateway. This happened to be the wireless interface on my MacBook Pro. If I went hardwired, IPv6 would not work, nor would IPv6 work on my wife's laptop.

After some fiddling around, I think I figured out what was going on. It appears that the stateless IPv6 addressing setting on the gateway I have does not work. As soon as I switched it over to stateful, which functions more like a traditional DHCP server, and defined an IPv6 address pool, all seems to work.

There's much to learn about IPv6. The nerd in me is excited.

 

IPv4 forever, or at least until I retire. I feel like I'm my dad when he worked for the phone company. It was a race for him to retire before the electronic switching took over.

 

Well, from what I've read, IPv4 isn't going away. It's look like for the forseeable future networks will shift to dual-stack environments with IPv4 and IPv6 running concurrently. I'm not sure at what point Internet resources will start to be IPv6 only (I don't see any of the AS operators forefitting IPv4 blocks and can't imagine IANA /the local body in control would force them to do that), but until then there isn't any compelling reason for an IPv4 only network to make the switch...as far as I know anyway.

Unfortunately, IPv6 broke again. It was working on two hosts for a short period of time, then stopped. I sense its a routing issue with the gateway. I posted on Comcast's forums, since that seems to be the only place you _might_ get someone who knows what they're doing. Phone and chat yesterday proved to lead nowhere (thought the support people were very nice, dumb, but nice).

Now, do I _need_ IPv6...no. I'm just OCD when there are broken features. I want it ALL to work! Plus, the nerdgeek in me wants to play around with it. I've got a LONG ways to retirement, I might as well embrace IPv6 now...

 

I should clarify this. IANA, the global organization that oversees the IP address space in /8 blocks, assigned the last available blocks in 2011. I don't know about other regions, but, ARIN, the organization that oversees the IP addresses in North America DOES still have available address blocks. However, they're quickly dwindling. They're down to the equivalent of 75% of a single /8, which is ~13 million IPs. It may sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things it really isn't.

https://www.arin.net/resources/reque...countdown.html

 

Glad I could help...