Well, it doesn't. If anything the lack of NAT means it uses fewer resources, but nobody will notice anyway because the resource usage of an IP protocol is irrelevantly tiny.

You know where this logic is headed, right? It won't be long before you won't be able to buy a bunch of v4 addresses for them. Or maybe you will, but they'll be expensive enough to seriously impact your bottom line. Will an extra $5/mo on each customer's bill be enough to count as an inferior experience for them? What about $10/mo? $20/mo? (Not just your bill, mind. Their Netflix bill too, or anybody else they pay for any services that need a server to run. Or maybe the service is free, but shut down because servers are too expensive due to the IP cost.)

That's the future you're trying to get for your users. I don't think it's superior.

If you have v6, you can accept inbound connections on any of your computers without dealing with port forwarding/NAT.

There are others, but whatever, there's one.

If you read my above posts, you'll see I'm not asking you to punish your customers. I'm specifically asking you to do dual stack, so your customers have v6 and Skype works. There is no need to break Skype to get v6 to your customers.

I blame you, and people like you, for refusing to roll out v6. If you'd all just do it, we'd be done by now. Please do your part.

Yes, the situation with Skype sucks, but it's not preventing you from rolling out v6, it's only preventing you from not rolling out v4. We need v6 now; sunsetting v4 has to come after that, not before. Yes, I know it sucks that you can't do v6-only networks yet, but rolling out v6 is step 1 in getting to that point, so please do it.

That's BS. You need v6 to reach other people's v6 servers. Other people need you to have v6 so they can run v6 servers. Your users need v6 so they can run servers that other people can actually connect to without fucking around with NAT. You need v6 for when you inevitably run out of v4 addresses and start having to do CGNAT -- over 50% of your traffic will be on v6, so your CGNAT boxes will only need to handle half the traffic they otherwise would, which makes them cheaper (not to mention your customers will actually be able to receive connections). The internet needs everybody to have v6 because v4 is a clusterfuck with this many users and it's only going to get worse.

You don't need to handle "4-6 NAT" and "6-4 CGNAT" for this. You're overcomplicating it. Just do dual stack. It's easy and it works perfectly fine (and it doesn't break Skype, or anything else).

Skype works just as well on a dual-stack network as it does on a v4 only one. It is broken on v6-only networks even with NAT64 in the picture, which definitely sucks, but please don't let it stop you rolling out v6! Skype is only a blocker if you're trying to remove your v4, which is a separate step that you don't need to be doing yet.

(It's broken because it exchanges v4 literal addresses in the protocol -- there's no space for v6 addresses and it doesn't use DNS, so NAT64+DNS64 is out. Of course MS could fix it easily enough if they could just be bothered to...)

There's also DS-Lite if you really desperately want to run a v6-only access network, but generally dual stack is the way to go, particularly for any network that already exists.

Yeah, don't bother with that. Deploy v6 now, move to CGNAT for v4 when you have to (possibly soonish), and then worry about anything else much later.

Skype will continue to work. It doesn't care what addresses are used for the management interface, and it doesn't care that you have a dual-stack network -- it just ignores the v6 side. Skype is only a problem if you remove the v4, but you don't need to remove your v4 to deploy v6.

(Or it can be made to work with 464XLAT, if you really want to run a v6-only access network.)

I was assuming that the 32-bit plugin process could be a lightweight shim. I doubt it'd need 64-bit versions of all 54 MB of the dlls that Firefox ships with.

This sounds like an actual use for that stub installer that you serve by default to Windows users. Just have it pick which version to download.

Its user base would rather help than be snarky, but it's hard to help when Mozilla completely rejects you.

More on-topic, I found this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/oB-GAXt6Ijo/lUgjfUZ8ArEJ. Apparently "working on it" is the new way to spell "ignoring".

By "full", I mean that it can do DNS. Windows not supporting RDNSS doesn't mean that you have to set the server manually; you can set it automatically.

I'm not really a fan of RDNSS; it puts host config into RAs with no clear guidelines as to which config options ought to be in them. (Why do we only put DNS info in there, and not all the other things you can configure?) But I'm not arguing that MS shouldn't support it, I'm just pointing out that Windows isn't so incapable that it has no way of setting DNS servers automatically.

(As an aside, Windows will also configure a default set of DNS servers if you have no other v6 servers configured, so if you're doing a v6-only network and you really don't want to run stateless DHCPv6 for some reason and the only thing you wanted to set was the DNS servers, you could just add fec0:0:0:ffff::{1,2,3} to your DNS server and Windows would work fine.)

Plus no difference at all between listening to everything you could in the 40s (comparatively not much) and recording what's useful, vs recording everything.

You also said they can't transition to v6 because their own OS doesn't support it, which isn't true. It's supported full automatic configuration of v6 network details out of the box since Vista in 2006, which is a lot longer than most Linux distros have been doing it. I believe Debian only started doing that last year, and I'd be unsurprised if there were still major distros that didn't.

I wish I could find the discussions they must have had at the time about RAs... I assumed there would be mailing list archives or somesuch but I haven't managed to find anything. I guess the logic was that DNS info (or other host config) doesn't belong in RAs, because RAs are broadcasts sent by routers (plural, potentially) to announce network layout. That doesn't match up with the requirements for host config parameters, where you need a single authoritative source and you need the ability to receive machine IDs from clients so you can give out per-machine config settings.

(Of course we haven't really stuck with that logic, since people argued that they didn't want to run DHCPv6 just for DNS, so DNS info was added to RAs. Then other people argued they didn't want to run DHCPv6 just for DNS search domains, so that was added too. Where does it stop, I wonder...)

It's not that hard, but it's not that easy either. It's far simpler without NAT, where you just connect to the machine.

Also it suddenly gets very, very hard when your ISP puts you behind their own NAT, so you don't even have a "public IP" for your laptop to connect to.

Um, no. We're running out of addresses because we don't have enough addresses.

(And to address some of the other misunderstandings: ARIN still have a v6 printing press, v6 doesn't magically expose everything to the entire WWW, you can still run a central firewall in v6 (just without NAT, thankfully) and your IPs won't require memorizing 128 bits unless you're dumb enough to pick an address that uses all 128 bits, in which case you don't get to complain about it).