[VicPiMakers General] IPv6 discussion on hacker news

[Mark G.]

Hi Everybody,

Since we are all familiar with IPv6, I thought this
discussion on Hacker News might interest some of
us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33894933

Some highly charged opinions abound.

Here's the preamble:

"Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public 
IPv4 addresses - as they should! Those numbers started getting 
expensive. This prompted me to try and set up a new server cluster using 
IPv6 exclusively, and see how far I could get before having to give in 
and purchase an additional v4 address.

The experiment ended much sooner than I had anticipated. Some of the 
road blocks I hit along the way:

   - The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via 
IPv6, making it impossible to download release artefacts from many 
projects, lots of which distribute their software via GitHub exclusively 
(Prometheus for instance).
   - The default Ubuntu key servers aren't reachable via IPv6, making it 
difficult to install packages from third-party registries, such as 
Docker or Grafana. While debugging, I noticed huge swaths of the GPG 
infrastructure are defunct: There aren't many key servers left at all, 
and the only one I found actually working via IPv6 was pgpkeys.eu.
   - BitBucket cannot deploy to IPv6 hosts, as pipelines don't support 
IPv6 at all. You can self-host a pipeline runner and connect to it via 
v6, BUT it needs to have a dual stack - otherwise the runner won't start.
   - Hetzner itself doesn't even provide their own API via IPv6 (which 
we talk to for in-cluster service discovery. Oh, the irony.

It seems IPv6 is still not viable, more than a decade after launch. Do 
you use it in production? If so, how? What issues did you hit?"