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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

#411

Post by akira2501 »

FateOfNations wrote: post #403
therealmocker wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I wish they had done with the much larger address space is make it easy for an individual to get their own block of IPv6 addresses. Letting enthusiasts experiment with their own address space seems like it would help with knowledge / adoption.

Big evil Comcast gives out a /60 to residential customers if you ask for it (via setting a DHCP option). That allows for 16 networks to work with.

DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation. If you're a business customer, you get a larger allocation seemingly depending on the size of your IPv4 static block. I've been given /56 and /54 from their business service. It's quite nice.

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

#412

Post by FateOfNations »

nottorp wrote: post #263
yesco wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-L…

It is very normal for devices to have multiple IPv6 addresses. Pretty much every device will have at least two: a link-local address and a public address. When autoconfigured, some devices generate both a long-term and a temporary public address.

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

#413

Post by Dagger2 »

anyfoo wrote: post #379
zamadatix wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s different on the software side but coming from a network VAR it’s the same skill set. You still have subnets and routes and netmasks and DHCP or automatic assignments the difference is the size. If you know IPv4 all you need to learn is “the subnets are all /64 in size, addresses are 128 bits, and you don’t need DHCP if you don’t want”.

Yeah, but I have to say, even as someone who wants IPv6 to succeed and supersede IPv4, from the perspective of building that network infrastructure software, I think this "IPv4+" would have been massively simpler to add, extremely so, and that may have aided adoption a lot. It's really hard to overstate how much simpler tacking on 128bit IP addresses to an otherwise unmodified protocol would have been in the software…

The majority of the problems seem to come from the fact that v6 addresses are longer than v4 ones. That's why we need socket(AF_INET6)s and AAAA records and a DNS API that supports multiple address families and dual stack and new firewalling and updates to all protocols that embed v4 addresses.

You're going to have the exact same problems with any protocol that has addresses longer than v4's.

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

#414

Post by NegativeK »

Yuyudo_Comiketo wrote: post #289

All ipv6 shortcomings discussion aside; What I think is the more vital problem to focus on is that the governments clearly don't want us mere mortals to expose our own servers running on our own hardware to the outside world (most often justifying that with "it's for your own security" mantra, for we're all deemed too dumb to figure that out for ourselves). ISP-imposed ipv4 double NAT (imposed on ISPs by the governme…

I've downvoted you for being combative, wide-sweepingly conspiratorial, off-topic, and thinking everyone who disagrees with you is out to get you.

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

#415

Post by unethical_ban »

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.…

I don't want to be rude, and I'll assume good faith. But it seems naive to think the syntax of an address would be the sticking point.

128 bit addresses, NDP, SLAAC, etc., there are many huge changes that I don't think syntactic sugar would have saved.

Maybe though? Perhaps it would have been doable but I simply don't know.

We, the world, should ha e legislated some of these standards. The fact that in 2022 I have to worry about if I will get a /60, /64 or /128 from an ISP is criminal. That I can't get a consumer router with prefix delegation available.

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

#416

Post by Dagger2 »

ufmace wrote: post #270

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…

If you're on Fios, there's an issue between checksum offloading on Intel NICs and the ONTs that Fios uses. The workaround is to disable checksum offloading.

If not, perhaps you forgot to apply TCP MSS clamping on v6. (An easy test for this is to set the MTU on your client machine to 1280.)

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

#417

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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.…

OMG! What were we all thinking! Thank you redox99 for figuring this out. Only now that you have pointed out this idea is it suddenly obvious.

But, since this is, you know, the entire internet, can you maybe write a more detailed specification?

So like, when my TCP stack creates a presumably backwards compatible IPv4 header, where does it put the extra 4 bytes? Or do we only send these IPv4+ packets to devices that we also know are IPv4+? If we add four bytes at the end of the IPv4 header, then when I send to 12.4.1.0.8.8.8.8, then the legacy server will read it as 8.8.8.8 and send my information to Google. That seems bad.

Or will we create a new IP header format? If so, how will we make sure that all the software on a given box understands the new format? How do we incrementally roll out these new applications, kernels, modules, etc, in such a way that we dont break the internet in interesting and fatal-for-real-people ways? Maybe we could deploy IPv4 and IPv4+ side-by-side, so that both are running, and so the new IPv4+ can fail with no risk to the IPv4 services?

How about parsing IP addresses. What if I send to 10.44321? This is a valid IP address. Are we going to say that the various short-hand representations only apply to IPv4, so you an't shorten 127.0.0.0.0.0.0.1 to 127.1? How will we handle scripts where the subnet is specified as /24 independently of the address, such that IPv4+ subnets will contain 32 billion IPs instead of 256? Or do you imagine that IPv4 and IPv4+ scripts must be kept separate?

I am looking forward to your specifications! While you are addressing all these issues, could we also look at expanding the number of ports available too? Also, what if IPv4+ used sixteen bytes, instead of eight?

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

#418

Post by Vespasian »

jlokier wrote: post #378

It's 2022 and I've never yet seen an IPv6- capable internet connection at any home I've lived in, office I've worked at, coffee shop or library whose network I've used. And I've lived in a lot of places Phones have it. But when I connect my computers via my phone's hotspot, the computers only get IPv4. My data SIM at home enables IPv6 when used in a phone. But when installed in my 4G router, same contract, same provi…

I've had IPv6 at my home for at least 10 years I would say.

My parents do as well.

I was recently surprised that ssh to my dual stack private server didn't connect at work. It turned out I had set up the config file as V6 only.

Location: Southern Germany.

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

#419

Post by wbl »

theamk wrote: post #345
CountSessine wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory this could be handled by stuffing the extra 96 bits in an IP extension header. But this solves nothing because then any switch that isn’t IPv4+ aware will route packets incorrectly. Literally every single switch on the internet needs to be updated/replaced before you could start generating IPv4+ traffic otherwise the one outlier will send your IPv4+ packets off to Uzbekistan. OR Maybe you don’t use those 96…

Or you extend on network level, and even kernel level, but keep programming API compatible. I don't think people like IPv4 packets that much, it is all the APIs which are giving problem. I bet if we kept everything about IPv6 the same, but (1) made IPV6_V6ONLY mandatory and default to zero (2) did not use colon in IP address representation (3) recommended firewalls use same config rules for IPv4/IPv6 address.. then I…

That mistake was already baked in to the sockaddr_t ABI.

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

#420

Post by icedchai »

__d wrote: post #399
Dagger2 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like IPX. It's still necessary and in use for some things -- so it hasn't reached its end of life -- but when was the last time you ever thought about it? By this metric, we still haven't finished migrating to v4.

I'm curious: what still uses IPX in 2022?

I have no doubt there's an internal application running on a Novell server somewhere that we'll never hear about. It's still running on a machine in a closet just like it was in 1997, or possibly imaged and migrated to a VM because nobody wanted to touch it.
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