My take is that they should have used alphanumeric addressing. You could have addresses like company:office:laptop and it shouldn't have reinvented arp and dhcp or added more complex routing like anycast or link local. It tried to solve too many problems at once.
Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
141–150 of 649 posts
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SLAAC should not change after the host has generated it during installation / first connection, as long as you don't reinstall the OS etc. It's basically no problem. Even better: I can set my own ::/64 so personal servers at home can be ::d3ad:b33f and accessible from outside without NAT. It's beautiful. Firewall configuration is not hard either these days is it?
So I have to manually configure every device to be able to use internet? Every friends phone that wants to connect to my wifi needs manual setup? That is a problem. To which the solution is IPv4?
What? No. You connect a device, and SLAAC (and optionally DHCPv6, on enterprise networks) configures everything. It just works.
SLAAC is more than capable of sending DNS settings to devices. There's no manual configuration involved.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been decades. The vast majority of network equipment already has been replaced multiple times since IPv6 became a thing that people "understood" we would switch in the future. The difference is that instead of their ipv6 being broken, partial, or correct but non functioning because it needs additional configuration, it would properly work and support with the much simpler "ipv4+"
But IPv4+ is incompatible, so it requires to maintain two network stacks until reasonably everything has moved over to it. You need to duplicate the configuration for DNS, routing, firewalls etc., exactly as for dual stack IPv6. I don't really see a difference.
Imagine I own a company and I already have a bunch of IP4. I upgrade my network equipment to IP4+, and then keep all my routing and firewall configs. Everything just works the same as before. Now I want to access IP4+, so I add a route entry for all the IPs above 255.255.255.255. In fact, if that entry is just "send everything to my upstream" it might already work!
Now I want to add some new resources but I'm out of IPv4 space. So I get some IP4+ space and a new host with a new firewall rule for the new octet and a DNS entry. Of course only other people on IP4+ can reach it, so I use it for my internal tools since I know all of my clients support IP4+.
Then I want to use it for a public service, so I add a dual DNS entry of 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.4. IPv4 clients get 1.2.3.4 and IP4+ clients get 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4. Now I can start collecting data on how many people support IP4+. When it gets high enough, I can shut off the v4 address and move it to IP4+ only.
It would make the transition just soooo much easier, because the changes are much more incremental. I don't have to set up a whole new dual stack. I can just make a few dual entries.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh you don't need a firewall then? I guess accessing a routers web interface from the WAN is a-okay
My shitty cable modem which is also a router does not expose its web interface to the world by default. I don't understand why you'd need a firewall if - you trust devices on your network (yes, big if, but even then: the only reachable ports of a machine from the outside are those explicitly open to the outside, most stuff listens to 127.0.0.1 anyway) - you only configure your NAT to forward ports you would open on y…
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Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#145IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades. And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself. If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade. Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.…
> (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4). Which would need translation support at the edges between devices speaking only old-IPv4 and the superset-IPv4. Just as is done with IPv6.
Except that it would be a small incremental change instead of a whole second stack.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#146> The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via IPv6 This is quite strange given the period around 2010 where there were government edicts that IPv6 must be supported. Perhaps GitHub wasn't mission critical back then.
This seems to be the github ticket / request for IPv6:
https://github.com/community/community/discussions/10539
Apparently github are working on it as of Oct 2022 ... https://twitter.com/AS36459/status/1582728252199964672
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#147I propose a real simple solution: Major providers pledge to take this seriously. They toss a rule in their routers that just drops all ipv4, for 1 minute, starting at noon UTC. At 12:01 UTC, revert the change and ipv4 works again. Do this every day. The following week, up it to 2 minutes. The incentive will happen.
Of course it’s simple if you have the capability to compel coordinated action across a globally-distributed disparate-and-not-easily-definable group of stakeholders whose incentives typically do not align.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pricing, fyi: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/ipv4-pricing/ Around €19.00 setup per IP.
That's not insane, that's pretty cheap. If you buy IPv4 addresses in bulk (e.g. an entire /18 or so), they're ~$40 a piece these days. When you buy cloud services from AWS or GCE, you're still paying for those IPv4 addresses, it's just baked into the price. Hetzner makes paying for it optional, which makes it so much more visible.
This isn't buying, this is renting. You are paying that setup fee + the monthly fee.
As a comparison, I pay ~$1.60/ip/mo (no setup fee) for my IPs.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#149IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades. And I don't mean adoption, I mean the standard itself. If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade. Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.…
It provides a lot of improvements actually. Stating the obvious, NAT isn't needed anymore. Also with modern Firewalls rules need to be written only once. At this point I'm just surprised why it's not adopted
> NAT isn't needed anymore.
False.
The most obvious case is multi-homing (for redundancy, fail-over, and policy-routing reasons) without an AS available and thus without BGP. In other words, a typical case when a user has a fiber connection and LTE as a backup. Then it is the router who should pick the correct source address, according to the link which is up.
Another reason is to deal with dynamic addressing from the ISP. Let's suppose we have an ADSL PPPoE connection, with prefix delegation. The modem connects, gets a prefix, devices grab IPs from it. Then a rat chews upon the line, causing a disconnection and a reconnection - but the ISP now delegates a different prefix. Or worse - the modem crashes and reboots, also picking up a different prefix. Devices are still not picking up such unexpected renumberings well. So they continue using old addresses, which don't work. Using a layer of network prefix translation solves the problem, as now only the router needs to be aware of the renumbering that has just happened due to the rat.
Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
But IPv4+ is incompatible, so it requires to maintain two network stacks until reasonably everything has moved over to it. You need to duplicate the configuration for DNS, routing, firewalls etc., exactly as for dual stack IPv6. I don't really see a difference.
Imagine I own a company and I already have a bunch of IP4. I upgrade my network equipment to IP4+, and then keep all my routing and firewall configs. Everything just works the same as before. Now I want to access IP4+, so I add a route entry for all the IPs above 255.255.255.255. In fact, if that entry is just "send everything to my upstream" it might already work! Now I want to add some new resources but I'm out of…
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