IPv6 Support

[УНГУРУ]

When does the steam enviroment support IPv6?

Nowadays ISP's don't get new IPv4 ranges anymore. Valve should be a pioneer like they were in 2003 when they found steam.

Regards

[aiusepsi]

Publicado originalmente por Start_Running:

Is it possible to be on the internet without an IPv4 address?

Yes, with an IPv6 address; you can only talk to other hosts with IPv6 addresses, but you're very much still on the Internet.

One thing that is more likely to happen than people not having IPv4 addresses at all is their ISP using carrier-grade NAT to conserve IPv4 addresses. Bear in mind here that ISPs can't get any new IPv4 addresses; they have to make do with the ones they already have.

That means people will start having IPv4 connections which don't have real end-to-end connectivity; one real public IPv4 could map to dozens of households. Real end-to-end connectivity will only be possible over IPv6.

As I've previously mentioned, this is a special problem for gaming; to play with someone else, either you both have to use the same server on the public internet, or one of you has to host. Carrier-grade NAT makes it impossible to host a game.

Publicado originalmente por Start_Running:

ANd what makes you think their services aren't?

store.steampowered.com and other Steam-related domains don't have AAAA records; that is, you can't resolve that domain name to an IPv6 address. You can query AAAA records here: https://mxtoolbox.com/IPv6.aspx

You can get an IPv6 address for google.com, facebook.com, en.wikipedia.org, etc. but not any Steam domains.

[Start_Running]

Well I've learned quite a bit

[orhaN utanG]

Carrier Grade NAT is the worst. It affects millions of people in Germany already and it's a huge problem, especially during the weekends. Their AFTR-Servers are overloaded during those rush hours. Steam could do something about it but the truth is: They don't give a ♥♥♥♥.

[Satoru]

Publicado originalmente por Hom Tanks:

Carrier Grade NAT is the worst. It affects millions of people in Germany already and it's a huge problem, especially during the weekends. Their AFTR-Servers are overloaded during those rush hours. Steam could do something about it but the truth is: They don't give a ♥♥♥♥.

So it’s Steams fault your ISP is garbage

Good to know you’re putting your priorities in the right place

[aiusepsi]

Publicado originalmente por Satoru:

So it’s Steams fault your ISP is garbage

Good to know you’re putting your priorities in the right place

Sigh. No, it's not Steam's fault that his ISP doesn't have sufficient IPv4 addresses to give to all their customers, but it's not the fault of the ISP either. It's the fault of IPv4 exhaustion, which is just the simple fact that there are no longer enough IPv4 addresses to go around. A European ISP cannot get any more IPv4 addresses; RIPE, the RIR for Europe, has no more to allocate and it hasn't had any for a long time now. (EDIT: This is not quite true; on the 1st of March, RIPE was allocated ~2000 IP addresses that IANA had scrounged together, in the form of 8 /24s, i.e. 8 subnets with 255 IP addresses each. That's 8 new small networks for the whole of Europe. This is the IP equivalent of starvation rations. These are the first new addresses since 2011.)

There is nothing that ISPs can do about this! In a post-IPv4 exhaustion world, the only way to provide connectivity to services which don't adopt IPv6 is to adopt crappy workarounds like carrier-grade NAT. The onus here is really for services, like Steam, to adopt IPv6 so that these crappy work-arounds aren't necessary.

Even if his ISP had really really good carrier-grade NAT, that's not a long-term solution; NAT breaks full end-to-end connectivity, which is especially harmful to peer-to-peer multiplayer games in particular. And this is on top of the fact that using a router at home means you're running a NAT on top of a NAT; this is just a nightmare for connectivity.

IPv6 support just isn't that exotic these days. Steam should support it.

[Satoru]

Publicado originalmente por aiusepsi:

Publicado originalmente por Satoru:

So it’s Steams fault your ISP is garbage

Good to know you’re putting your priorities in the right place

Sigh. No, it's not Steam's fault that his ISP doesn't have sufficient IPv4 addresses to give to all their customers, but it's not the fault of the ISP either. It's the fault of IPv4 exhaustion, which is just the simple fact that there are no longer enough IPv4 addresses to go around. A European ISP cannot get any more IPv4 addresses; RIPE, the RIR for Europe, has no more to allocate and it hasn't had any for a long time now.

There is nothing that ISPs can do about this! In a post-IPv4 exhaustion world, the only way to provide connectivity to services which don't adopt IPv6 is to adopt crappy workarounds like carrier-grade NAT. The onus here is really for services, like Steam, to adopt IPv6 so that these crappy work-arounds aren't necessary.

Even if his ISP had really really good carrier-grade NAT, that's not a long-term solution; NAT breaks full end-to-end connectivity, which is especially harmful to peer-to-peer multiplayer games in particular. And this is on top of the fact that using a router at home means you're running a NAT on top of a NAT; this is just a nightmare for connectivity.

IPv6 support just isn't that exotic these days. Steam should support it.

The poitn is the overloading of carrier grade NAT isn't Steam's fault

You can argue how much site should migrate to ipv6

But if your interm solution is to use carrier grade NAT and you cannot support it because your ISP bought used Cisco routers on ebya, that's not Steam's problem

[aiusepsi]

Publicado originalmente por Satoru:

The poitn is the overloading of carrier grade NAT isn't Steam's fault

You can argue how much site should migrate to ipv6

But if your interm solution is to use carrier grade NAT and you cannot support it because your ISP bought used Cisco routers on ebya, that's not Steam's problem

Yeah, it is Steam's problem. It's literally the problem of everyone who uses the Internet. If people can't access your service properly because IPv4 connectivity is degrading, it's your problem. This is only going to get worse as time goes on. This is why ISPs are supporting IPv6, this is why companies like Facebook and Google who run lots of servers are switching over (as aforementioned: Facebook's internal networks are now exclusively IPv6!), because the difficulty of getting new IP addresses to host servers on is starting to bite them, too.

