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SixXS IPv6 Tunnel Provider Is Shutting Down (sixxs.net)
yakatz writes: SixXS started providing IPv6 tunnels in 1999 to try to break the "chicken-and-egg" problem of IPv6 adoption. After 18 years, the service is shutting down. The cited reasons are:
1) growth has been stagnant
2) many ISPs offer IPv6
3) some ISPs have told customers that they don't need to provide IPv6 connectivity because the customer can just use a tunnel from SixXS
This last reason in particular made the SixXS team think they are doing more harm than good in the fight for native IPv6, so they will be shutting down on June 6.
1) growth has been stagnant
2) many ISPs offer IPv6
3) some ISPs have told customers that they don't need to provide IPv6 connectivity because the customer can just use a tunnel from SixXS
This last reason in particular made the SixXS team think they are doing more harm than good in the fight for native IPv6, so they will be shutting down on June 6.
Shutting down for the good of the internet. Thats a first but I commend them for it! Finally a company thats not money hungry alone.
Not at all sure that any kind of tunnel is appropriate in this day and age, anyway.
Hell, just push all your traffic through us! It's fine! All that unencrypted email and DNS lookup? Don't worry, we're just converting to IPv4 for you!
My home router has every IPv6 option known to man, including all kinds of tunnel and DHCPv6 etc. kind of connectivity.
My ISP supports none of them. The problem is not that I couldn't get on the IPv6 net. It's that my ISP has zero interest in helping me do so. Until that's fixed, it's pointless worrying about another way to get to the same sites/services as I already do.
I am very bummed about this. I use HE at home but at work can't get their tunnels to work because I'm behind a firewall. SixXS's client works by tunneling over TCP, I think? Which isn't the best thing ever, but it works, and I will miss it.
You can now setup an Amazon box and tunnel through them (finally!!), so it was great but makes sense, saves costs for them.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Fond memories of using something like this, if not SixXS itself over 10 years ago. Our ISP didn't do v6, and we needed to test with it. Tunnel providers to the rescue! Now even my local ISP that everybody complains about provides v4 and v6. It's been in Windows for... how many versions now?
I'd forgotten all about these tunnel providers. News of one shutting down and a trip down nostalgia lane seems appropriate. So long, and thank-you for providing something that we needed at the time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Most people are not affected by ipv6 so they don't care. So do the established ISPs. Most established ISPs sit on a big ipv4 pool and it would cost them to upgrade their legacy infrastructure. Newer ISPs are more hurt by ipv4 drying up as they don't get big chunks of ipv4 addresses any more, and need to do carrier grade NAT and similar strategies. So there is some motivation by them to aid in ipv6 adoption. Also, they do everything from scratch so deploying dual stack is easier for them.
However, as long as everything works^{tm} on ipv4 networks as well, nobody will switch. What we need is ipv6 only, mainstream, services, to force home user facing ISPs to support ipv6, and ipv6 only customers, to force website owners to support ipv6.
Just take google, they could easily give bonus points in their search result for web sites that support both ipv4 and ipv6. This would motivate countless site owners to do a switch.
call your ISP? In reality was using SIXXS for years now i just dont need it. I still have ipv4 address and open ports. No need for me to use IPv6
Finally a company thats not money hungry alone.
Given that SixXS has been free-as-in-beer regarding their services (and free-as-in-speech regarding some of their client side code), it's hard for them to be money hungry.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It doesn't matter how many IPv4 addresses you have. How do you connect to the company that can't get a IPv4 address to address their service but can get IPv6 addresses. How do you reach them without a IPv6 address? This is the state of the world today.
I think that's the company's problem.
One of the best things about SixXS was the AYIYA protocol which let you turn up a tunnel behind nat, which is great when you are on the road. I am very disappointed that they have chosen not to release the code behind the service so that I can run my own AYIYA server.
i will admittedly say i have no idea what sixxs is
SixXS was a free IPv6 tunneling service, so that people with only IPv4 provider can still get access to IPv6 addresses through a 3rd party.
(But more reliably than 6in4 which is dependent on the dynamic IPv4 address, and relies on volunteer servers reached though anycast).
The idea was to break the chicken-and-egg problem faced by IPv6 migration :
- content provider don't care about moving to IPv6 because nobody is using it and most people are still on IPv4
- and ISP not spending the effort to provide IPv6 to their clients, because there's no IPv6 content to justify the move.
SixXS provided a 3rd party with a very reliable way to get onto IPv6, so at least the "there are no users" excuse isn't valid anymore.
