> Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them.

If your university doesn't have a lot more demand for IP addresses then yeah -- it makes sense that they'd just hold on to their network space, continue to NAT their DHCP pools and keep doing what they're doing. That's not an indictment of IPv6, it just means that the work to deploy IPv6 doesn't provide any benefits to them. However, newcomers and networks that foresee expansion can't just "stay the course" -- there just isn't enough IPv4 for them -- and do need to bite the IPv6 bullet.

Deploying IPv6 does indeed require work in terms of management (all tools that assume the length/format of an IP address need to be updated, netadmins need to learn and deploy RA guard and friends) and your network silicon needs to do IPv6 in the fastpath -- but even with all these pain points, carrier-grade NAT'ing IPv4 is nevertheless more painful, expensive, and slow.

Forward-thinking network operators have been taking advantage of the LTE and DOCSIS 3 transitions to enable native IPv6 everywhere, and Facebook is moving to IPv6-only infrastructure -- and it's paid off! About 80% of network traffic (to Akamai) from T-Mobile and Verizon is IPv6 (from Comcast it's lower -- around 50%): https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter...

The future is IPv6 -- it's just not quite equally distributed yet.

>If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure.

Isn't selling them off to someone who will pay money for them pretty much the definition of making them available for someone who has a use for them?

It's not like you can't buy an IPv4 address if you want one because Amazon and Google own them all.

We just have this situation where a few universities, the US DoD, and a handful of corporations own a disproportionate number of IP addresses because they were early to the game. They all got cheap IPv4 addresses. So HP owns two /8 addresses while Google does not.

I'm not seeing a situation where donating millions of IPv4 addresses to someone is going to improve society relative to Amazon forking over a bunch of dollars to a university.

I guess it's a matter of opinion. If a university had some prime real estate, they could sell it to the highest bidder so that they could build a shopping mall, or they could donate it to a non-profit that would improve society in some way, thereby fulfilling their mission, to improve society. Or they could just cash out and getting more money could arguably improve society in a less tangible, less measurable way.

Universities are uniquely positioned to not be constrained by market forces. Part of the reason that universities get privileged access to things, is because they are seen as working in the public interest. Government and business and wealthy donors throw money at universities, because they want to see innovation and public good come from it.

Maybe that's idealistic of me, and universities are just a kind of business, and only that. MIT already gives the public free hosting, with an externally routable, unfirewalled ip4 or ip6 address, to anyone who comes on campus. I don't think any other universities in the world do that. And MIT does this at great expense. (this is how Aaron Schwarz was able to download so much of JSTOR)

It makes no financial sense for MIT to be doing this. Perhaps they should lock down their network as much as possible, and probably outsource it's management.

That hasn't been completely true for a few years. If you just walk onto campus with a wireless device and use the public network (the one that doesn't require authentication) you get a 10.x.x.x address behind a NAT and it has some firewall restrictions. (They're pretty light; it's mostly to keep out some network attacks.) I think you do still get a public address if you plug into an Ethernet port, and you may get one if you use the MIT SECURE wireless network.

MIT's network policies are not purely about what makes financial sense. The Institute was one of the birthplaces of the internet, and they see the ongoing development of it as one of their core missions. MIT has a close relationship with W3C, which is located a stone's throw away. Their network is multi-homed to the max; I think they peer with ALL the backbone providers that operate in the US. The school has ludicrous amounts of internet bandwidth; I think it's now measured in terabits per second. After all, they have to be able to cope with thousands of students watching Netflix along with all the research!

And just in case there is a REAL internet collapse... they have an emergency info site at mit.NET that is hosted far away from the campus. That would let them get some information out even if Cambridge were wiped off the map and all the name servers for .edu were to fail.

On Linode, were you using the default single IPv6 address, or did you request a prefix? I found that the default address was in a blacklisted /64, and couldn't send email without it getting bounced or blackholed. Once I got my own /64, the problems went away (but DKIM+SPF was also mandatory).

We really need to just pick a date and turn off ipv4 because its the only way to make this guy change.

It's not me that's fixated on ipv4. I would love ipv6. But why aren't ISPs providing it? Why aren't universities and other large organizations switching to it by default?

ISPs don't care. They would rather everyone just use carrier-grade NAT.

Because someone works at those universities or ISPs who is making the same argument you're making. If enough of you all throw your hands in the air and say 'not enough people are doing it' then there will never be enough people doing it. At some point someone needs to point a (metaphorical) gun at your heads and make you all do it or else.

In the meantime, you should feel bad every time you make this argument because you're helping to make the world worse and enabling everyone else to just kick the can down the road.