Is there hope for IPv6? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#101

Post by lanstin » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #81

Someone1234 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backwards compatibility seems to be the largest. Look at the deployment of TLS as a success story. Everyone kept on supporting both old and new, watched the percentages, and then dropped the old when the new had enough penetration. The whole thing is also a bit of a shell game. Nobody wants to invest in it until they feel like they're "behind" if they don't. So you have a big player or two in order to make it feel li…

> So you have a big player or two in order to make it feel like that's the way the wind is blowing. This assumes markets with little to no competition. But most ISPs are in competitive markets with no trend setting big players and they can't waste money investing into IPv6 or anything else that has no demand if they want to keep the business alive and healthy.

I wanted to buy native IPv6 access from my ISPs for a long time but it was not possible every where. I get it now from a Comcast business account. My Google search traffic is now over IPv6. Admittedly my networking interests are probably too rare to make a market force thru numbers.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#102

Post by gweinberg » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

Let's just skip to IPv7.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#103

Post by k__ » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #98

7e wrote: post #93

This chart: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ... reports a steadily increasing adoption rate for IPv6. Is that rate somehow too slow? It currently stands at 25% of Google users.

Considering that ipv6 has been around for more than 20 years?

Germany has a good rate.

My cable provider uses IPv6.

But yes. When I did an internship in 2001 my co-workers told me that I had to learn IPv6 because it will replace v4 in the next years, hehe.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#104

Post by geofft » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

lwf wrote: post #100

apple4ever wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit on the problem with IPv6 designers- they took a solution (bigger address space) to a problem (not enough addresses) and they added a bunch of other changes (No NAT, No DHCP, ARP vs NDP, weird address scheme, etc) that arguably made things worse. Then they wonder why people aren’t adopting it. (Its the same complaint I have against Let’s Encrypt. They shoved down a policy which is antithetical to helping their…

> (Its the same complaint I have against Let’s Encrypt. They shoved down a policy which is antithetical to helping their mission.) Can you expand what you mean by this? I'm drawing a blank.

I assume they're referring to the 3-month certificate lifetimes, which all but force you to automate certificate renewal, whereas the 1+-year certificates of the past let you treat it as manual sysadmin work. This was based on a belief that automating certificate renewals is the right thing to do.

Still, LE seems to be wildly more successful than IPv6. I suspect in part that's because they were more technically right - or at least it's more feasible to add the automation than to rearchitect an IPv4 network - and in part because you can do manual certificate updates. (For complicated and entirely uninteresting reasons, I do manual certificate updates on my personal website every three months using certbot certonly --manual and scp, and it works.)

I'm also way more personally sympathetic to LE because they're pushing the change for security reasons (revocation doesn't work, so we need to move to very short-lived certs) and not mere elegance ones. Rolling out IPv6 as designed brings no security benefits either to the user or to the ecosystem, and carries quite a few potential security risks.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#105

Post by vetinari » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

apple4ever wrote: post #95

vetinari wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLS is way more concentrated than IPv6/IPv4. There are a handful of browsers that pushed the adoption. There's nobody doing the same in the IPv6 space. There are areas that the browsers purposefully ignored (DNSSEC, DNS-SD) and thus their adoption is low.

Good points. And brings out the problem with IPv6- there is no sector pushing IPv6, because no sector sees the benefits. Question is why does no sector see it? My theory is that it adds a lot complexity and planning for little gain. So no sector is going to push for it.

With IPv6, there are mismatched incentives. There are parties that would have to do the investments and another parties would benefit.

For ISPs, it means investments with no benefits. They do it only once their CGNAT is too overloaded or on other sign of running out of IPv4. When they do it, in the simplest and cheapest way possible, which the informed customers see as worse service, so naturally they want to avoid it.

IPv6 would help network application developers, so they could do more or do what they do now with less, but they have no impact on investments ISPs would have to do.

Then there are parties, that have working IPv4 infrastructure, feel no pressure caused by lack of IPv4, and migration would mean just expenses with zero benefits. Exactly like companies that ran login forms over http, up until browsers started to warn users. That was the incentive, that caused them to switch to https.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#106

Post by Pxtl » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

Imho IPV6 failed because of a failure to make DNS usable to non-specialists.

If every device on every network could be assigned a domain name, then we'd never have to know what underlying addressing scheme exists.

My ISP has a name. I have an account with them. Every device on my network has a name.

There's no good reason I don't have

Device.accountName.pub.ispName.tld

Bound to the phone I'm writing this on right now.

But because that doesn't exist, users are still used to screwing with MAC and IP addresses just to set up port forwarding and all that other nonsense.

And so we have to care about IP addresses. And so we're stuck on ipv4.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#107

Post by gmueckl » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

rbritton wrote: post #97

j1vms wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TLS is a great example of how to do it. ASCII -> UTF8 VHS -> DVD not as successful: DVD -> BluRay : timing was rather close to the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.

