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Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

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Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#261

Post by cryptonector »

cletus wrote: post #106

IPv6 is a case study in the second sytem effect [1]. Realizing you need to make breaking changes and it being rare that you get to do so you decide to make all the changes. The truth is IPv4 only had 2 real problems: 1. Lack of address space due to 32 bit addresses; and 2. Lack of a solution for roaming since your IP address is a core part of connection identity (between the source and destination address and port).…

Finally, a great comment in this thread.

Arguably lack of IP address block portability is not that big a deal [now that we're well used to it]. But IPv6 did not solve the CIDR route table size issues, and that's a big failure.

I have long thought that IP packets should have a source and destination ASNs as well as actual addresses. That would mean that we'd need more DNS (or similar) lookups, and a bootstrapping system for that. A scheme like this would greatly reduce router table sizes and would allow for IP address block portability.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#262

Post by anthropodie »

throw0101a wrote: post #164
redox99 wrote: post #32

IPv6 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.…

> And regarding compatibility, with ipv4+ if you have a 0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x ip address you would be able to talk to both ipv4+ aware and legacy ipv4 devices natively without any tunneling (because you also own the legacy, non quad 0 ip address). This exists: > Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For…

> What makes you think that companies would have been willing to make the effort to deploy "IPv4+" any more than IPv6?

I'm pretty sure that those who built new protocol were aware of this and were like "anyway we are gonna have to upgrade network devices. Why don't we build a new protocol while avoiding pitfalls of older one"

Any comittee that sat down to solve IPv4 issue would have thought of compatibility first.

I am shocked that so many people agree with OP's armchair solution here.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#263

Post by nottorp »

yesco wrote: post #122
justin_oaks wrote: post #14

Having "grown up" with IPv4, I'm slow to learn everything necessary to set up an IPv6 infrastructure. The times I did look into it, IPv6 seemed so much more complicated than IPv4, but maybe that's just because I'm just not familiar with it. Are there any good resources on setting up IPv6 support from first principles? I still get confused as to the "right" way to set up internal networks for IPv6, especially when DHC…

A confusing aspect of IPv6 is that it's actually a much simpler protocol than IPv4, you often end up assuming you need to configure a bunch of stuff that you really don't have to. The most common example would be NAT, despite the complexity it adds to IPv4, people often get comfortable with idea of setting up complex subnet hierarchies and feel lost when that all just disappears with IPv6. The key things to remember…

Ok, i'll bite.

> Auto generated addresses are usually in the form of "prefix - device_id" so even if a node has a lot of addresses, they are all mostly the same

> Internet/non-local IPv6 addresses break the rules a bit and don't use a device_id in their addresses in order to protect user privacy

So a device needs to have both an internal address and an "Internet/non-local" address in IPv6?

Plus one for WAN and Link-Local?

4-5 addresses per device?

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#264

Post by jeroenhd »

trey-jones wrote: post #175

The furthest I ever got was creating firewall rules for ipv6 that mostly corresponded to our ipv4 rules. These were never used, but they were tested and ready. This was around "ipv6 day" (2014? 2015?) I've thought about it on and off since then and wondered whether I should be doing more with ipv6, but haven't actually taken any action in that direction. I wonder if there's a relatively simple solution to at least mo…

> I wonder if there's a relatively simple solution to at least most of the OPs list, all having to do with outgoing ipv6 requests, which would be proxying such (or all) requests through another computer on the network that has both ipv4 and ipv6 interfaces. Maybe that is an oversimplification.

If you have an IPv4+IPv6 capable server around, you can set it up yourself if your ISP hasn't made a proxy available. There are various NAT64 implementations you can use; running them and setting up a DNS64 server is all you need to make such a feature available. You'd probably also want to add a firewall/whitelist to prevent other abusing your NAT64 gateway, though.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#265

Post by kd913 »

cramjabsyn wrote: post #226
neilalexander wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no “backwards compatible with IPv4”. If you have to modify the existing packet headers, you no longer have backward compatibility. If you change anything involving how a flow is identified (like the source/address destinations and ports) then you have broken backward compatibility. Firewalls need to understand new address formats, routers need to understand new address formats, end systems need to understand…

> It’s just that transition is expensive It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.

