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The world in which IPv6 was a good design

apenwarr.ca

161–170 of 199 posts

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#161
post #4
post #3

Ok, so QUIC or some other common layer 4/4+5 'Modern TCP over UDP for network compatibility' solution. Lets just throw away the concept of 'addresses' for authentication and actually use a cryptographic authentication identifier of somekind, combined with some mux iteration ID.

Drop the idea of ports too. Every program gets its own IP Mentioning ideas like that at work get queer looks about how it'd be impossible to configure a firewall at that point But keep going further. End up with 128 bit CPU where every byte is IP addressable. Necessary security to block random outsiders from reading your memory, but capable of potentially running various parts remotely transparently

> how it'd be impossible to configure a firewall at that point

Why is that? Wouldn't those addresses be hierarchical?

Mobile addresses for applications would make the usual case of "hey, you migrate service X to that other switch, and nothing works anymore" basically disappear.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#162

Is anyone else shocked at the low level of adoption of IPv6? I remember how in the late 90s people were saying we were going to run out of addresses and everyone need to migrate to IPv6 ASAP. Now, it seems that IPv4 is going to be around for a long while.

Keep in mind that we are currently running out of IPv6 addresses.

The slow adoption is pushed by entities that control a big number of IPv4 addresses. I have no idea how long this situation can sustain itself.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#163

> In truth, that really is just complicating things. Now your operating system has to first look up the ethernet address of 192.168.1.1, find out it's 11:22:33:44:55:66, and finally generate a packet with destination ethernet address 11:22:33:44:55:66 and destination IP address 10.1.1.1. 192.168.1.1 is just a pointless intermediate step. Bollocks. The abstraction allowed by using an IP address instead of a MAC addres…

What he is saying is that in a routed network (instead of bridged), you don't need MAC address. At least not at layer 2.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#164
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> QUIC being the odd one out of the trio as it grafts on some awful HTTP semantics, but that's Google for you. What specifically do you mean by that, and are you sure that it still applies to the IETF version?

There are a number of statements like "QUIC is functionally equivalent to TCP+TLS+HTTP/2" in the "QUIC wire specification" and other documents, and this agrees with what I remember seeing in the source in the Chromium repo when I last looked. I've not read about the IETF version; I'll look into it.

I haven't been following QUIC very closely, but from what I understand, they have put in a proper abstraction between the TCP+TLS part and the HTTP part. While the mapping of how to use HTTP over QUIC is still part of the spec, as I understand it, there shouldn't be any major problems mapping other protocols onto it.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#165

Is anyone else shocked at the low level of adoption of IPv6? I remember how in the late 90s people were saying we were going to run out of addresses and everyone need to migrate to IPv6 ASAP. Now, it seems that IPv4 is going to be around for a long while.

Keep in mind that we are currently running out of IPv6 addresses. The slow adoption is pushed by entities that control a big number of IPv4 addresses. I have no idea how long this situation can sustain itself.

Citation needed for both wild statements.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#166
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliable rule, and not just for software. Seems like a good place for mentioning 'Chesterton's Fence'.... In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern…

Sometimes, a thing is there because it's there, and nobody knows the original purpose, so by Chesterton, nobody would be able to tear it down, because nobody can see the use of it. Chesterton's Fence neatly saves the utterly pointless fences in our lives, regardless of the damage they can cause.

It's a principle, not an unbreakable rule. The point is to take some time for the due diligence of understanding why. Fences (or laws or code) don't just appear out of nowhere. Someone spent time and energy to put it there.

If you don't immediately see its use, you should do some more thinking/archeology.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#168

"QUEER"?!

Don't be a triggered snowflake. Queer is a real, non-offensive word with a real, non-offensive meaning. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=queer+definition&t=ffip&ia=definit...

You can please leave out the name-calling while making your point, like the guidelines ask.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#169
A little off topic, but the TCP BBR Congestion Control they mention looks promising. I've been annoyed by "Bufferbloat" for over a decade and find different solutions to the problem pretty fascinating.

The nice part about this solution is that it doesn't require making changes to the individual nodes on the network (e.g. cable modem) in the way that other solutions have required (small and fair queues).

It also appears to be able to avoid the usual packet-drops of regular TCP congestion control.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#170
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliable rule, and not just for software. Seems like a good place for mentioning 'Chesterton's Fence'.... In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern…

Sometimes, a thing is there because it's there, and nobody knows the original purpose, so by Chesterton, nobody would be able to tear it down, because nobody can see the use of it. Chesterton's Fence neatly saves the utterly pointless fences in our lives, regardless of the damage they can cause.

How many bad situations have been prevented though? I've seen many situations where someone did try to remove something pointless that really wasn't pointless.
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