Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable

Post by est31 » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

keiyakins wrote: post #609

est31 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

site-local addresses are deprecated since RFC 3879. Link-local addresses are indeed another standard, but have the very same length problem. You have these horribly long ipv6 addresses... those can't reasonably be parsed by humans... There is no 192.168.* equivalent in ipv6. Why don't we have something like fd00::1 being the router and fd00::2, fd00::3, etc being the devices in the local network, assigned by DHCP. Yo…

Why do you care how long the addresses are? That's what DNS is for. Within a link - most home networks are only one, and those are the ones that need to be simplest - there's even mDNS.

Post by keiyakins » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

rekoil wrote: post #632

Dagger2 wrote: post #627

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This is v6; nobody counts individual IPs, because the answer is always "enough". A /60 is only 16 /64s (i.e. 16 subnets), and that's not always enough.

Wait, can you not subnet IPv6 smaller than /64?

Post by keiyakins » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

dqh wrote: post #624

keiyakins wrote: post #613

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Indeed, your system would require NAT4.44 as a transition mechanism, just like NAT64 is needed now. It gets no benefit over IPv6, and none of the other benefits like SLAAC. So, what's the point? It's no easier to migrate to, and once we're migrated is worse.

If a source behind an IP4.4 router sent a packet to an IP4 destination, then yes, the source router would need to apply NAT to the source address. But this is already a standard IP4 router capability, and I think that most connection origins on the internet are already behind a NAT. I don't agree that it wouldn't have been easier to migrate. No changes would have been needed within retail ISPs for starters. Source co…

Post by dqh » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 9:47 PM UTC

keiyakins wrote: post #635

dqh wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a source behind an IP4.4 router sent a packet to an IP4 destination, then yes, the source router would need to apply NAT to the source address. But this is already a standard IP4 router capability, and I think that most connection origins on the internet are already behind a NAT. I don't agree that it wouldn't have been easier to migrate. No changes would have been needed within retail ISPs for starters. Source co…

How would changes not have been required in the ISPs? An IPv4 router wouldn't know what to do with a 4.4 packet. At best, it'd route it to the wrong place - 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 and 5.6.7.8 are totally different hosts that may well not even be on the same continent. Additionally, the only reason so much code had to change for ipv6 is that Berkley sockets is a terrible, terrible API that has abstractions so leaky they migh…

Post by Dagger2 » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 1:39 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #601

Dagger2 wrote: post #594

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It causes no end of problems, not just for ISPs and mobile networks but also for people running server networks and for end users like us. I suppose it can be hard to see that when you grew up with the problems and have never used a network where you didn't need to deal with them though. The world can mostly function without NAT. It's mainly only used to work around address shortages, which aren't an issue on v6, so…

No, NAT is not for network address shortages. NAT is a cruicial privacy and security feature. "No need to use NAT" is, of course, a horrible anti-feature, not a benefit of IPv6. (And, of course, in the real world the vast majority of IPv6 is rolled out with NAT anyways.)