>It’s impossible to finish a transition when the old version has no end of life in sight.

The end of life is gonna happen when ipv4 addresses end up being cost prohibitive. They are already some $50 an ip address.

That is gonna be cost prohibitive in developing Countries, who already are making a transition to ipv6.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#266

Post by jeroenhd »

jedberg wrote: post #213
jeroenhd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No you wouldn't. 0.0.0.0.1.0.0.0/40 and 1.0.0.0/8 are the same thing. I don't see why the CIDR would make a direct difference. Whether it's converting 1.0.0.0/8 to 0.0.0.0.1.0.0.0/40 or 2002:c000:0204::1.0.0.0/96 doesn't seem to matter to me. The only difference I can think of is local networks (10/8, 192.168/16, 172.16/12) but your suggestion would fail in the same way. Several compatibility systems for IPv6 exist…

> If your business network is managed by "hey, this feature exists, let's see what happens if we turn it on" then your network admin needs to be more professional. I think this is why you don't understand how IP4+ would be easier. 99% of companies make their "IT guy" manage the network. They aren't network professionals. They are mostly desktop professionals who also get forced to manage the network and firewall. Sam…

If it's just "The IT guy", then IPv6 will work out of the box for outgoing traffic and will block all incoming traffic. This is why almost half of the USA is using IPv6 right now, it's just turned on by default.

Hosting stuff is harder, but it's also that different. Theoretically, you can NAT IPv6 traffic to an IPv4 server inside your network no problem, but it's a pain and nobody really needs it anyway, so it's not widely used.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#267

Post by jeroenhd »

epx wrote: post #257
jeroenhd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sadly, our local ISP is still IPv4-only, meaning we cannot even access our IPv6 hosts while at home, so we need to fall-back to IPv4 quite a lot. Have you perhaps looked into using tunnels to fix this? he.net can add IPv6 support to any routable IPv4 address that can respond to ICMP. If you need to stick to your internal ULA, something like NPTv6 can translate the /48 subnet HE provides to your own /48 subnet trans…

He.net needs a fixed non-CGNAT IPv4 address, with protocol 41 open, and this is quite difficult to get.

That really depends on where you live. Every ISP I've ever had has fit this bill.

I know IPv4 availability in developing countries is a problem and there's no fix for that other than "wait until IPv6 is available", but in those countries IPv6 is actually part of the solution to not have to rely on "communal" IPv4 CG-NAT.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#268

Post by watt »

miyuru wrote: post #43
bombcar wrote: post #34

Setting a website to be available over IPv6 is relatively easy, yet we see: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;news.ycombinator.com. IN AAAA Why? Because it's not quite as simple as making Apache respond over IPv6; any website of any size has various protections in place to prevent DDoS, spam, etc, and those tools are almost universally basic and at the root is the "ban by IPv4 address". Without that tooling supporting IPv6, it r…

Actually HN is available via IPv6 over Cloudflare. You have to add a CF IPv6 it to the hosts file. In fact I am posting this comment over IPv6.

The fact anyone should think this is somehow acceptable state of art is obscene to me.

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#269

Post by jeroenhd »

withinboredom wrote: post #252
jeroenhd wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a strange limitation in my opinion. I understand that dealing with subnetting/host network rebinding to allow full IPv6 can be a challenge (especially if you're on DHCPv6 or some other manually managed thing instead of normal SLAAC) but surely Microsoft could use whatever NAT solution they use for IPv4 to work on IPv6 as well? Apparently support for the protocol can already be enabled ( https://github.com/natha…

Heh, yeah, I opened that issue. Nathan is awesome for maintaining that kernel.

Haha, I didn't even notice. I should clean my glasses!

Re: Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

#270

Post by ufmace »

I was rather dissuaded from trying to keep it working on any of my servers when, after much head-scratching and wrangling, I eventually traced a bunch of weird network issues on my desktop system to IPv6. Seems that any web requests to sites that supported v6 natively were randomly flaky and slow, causing terrible video streaming performance. Only fixed when I shut off v6 at the network adapter level.

Guess I'll try and turn it back on in a year or two and see if it's still terrible. If it's not, maybe I'll think about turning it on for some of my servers again.

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