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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

371–380 of 399 posts

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#371
post #261
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of technology transitions go smoothly, while others painfully drag on for a decade (ipv6, Python3). Are there any common root causes for the semi-failures? Has anyone written about why some succeed and some don't?

But is either Python3 or IPv6 really a failure? Sure the migration has been slow, but has still been rolling on pretty consistently forwards. There are no major reversal in the trends of either IPv6 or Py3k adoptation, and especially for IPv6 there is pretty much no alternative out there. Maybe just a decade is not all that long period and the tech community is too impatient due the historically rapid pace of changes…

Let's see... Can I get a /10 IPv4 block for my company without paying a small fortune? Can I do the job using IPv6 only? Does the vast majority of mobile and emerging market customers have end to end connectivity?

If the answers are "No", "No" and "No", I would have to say that indeed, IPv6 really is a failure, after two decades and monstrous investment thrown at it, it has failed to solve any of the practical issues it was supposed to.

It's a gigantic failure, both in a costs vs. benefits approach, but exponentially so when considering the opportunity costs of being still stuck with IPv4.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#372
post #370
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of proposals that build on these ideas, for example EnhancedIP. Typically, they would encode the extended addressing info in an options field. They were to late the party and missed the circa 2000-2005 window where it became clear Ipv6 will be an uphill struggle. Back in the day, only naive proposals like ipv7 existed, "ipv4 with larger address" but that solves little. The fundamental difference co…

There is a large cost to configure IPv6 because most operators have ignored IPv6, waiting for the IETF to magically get it right. There is very little consensus within the operator community on how to deploy IPv6. The net effect is that there is an endless series of configuration options. Which leads to having to select equipment very carefully to make sure you get an overlapping feature set. The problem with somethi…

> The problem with something like encoding extra address bits in IPv4 options is that you would have to get a large group of operators on board for it to get any traction.

Sure that's why you have things like IETF, to coordinate such changes. If that were to happen, the EnhancedIP option would quickly become transparent, as the core of the internet upgrades firmware in a few years. I'm not in any way proposing this to be a good idea today, let alone that it could be deployed in ad-hoc uncoordinated fashion.

> my home internet connection give customers a static (officially 'stable') IPv4 address. It may not be beneficial for them if a next generation internet protocol would force the deployment of NAT boxes.

In that case you become the owner of your own routing domain and you have the option to provide your "customers" with an extended IP address that is e2e reachable from the outside world, while NATing the rest of the legacy devices. Your ISP does not have to do anything aside from not filtering options, that's the beauty of a backwards compatible solution.

> Merging the two, as is done for example with NAT64/DNS64, leads to network issues that many people don't understand.

The complexity and fragility of something like NAT64 comes exactly from the fact that it tries to bridge two separate internets. An EnhancedIP NAT is simply a transparent router for EnhancedIP aware endpoints within the domain it controls. You can freely mix legacy and upgraded devices in your network with guaranteed interoperability and you get e2e connectivity if both end points and any NATs in the route are upgraded. The rest of the network only "sees" IPv4 traffic as far as they are concerned.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#373
post #14

This article completely fails to mention that IPv6 is not just an extension of the address space but a whole different worldview about how to run a network: - IPv6-to-IPv6 NAT has only been accepted very recently and very begrudgingly. Whatever your views are on NAT, the fact is that lots of people have network designs that rely on it, and if you want them to stop, you're now asking them to couple two major transitio…

This. I was (as a young engineer) monitoring the mailing lists during the IPV6 proposal discussions and the hubris was palpable. It was very much a case of "they will have to implement this so we will get to force all of these other improvements on them too "

makes x.400 and x.500 seem sensible

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#374

I really want to enable ipv6 on my web site, but then I heard horror stories about connections failing if not all routers between the client and the server have ipv6 enabled. Apparently at least for a while, browsers would not try the same request again via ipv4, so the site would simply be unreachable. Perhaps browsers have become smarter about that, but it really makes me wary about enabling ipv6. I have no immedia…

Yes, browsers have become smarter about that. You can test it by enabling ipv6 and then drop all ipv6 packets with ip6tables, that has the same effect as if some middlebox dropped them.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#375
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my ISP offered free dyndns I am about 80% certain that in the time it took you to write this comment you could have bought a domain name, used the registrar's web-gui to input your now static IP addresses, and had a perfectly functioning DNS setup for your home. Or, if the free DDNS is the most important to you, OpenWRT appears to natively support quite an extensive list: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/serv…

I have a domain name. Setting up subdomains and binding it to addresses is non-trivial. I have to figure out all the business of anames and MX records and how to set up a subdomain. And considering that routers issue ipv4 addresses automatically, offer user-friendly GUIs for binding addresses to devices and forwarding ports, it's not really comparable is it?

You are not comparing apples to apples here. You’re talking about setting up MX records vs memorizing an IPv4 address. There is no way that pxtl@random-IPv4-address is how you’re handling your email.

If you can run a server securely on the public internet, you can set up a domain name. To pretend otherwise is a little absurd. Frankly if you can’t set up a domain properly in DNS, you probably can’t successfully manage to forward a port to your server anyway.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#376

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…

IPv6 adoption has been on an exponential growth curve for a long time, with an inflection point where it really started taking off around 2013. Google has some very solid stats to back this up https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html There are absolutely motivations and incentives for the advancement of IPv6, the most obvious of which is the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. The Notice the inflection point…

> There are absolutely motivations and incentives for the advancement of IPv6, the most obvious of which is the exhaustion of IPv4 address space.

Which is exactly my point: a system could have been decided that only focused on increasing the address space (in as backwards-compatible a way as possible), but instead v6 tried to roll "everything and the kitchen sink" into it, while making the address space transition about as difficult as possible.

The fact that IP v4 addresses are so expensive just highlights the failure of v6. If v6 had been successful, v4 addresses should have a value of $0.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#377
post #14

This article completely fails to mention that IPv6 is not just an extension of the address space but a whole different worldview about how to run a network: - IPv6-to-IPv6 NAT has only been accepted very recently and very begrudgingly. Whatever your views are on NAT, the fact is that lots of people have network designs that rely on it, and if you want them to stop, you're now asking them to couple two major transitio…

When I try to open https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=32621 it wants a login, so someone switched this bug to hidden.

Here is a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20170324213950/https://code.goog...

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#378
post #309

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…

This can be deployed quite quickly if mandated as a requirement for any ISP to operate (ISPs usually need some license from local municipalities or something of the sort). They'll implement it in an instant. Otherwise, they'll just sit doing nothing, and it remains a chicken and egg problem.

No, a municipality can require nothing beyond a business license to sell services in their jurisdiction.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#379
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not only about intermediate boxes. Just consider how relatively smoothly various parts of WiFi stack was upgraded or how 2G->4G transition happens with mobiles phones. The biggest problem with IPv6 is that it a different protocol that requires special support on all levels starting from applications and down to managed switches.

> consider how relatively smoothly various parts of WiFi stack was upgraded Has WiFi been upgraded? I believe new devices still have support back to 802.11b.

The new WiFi installations do not run old protocols. Surely they may support the older versions, but by default the newer protocols are used. Compare that with IPv6 when after 20 years the protocol is still disabled by default on ISP provided routers in Europe.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#380
A couple of months ago voted for IPv4 by paying $1/month for every IPv4 IP address on my new server.

128 IP addresses total. That is well over $1k/year voting power.

The reason for that purchase is that IPv4 addresses represent internet reputation while crawling websites.

I am not interested in getting IPv6 at all.

How much did you pay for IPv6?

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