2024-01-31
Using IPv6 has quietly become reliable (for me)
I've had IPv6 at home for a long time, first in tunneled form and later in native form, and recently I brought up more or less native IPv6 for my work desktop. When I first started using IPv6 (at home) and for many years afterward, there were all sorts of complications and failures that could be attributed to IPv6 or that went away when I turned off IPv6. To be honest, when I enabled IPv6 on my work desktop I expected to run into a fun variety of problems due to this, since before then it had been IPv4 only.
To my surprise, my work desktop has experienced no problems since enabling IPv6 connectivity. I know I'm using some websites over IPv6 and I can see IPv6 traffic happening, but at the personal level, I haven't noticed anything different. When I realized that, I thought back over my experiences at home and realized that it's been quite a while since I had a problem that I could attribute to IPv6. Quietly, while I wasn't particularly noticing, the general Internet IPv6 environment seems to have reached a state where it just works, at least for me.
Since IPv6 is everyone's future, this is good news. We've been collectively doing this for long enough and IPv6 usage has climbed enough that it should be as reliable as IPv4, and hopefully people don't make common oversights any more. Otherwise, we would collectively have a real problem, because turning on IPv6 for more and more people would be degrading the Internet experience of more and more people. Fortunately that's (probably) not happening any more.
I'm sure that there are still IPv6 specific issues and problems that come up, and there will be more for a long time to come (until perhaps they're overtaken by year 2038 problems). But t you can have problems that are specific to anything, including IPv4 (and people may already be having those).
(As more people add IPv6 to servers that are currently IPv4 only, we may also see a temporary increase in IPv6 specific problems as people go through 'learning experiences' of operating IPv6 environments. I suspect that my group will have some of those when we eventually start adding IPv6 to various parts of our environment.)