Now fast forward a decade and a half later and nowadays a lot of content providers *ARE* on IPv6 (e.g.: Google, most universities, etc.), but there are still ISP not providing IPv6 on their network (e.g.: using something like 6rd, which basically works like 6in4 but relies on official servers with fixed address that is owned and operated by the ISP),
Instead of that ISPs let the users go use SixXS, for the users who want IPv6. So rely on a free 3rd party service, instead of putting the efforts themselves to enable IPv6 for their own users as they should be doing.
So SixXS is shutting down to force ISPs to setup and listen to their users and provide IPv6, instead of deferring it to SixXS.
its sad to see them go since it was a free service, providing a service for people without means.
The thing is, SixXS was providing a service that should in theory be provided by the ISPs themselves, but some are too lazy to implement IPv6 even after almost 2 decades.
(and it's not for people without means. Technically, it's for people who have the means to pay an ISP for a connection, but said ISP is damn shit lazy and doesn't care to provide something more modern than last century's IPv4)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!!
At work we use a tunnel from Hurricane Electric. It has worked well for the past couple of years. We have a fiber link from Cox Business, so I decided to see if Cox had IPv6 in our area. I emailed our contact at Cox asking if they could provide us with IPv6 addresses. Their reply was that we would need to justify a need for so many IPv6 addresses. I replied and explained that a /64 is the smallest IPv6 subnet they can give out by design. They did not reply.
Screw these guys.
I applied for a tunnel and never got mine, so I could give two fucks if they don't "carry on" with their virtue-signaling bullshit. IPv6 will happen eventually, even without some limited provider trying to be the arbiter of adoption.
nope, it is also our problem if we can not reach ipv6 only resources.
Also, not having ipv6 is just the ISP being lazy, today the backbones have ipv6, big sites also have it, so it is the lazy ISP that are postponing the global ipv6 grow
Higuita
One very direct effect of all of the above :
You won't be required to use cloud service for every single small thing you need to talk to.
(security cameras, weather station, talking toy, etc.),
instead you can trivially access any gizmo directly over the web simply by opening it in your router/firewall.
IPv4 remote access : you need to sign up an account at their service. You gizmo and the app on your smartphone are constantly talking to this server.
This makes a big central failure point : the company server can get hacked, leading to thousands of account information leaking (see HaveIBeenPwnd for your weekly example), or if the device is insecure that's a single point from which to attack all devices. Also if the company goes belly up and the server is shut down, your gizmo becomes an expensive brick.
And these kind of server still costs a little bit of money, so either you're going to need to pay for the service. Or you're going to get ads-bombed as shit.
IPv6 remote access : you need to open a port (or a whole device) in *your* router. Your smartphone app is directly talking to your gizmo without any 3rd party getting involved.
There's no big server with a treasure trove of personal data to leak. If attackers want to hack an insecure gizmo, they need to find them one by one on the web.
Even if the company fails, you can still use your app to talk to the device, you don't rely on a 3rd party server.
There are no server costs to cover.
(Previously, similar things would have required fiddling with NAT, port forwarding and other such remapping to get done on IPv4. Trivial for most /.ers, but not necessarily with random users).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What are the reasons for an ISP to do IPv6?
There are tons of advantage of IPv6 over IPv4.
One of them being a vast supply of addresses (128bits vs. the overcrowded 32bits of IPv4).
It's auto-configured (you just plug a device into a network and it automatically gets IPv6 working. Routers directly hand out prefixes, no need to organise stuff through DHCP. In IPv6 DHCPv6 is only used to hand out configuration options)
Every device gets a single address that is routable anywhere on the internet. (No need of NATs, masquarading, and private address ranges).
People still can go to Google with IPv4, so no reason there.
...for now. As IPv4 address space gets depleted you'll soon reach the point where some machine are only IPv6 addressable, and thus some servers can only be accessed over IPv6.
They would need to invest and that is never a nice thing to do.
They need to replace a lot of hardware or at least reconfigure it and that will cost money.
Nope. The whole point of technologies like 6rd is that you deploy IPv6 as a tunnel over the IPv4 infrastructure that you already have.
No new hardware needed (beside the tunnel server), specially not needing to replace the thousands of expensive routers scattered accross the city that you cover with your services.
As a business I would also be against it.
I hope I am wrong and somebody can tell me a lot of advantages that would make them money, save them money or a combination of both.
That the problem with IPv6. There isn't a simply clear immediate money benefit. The benefit isn't ultra-short term.
The benefits are instead long-term : IPv4 is an old technology that is slowly reaching its limits (e.g.: number of available addresses) and that requires more and more layers to circumvent (e.g.: NAT to get around addresses limitation. e.g.: using relay servers on the cloud instead of devices talking p2p with each other, etc.)
From a technological point of view, we are running straight against a wall. But ISPs are complaining that they are not going make tons of money immediately by switching to IPv6 so they stay on course headed for the wall collision.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nope.
Since when is not being able to contact a company an issue?
They need us, fuck them.