I would posit that BluRay has been less successful for two other reasons: 1. DVD video quality is good enough for most. 2. The Combination of DRM, unskippable portions, and similar is enough of a barrier to discourage the upgrade. Personally, I will only watch a movie on disk when I don’t have time to rip it and remove that crap.

The DRM and unskippable portions were the same for DVDs when they launched and yet they were a bigger success in an equal timeframe. I do not think that most consumers care enough about these two points to actually influence their decisionmaking.

I'd be more interested in how the HD DVD as a very visible competitor blocked BluRay adoption because of consumers wanting to wait for a winner in that war.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#108

Post by leoc » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

rbritton wrote: post #97

j1vms wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TLS is a great example of how to do it. ASCII -> UTF8 VHS -> DVD not as successful: DVD -> BluRay : timing was rather close to the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.

I would posit that BluRay has been less successful for two other reasons: 1. DVD video quality is good enough for most. 2. The Combination of DRM, unskippable portions, and similar is enough of a barrier to discourage the upgrade. Personally, I will only watch a movie on disk when I don’t have time to rip it and remove that crap.

DVD quality may be worse than you remember. The difference is really very clear on modern HD screens.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#109

Post by sopooneo » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

apple4ever wrote: post #73

geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loose coupling and no second system effect. IPv6 should have been extended address space and extended address space only, in a manner backwards-compatible with IPv4. You think ARP is broken? Great, implement a fixed version of ARP for both IPv4 and IPv6, meanwhile we'll spec IPv6 to use ARP. Don't design IPv6 to use your new thing called NDP that layers completely differently. You think everyone using NAT is wrong? G…

You hit on the problem with IPv6 designers- they took a solution (bigger address space) to a problem (not enough addresses) and they added a bunch of other changes (No NAT, No DHCP, ARP vs NDP, weird address scheme, etc) that arguably made things worse. Then they wonder why people aren’t adopting it. (Its the same complaint I have against Let’s Encrypt. They shoved down a policy which is antithetical to helping their…

A successful solution would have pissed a lot of people off. Every faction that had just one little enhancement, that could by itself probably have been okay, would have to have been told no. That's a hard thing to do.

Sometimes you have to say "yes" to one powerful faction, regardless of whether their request is technically a great idea, in order to get enough political capital to fend off everyone else.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#110

Post by gregmac » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

magila wrote: post #53

geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loose coupling and no second system effect. IPv6 should have been extended address space and extended address space only, in a manner backwards-compatible with IPv4. You think ARP is broken? Great, implement a fixed version of ARP for both IPv4 and IPv6, meanwhile we'll spec IPv6 to use ARP. Don't design IPv6 to use your new thing called NDP that layers completely differently. You think everyone using NAT is wrong? G…

The thing about NAT that for network operators it is a negative externality. For them it often simplifies their job. They do not feel the searing pain it inflicts on network application developers. It's hard to come up with a carrot to convince operators that NAT is wrong because from their perspective it isn't, even if it harms the internet as a whole.

NAT is only painful for applications that implement arbitrary inbound connections, such as peer-to-peer connections, and applications that use separate control/data connections. The former is understandable because it's necessary, the latter is arguably lazy application developers.

Peer-to-peer is largely solved with UPnP port forwarding, but most of these apps can also at least be configured to use a specific port range, education can then be configured on the router to forward.

Then the are the badly designed protocols. That's perhaps a bit harsh, they have their reasons, but using multiple ports is a bit lazy vs using encapsulated packets (eg where you can send either a control or data packet over a single connection, or even send multiple data streams concurrently, in both directions).

FTP is one example, where a separate port is used for data transfers. This is "simple" from the perspective that the data port just contains the raw file contents, no extra encoding, but very painful from a network point of view. I used to support web hosting customers around 2000, when ftp was commonly used for maintaining site content, and people didn't understand when to use PASV mode, server operators didn't always setup the firewall to allow inbound data ports, and occasionally you'd run into the worst case of both client and server behind NAT.

SIP is another example. It uses multiple streams, but is built assuming everything has a public IP. The message it uses to setup this stream includes the system's IP address, which is the private non-routable IP when behind NAT.

Contrast these to a multiplexing protocol like HTTP/2, where it's basically transparent to network operators (still just a single TCP connection on 80 or 443). There's many other examples of multiplex use in more proprietary systems: online gaming, for example, sends different packet types over a single connection -- it doesn't require a separate "movement" and "shoot" port for each connected player. Most sites/apps using web sockets also work like this, with each piece of data encapsulated inside a message wrapper (usually JSON).

I'm being a bit unfair, because FTP predates NAT, and SIP was being created around the same time -- though I'd argue SIP's assumptions about the network environment (and seeming compete ignorance of NAT) were both poor and unnecessary.