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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

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Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#201

Post by bsder »

phicoh wrote: post #116
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

I hope (but am skeptical) that folks look at the overall failure of ipv6 from a deployment perspective to understand the root causes of why it failed (some may think "failure" is too strong a word, but I remember v6 being "just around the corner" in 2000, yet in 2019 I'm still connecting to a GCP database with v4). Coming up with a solution that looks like a huge technological advancement, with no real respect for th…

There are 3 problems with IPv6 - There is a lot in IPv6 that is different from IPv4. Ignoring if those changes are good or bad, it does make the transition harder. - IPv6 was promoted way before there was demand. To some extent it is good to prepare people (and vendors). But it does create the impression that IPv6 is a failure - Demand for IPv6 is highly asymmetrical. The party that is out of IPv4 addresses needs IPv…

You missed:

- No real competition in ISPs

If you had a national ISP in the US who ran IPv6 with end-to-end connectivity without NATs, a killer app would move to it and then drag all the other ISPs onto IPv6.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#202

Post by walshemj »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

I hope (but am skeptical) that folks look at the overall failure of ipv6 from a deployment perspective to understand the root causes of why it failed (some may think "failure" is too strong a word, but I remember v6 being "just around the corner" in 2000, yet in 2019 I'm still connecting to a GCP database with v4). Coming up with a solution that looks like a huge technological advancement, with no real respect for th…

And if you look at the original group that came up with the idea it was 19 academics and one guy from bell labs - and no one with real skin in the game.

In the mid/late 90's even I as a relatively low level person working in networking at BT I could see the problems with IPv6

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#203

Post by richardwhiuk »

coding123 wrote: post #92
orev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might actually have the opposite effect of what is desired. Whoever is charging and benefiting from the fee would then have an incentive to maintain the status quo of IPv4 and continue collecting the fees. We’re already seeing this now as people are selling IPv4 addresses. Scarcity + demand creates market opportunities.

Couldn't they can mandate, that no customer must be charged MORE than the global fee, and violations instantly lose their ipv4 addresses (or rather replaced with v6)? I don't know who the ultimate benefactor would be - would it be ICANN?

In what jurisdiction do you envisage that law and why would the politicians agree to such a tax?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#204

Post by buzer »

geofft wrote: post #130
phicoh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 problems with IPv6 - There is a lot in IPv6 that is different from IPv4. Ignoring if those changes are good or bad, it does make the transition harder. - IPv6 was promoted way before there was demand. To some extent it is good to prepare people (and vendors). But it does create the impression that IPv6 is a failure - Demand for IPv6 is highly asymmetrical. The party that is out of IPv4 addresses needs IPv…

Why is IPv6 more attractive for address exhaustion than IPv4 NAT? As the article argues, you can't run IPv6-only. You need some strategy to reach IPv4 services on the internet because the internet is IPv4. That answer is going to be either publicly routable IPv4, IPv4-to-IPv4 NAT, or IPv4-to-IPv6 NAT. If you do the latter (or if you do dual stack) you can route directly to other IPv6 hosts without NAT - but what's th…

> Are there systems of communication between parties on the public internet that can guarantee native IPv6 on both ends, don't want to use IPv4 NAT, and don't want to set up a point-to-point VPN?

WebRTC is one example of something that can greatly benefit from having publicly routable addresses on clients (in practice this tends to mean IPv6). If both clients are behind IPv4 NAT that doesn't allow hole punching, they will need TURN (or media) server in order to communicate. While clients might be close to each other (e.g. same apartment building), that TURN server can have horrible routing for this set of clients. For example, it could be in Europe while both of the clients are in west coast of USA (and that's not even nearly the worst case).

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#205

Post by logifail »

mrweasel wrote: post #63
krylon wrote: post #38

I have been getting native IPv6 from my ISP for nearly six years now. It is not quite as cool as it could be, because I get assigned a new prefix every 24 hours, but still, IPv6 is there, and it "just works". When I connect to machines on my home network in any way involving avahi/zeroconf, the machines talk to each other via IPv6 by default. At work, it's a different story. I have drifted from a sysadmin/helpdesk ro…

>I have been getting native IPv6 from my ISP for nearly six years now. Meanwhile Danish ISPs refuse to implement IPv6 because: There's no demand. That completely missing the point and their responsibility in my opinion. There's never going to be any significant IPv6 demand from private users. At work however we have customers that have started to request IPv6 only devices and networks, because there's no need for IPv…

>> Meanwhile Danish ISPs refuse to implement IPv6 because: There's no demand. That completely missing the point and their responsibility in my opinion.

Responsibility to whom?

If there's no significant demand from end-users for something, then we're relying on there being a benefit for access providers.

>> For IPv6 to be successful the ISPs need to role it out, regardless of demand.