On a note not directly related to IPv6, there's a reason that companies like Netflix and Akamai put their content on servers as close to users as possible (in some cases, inside ISP networks) and it's because the quality of the connectivity they have to the end user is vital. If you can't get your data to your users, it's your problem.

[Cassidy]

I could get behind this. My country is too small to face this problem for now but having more options can only be better.

[Satoru]

Publicado originalmente por aiusepsi:

Publicado originalmente por Satoru:

The poitn is the overloading of carrier grade NAT isn't Steam's fault

You can argue how much site should migrate to ipv6

But if your interm solution is to use carrier grade NAT and you cannot support it because your ISP bought used Cisco routers on ebya, that's not Steam's problem

Yeah, it is Steam's problem. It's literally the problem of everyone who uses the Internet. If people can't access your service properly because IPv4 connectivity is degrading, it's your problem. This is only going to get worse as time goes on. This is why ISPs are supporting IPv6, this is why companies like Facebook and Google who run lots of servers are switching over (as aforementioned: Facebook's internal networks are now exclusively IPv6!), because the difficulty of getting new IP addresses to host servers on is starting to bite them, too.

On a note not directly related to IPv6, there's a reason that companies like Netflix and Akamai put their content on servers as close to users as possible (in some cases, inside ISP networks) and it's because the quality of the connectivity they have to the end user is vital. If you can't get your data to your users, it's your problem.

And again

Steam is not the only service on IPv4

The fact that an ISP is technically incompetent and cannot handle the load for their own technical solution to ipv4 is not Steams problem.

The fact that an ISP can not handle the load is an ISP problem

We are free to discuss the migration to ipv6 in general and where steam is in that process

But ISP problems are problems caused by the ISP itself.

There is a difference between

Steam should convert their back end to ipv6

And

Slowness on my ISP terrible IPV6 carrier may is caused by Steam

[aiusepsi]

Carrier-grade NAT is always going to be bad. This is why the industry's solution to IPv4 exhaustion isn't to just deploy carrier-grade NAT everywhere and call it a day.

The point of the Internet is that it's a decentralised web of connections, and an overloaded link can always be resolved by traffic finding another route around. That's all broken by carrier-grade NAT because it creates chokepoints; all the traffic for a particular set of users all has to run through one place. Even load-balancing users between NAT endpoints is a nightmare, because when your home connection is switched from one NAT endpoint to another as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned your public IP changed. All your existing TCP connections break (and application-layer connections layered on top of UDP), some services will freak out and require you to log in again, etc.

ISPs are providing a good solution to all this, which is to use IPv6. No carrier-grade NAT, no artificial chokepoints, proper end-to-end connectivity with a multiplicity of possible routes: the Internet as it is supposed to be.

I'm not saying that Steam is the only IPv4 service, or that Steam is making IPv4 bad (I'm really not sure where you got the idea that I was saying that? Like, I said it was their problem, I didn't say it was their fault*. Those words mean different things!). I'm not even particularly worried about that one German ISP (although that is concerning). I'm worried about the global IPv4 trend.

I'm saying that without IPv6 support, Steam is stuck on an Internet that is only going to get worse. And what's worse is that if Steam doesn't support IPv6 for things like matchmaking, Steam P2P networking, Steam Datagram, etc., it's going to drag down networked games, too.

* As another example of "their problem, not their fault", Steam had a problem with some ISPs having crap caching middleware boxes which keyed their caches in a bizarre and silly way, and this broke Steam client updates. Not Valve's fault, but it is their problem if Steam clients can't update properly! They worked around that by changing the package format slightly for Steam client updates so that the middleware boxes cached them properly.

[Poucas Trancas]

GCNAT is a big problem in Brazil also. Most, if not all ISP's, are putting everyone behind GCNAT.

[УНГУРУ]

It would be interesting to get a statement, what makes IPv6 so difficult to implement in their Steam-Network

[Gwarsbane]

Publicado originalmente por ☭ ☭ ☭ УНГУРУ☭ ☭ ☭:

It would be interesting to get a statement, what makes IPv6 so difficult to implement in their Steam-Network

Who says its difficult, maybe they are waiting till more ISPs actually have it, last I heard it was something under 10% of ISPs had it on.

Also it is a bit of a big change because from my understanding, IP4 and IP6 can't easily talk to each other.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Publicado originalmente por Gwarsbane:

Who says its difficult, maybe they are waiting till more ISPs actually have it, last I heard it was something under 10% of ISPs had it on.

Also it is a bit of a big change because from my understanding, IP4 and IP6 can't easily talk to each other.

https://netbeez.net/blog/ipv6-adoption/

15-20% going by this.

Publicado originalmente por ☭ ☭ ☭ УНГУРУ☭ ☭ ☭:

It would be interesting to get a statement, what makes IPv6 so difficult to implement in their Steam-Network

http://www.datacenterjournal.com/ipv6-adoption-challenges-options/

This shows some of the challenges involved.

I think many game don't support IPv6 either, so that could also be a factor.

IPv6 doesn't have much penetration at the moment.

You won't get an official statement from Valve on the matter, only guesses as to why from anyone else in these forums. If Valve wants to make a statement, they will do so through their blogs and/or announcements.

[Shadow of the SPQR]

Why does Valve even need to do this until there's a tangible reason to do so? Disrupting the peace to be a 'pioneer' in something that is not in their scope until clearly proven otherwise by the content on the platform sounds like a surefire way to cause problems and result in things buggering up as a result.