Live data from Hacker News

Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

311–320 of 399 posts

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#313
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use home.arpa from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8375 with a custom DNS server or host file. Or one of the many dynamic DNS systems.

Sure, because a custom DNS server is easy to set up.

Depends on your skill set. If you're ok with *nix, then PowerDNS is pretty simple to work with:

https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns

It's also fairly complete, used in production by some pretty big ISPs.

For a light weight approach instead, Dnsmasq is good:

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

It's what most home routers (and lots of other stuff) embed. :)

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#314
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your point (and reply) about memorization was good. Yes, I'm not constantly remembering "210.40.138.43" but enough tech people need to remember some of these things - for debugging, support, etc - that IPv6 is painful. Asking someone to verify an IPv4 in a dialog setting is doable - an IPv6 is not. I've maintained for 2 decades that simply adding another 2 slots for 0-255 would have opened up a greatly usable amount.…

That only helps in making the addresses seem more familiar but does not solve any of the other problems IPv6 solved. You would still need two separate protocols anyway because there is no backwards compatible way to route that.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#315
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm a techie too but I think: - If you go around memorising addresses then you are doing IT wrong in general. So many things depend on DNS (not just A records) that punching in IPs by default is a bad habit. Browsers will keep on enforcing SSL/TLS more and more until the point where typing in an IP address into the URL bar will be as painful as using the web GUI for say an elderly HP switch is right now. - In general…

> - If you go around memorising addresses then you are doing IT wrong in general. So many things depend on DNS (not just A records) that punching in IPs by default is a bad habit. Browsers will keep on enforcing SSL/TLS more and more until the point where typing in an IP address into the URL bar will be as painful as using the web GUI for say an elderly HP switch is right now.

This heavily reminded me of the good old Night Watch essay[1]. You can punch DNS names into the address bar on a browser, because someone out there traded normal sleep schedules for the tremendous opportunity to think about BGP trees, netmasks, and other exciting arcana.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#316
post #281
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easy enough to criticize the IETF and the wider IPv6 community for the mistakes they made. But as far as I know, nobody came up with a credible protocol that is fully backward compatible with IPv4. So, you can ask the IETF to come up with a magically protocol that has longer addresses and is still backward compatible with IPv4. But they are only human. So that kind of magic is not going to happen.

Wouldn’t a predefined mask for IPv6 addresses do exactly that? The last 32 bytes of the address could easily be an IPv4 address I should think.

A mask like 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:ffff:xxxx:xxxx/96?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#317
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an attempted deployment of IPv6 caused packet storms in the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab's network They were relying on Spanning Tree in a who knows how big broadcast domain. Firstly, that's just begging for things to hit the fan. A single device having a meltdown will cause exactly this, a broadcast storm that is able to take down the entire campus, because it was a single broadcast domain. Secondly, it is a se…

I mean, sure, CSAIL might have been wrong. (Worth mentioning this is just a single building, not all of MIT.) But if even the MIT computer science network isn't set up "right," there's doubtless a huge amount of technical debt for everyone else who's not an MIT nerd to clean up before they can make IPv6 work. And IPv6 would have been more successful if the designers had taken that into account.

The switches being good at ARP and bad at an alternative isn't down to technical merits, it's down to which one existed first.

And it sounds like turning the intelligent feature off and treating the packets as pure broadcast, just like ARP packets, would have fixed the problem. If the switch can't do that in the right way, it's not the protocol's fault.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#319
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, because a custom DNS server is easy to set up.

Depends on your skill set. If you're ok with *nix, then PowerDNS is pretty simple to work with: https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns It's also fairly complete, used in production by some pretty big ISPs. For a light weight approach instead, Dnsmasq is good: http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html It's what most home routers (and lots of other stuff) embed. :)

Ok, fair enough. It’s fairly simple to set up.

It’s just a bit of a pain to maintain if the only thing you care about is connecting to server nr 192.168.0.x

I could certainly do it, but there’s 5 services in my house I’d care to connect to, and remembering 1-5 is just as easy as giving them all names. The marginal gains are very low.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#320
post #296
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For privacy purposes I hope most ISPs do this. Looks like the wet dream of adtech, to have everybody use a static IP address. No thanks.

Most operating systems these days support IPv6 privacy extensions where a device will pick a semi-random address every 24 hours. IIRC, it is the default on macOS. You can have a static prefix and random addresses per device.

You will be tracked by prefix then.
Post reply on HN