>> regardless of profitability

Can anyone give examples of a successful technology roll-out where there was no demand, and no profit to be made?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#206

Post by pas »

mikekchar wrote: post #154
gregmac wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- No transition or migration design. It seems like IPv6 was designed as if it was being built instead of building IPv4, and didn't consider how the move would happen beyond something like "everyone run dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, and once that's at 100% we'll turn off IPv4." This results in a stale-mate of sorts: As a server operator, as long as you have IPv4-only clients, you need an IPv4 address. There are no [1] IPv6-on…

This is literally my problem with upgrading to IPv6 currently. And at the cost of potentially embarrassing myself, I haven't really looked into what the potential problems are going to be (and I'm embarrassed to ask :-) ). My ISP will happily switch me from IPv4 to IPv6 but I've got absolutely no idea what the potential problems are. This has put the task into a near perpetual, "I'll look at that when I'm not so busy…

demand dual stack. nothing else really works.

sure, we can simply stay on v4 and encapsulate everything into UDP and use vhost or other names and simply treat v4 address + ports as the solution. economically both are costs of growing the internet. (any solution requires a lot of application changes anyhow, v6 is simpler, but requires ISP buy in, so what app devs can do?)

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#207

Post by Dagger2 »

geofft wrote: post #168
Dagger2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the article is saying. They're saying that you still need to provide access to legacy v4-only hosts on the internet somehow, and you either do that via v4 (i.e. dual stack) or by some transition technology of which NAT64 is just one possible option. Nobody is suggesting to not talk native v6 to the internet too, they're just suggesting to not cut your users off from v4-only services.

If all your connections are potentially NATted (i.e., any DNS lookup might only return an IPv4 record), what's the advantage? You still have to build applications that are capable of dealing with NATs / non-end-to-end connections. You just also have to maintain IPv6 infrastructure. That seems strictly worse than staying on IPv4 NAT. (If you're talking to specific parties that you know have working IPv6, it's less wor…

The advantage is that you can be behind a dozen layers of NAT on the v4 side and it doesn't matter so much because 99% of your traffic is going over v6 anyway and anything that needs an inbound connection has the v6 available instead of being impossible. It's okay for v4 to suck if you can avoid it most of the time, but not so much when it's your only option.

Maintaining v6 is a lot less work than site-to-site VPNs, especially when "specific parties" is "random internet users" and when RFC1918 clashes are a thing.

v6 is worthwhile even if there is still some v4 going on. And even if it wasn't, how would you propose to deploy v6 and turn off v4 in one internet-wide atomic operation? There's no longer any entity that can enforce a flag day on the internet, so I can't see any way of doing that. The result is that we'd need to do a gradual changeover, which happens to be exactly what we are doing.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#208

Post by jjeaff »

4bpp wrote: post #198
phicoh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 problems with IPv6 - There is a lot in IPv6 that is different from IPv4. Ignoring if those changes are good or bad, it does make the transition harder. - IPv6 was promoted way before there was demand. To some extent it is good to prepare people (and vendors). But it does create the impression that IPv6 is a failure - Demand for IPv6 is highly asymmetrical. The party that is out of IPv4 addresses needs IPv…

More issues with IPv6 that are relevant for me as a techie: - Memorising an IPv4 address is about as easy as memorising a phone number, which is to say, fairly easy. I remember the iPv4 addresses of both my rental servers, every device on my home LAN, a bunch of public DNS servers if things go wrong, ...; there's no way I'm going to be able to do that for IPv6. - At least last time I tested it (more than 10 years ago…

I have no real first hand knowledge of this, but I have wondered if part of the reluctance of ipv6 is the fact that many of the "powers that be" use ip addresses to identify and group traffic and other activity from multiple devices. They also use ip addresses to block scrapers (both Google and Amazon do this heavily).

With ipv6, an IP address can be completely disposable. You could scrape Google search results all day long and use a different address for each call.

Heck, you could completely proxy search results in real time and create your own search engine, secretly using Google as your backend while injecting your own ads.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#209

Post by pas »

elcomet wrote: post #137
chrononaut wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's advantages and disadvantages to this approach. When we're talking about residential networks, some consumers won't care about the inability to do that, some will. Those that do care also have to weigh the privacy concerns about the fact that they have a now static prefix for their networks, much like static IPv4 addresses. Personally I'd prefer ISPs to take an approach like this by default, but allow the opti…

> When we're talking about residential networks, some consumers won't care about the inability to do that, some will. This prevents also to create products that need a public address. I think it is a real brake on innovation, who knows what could be invented if everyone had a public ip address ?

The address is public, you can use a dynDNS easily. Relying on fixed addresses never works.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#210

Post by buzer »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #197
logifail wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There are limits to how many devices you can put behind a single IPv4 address. Do you mean ~65k devices behind a single public IPv4 address? [0] >> There is the case of Belgium where law enforcement asked ISPs to limit CGNAT to 16 customers per IPv4 address. Well if law enforcement in Belgium asked, of course we all need to immediately work to redesign the global IPv4 internet to comply. [0] https://learningnetwor…

> Do you mean ~65k devices behind a single public IPv4 address? [0] That's an absolute limit of 2^16 (65k) - the practical limit is much lower. If you only allow one connection per client, then yes, you can get to 65k with TCP/UDP. If you want more than one connection per client (e.g. because the user wants to download content from Facebook while also downloading a YouTube advert), you need to allocate multiple ports…

You can actually get more than 65k connections per address depending on NAT technology. Traffic coming from 1.1.1.1:80 to 9.9.9.9:12121 can be mapped to 192.168.1.1:3333 while traffic coming from 2.2.2.2:80 to 9.9.9.9:12121 can be mapped to 192.168.1.100:9999. GCNAT devices usually support that.
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