Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

apenwarr.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 318 posts

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#201

Post by JohnFen »

jandrese wrote: post #177
convolvatron wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal. - changed arp. Ok, new design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone? - prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think - fusing the end system identifier…

Neighbor Discovery is basically ARP wearing a trenchcoat. The only people "hurt" by the change are the ones who were parsing the output of the arp command for whatever reason. IMHO the biggest problem is that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. There is no mechanism to inform anybody about which address you have configured for yourself, unlike IPv4's DHCP where a central server knows everyone's address and…

> that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked.

Indeed. I thought I was being an idiot and just not understanding how this was supposed to work, until I learned that it just doesn't do a lot of important things. So when the day comes that I have to move my network to IPv6, I plan on continuing to use DHCP because I want the omitted functionality.

Of course, I still might be being an idiot and not understanding. Getting a solid picture of how IPv6 is supposed to work is genuinely hard to do with any confidence.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#202

Post by fanf2 »

schoen wrote: post #68
ianburrell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year. IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.

We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4. While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/a…

There are auctions for IPv4 space, though they did not really become a thing until after the RIRs ran out of IPv4 blocks. The price per address is about $50.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#203

Post by patmorgan23 »

systemBuilder wrote: post #180
mike_d wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed. https://w…

IPv6 only solves a problem if you don't understand the problem itself! Just because people have five devices doesn't mean they need 65,000 * 5 internet addresses ... there is an endpoint for every port and each device needs only a handful of ports if not only one! Each user can certainly get by with five ports on five shared ipv4 addresses. As I said before IPv6 will never happen fully because it solves a non-problem…

That works fine for outbound connections but doesn't work for inbound connections. You can't have two devices listening for inbound connections on the same IP address.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#204

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

BizarroLand wrote: post #200
LinuxBender wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may wish to skip that one as well. [1][2] [1] - https://www.noction.com/blog/ipv10 [2] - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-omar-ipv10/10/

OK, so let's just crank it all the way to 11, since 11 is 1 more than 10. I think smarter people than me can handle all the technical underlayment, but when it gets to the point of where the techs and sysadmins are using it, it should have an 8 digit hex key at the start and then an IPv4 "alike" address at the end, and 0000:0000:-whatever should encapsulate the current network schema for backwards compatibility. Then…

Probably anathema to the dreams of IPv6+ IP-for-everything, but in your putative scheme, could we also make a carve out for local network? I like that 192.168.*, 10.* are defined as local.

So 0000:0000 local network, 0000:0001 legacy internet.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#205

Post by Dagger2 »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #95
mort96 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm worried about the long tail. IPv6 won't actually be useful until more or less everything supports v6; as long as there are enough clients which don't support v6 servers need v4, and as long as there are enough servers which don't support v6 clients need v4. And until we can start disabling v4, v6 gives no advantage and only causes significant added complexity. I'm worried that the time when we can start removing…

I think you’ll find the real transition to be a lot quicker than that. All it takes is one of the big companies drawing a line in the sand because they’re unable to buy enough IP addresses, so they finally take a stand. Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

> Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

That was the work of a few people on the YouTube team, not the company itself taking a stand:

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#206

Post by patmorgan23 »

jandrese wrote: post #170
kalleboo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate use goes down and Residential use goes up. Corporate networks were the last to drop XP, the last to drop IE, and will be the last to adopt IPv6.

That's not quite true. Even after corporate users have switched the government will still be on V4. The US military is drowning in IPv4 addresses and feels little pressure to switch.

Azure AD only got IPv6 support this year. Most corporate networks have not switched, whole most federal agencies have implemented IPv6(due to mandates), mobile carriers are heavily utilizing IPv6 and so are residential ISPs (Comcast and Time Warner have been deploying IPv6 since 2011)

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#207

Post by patmorgan23 »

uuddlrlrbaba wrote: post #175
fulafel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.

Wow a ~40% migration over the course of 20 years. What a victory :|

You try and get billions of people to do anything quickly

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#208

Post by Dagger2 »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #10
ggm wrote: post #5

35% worldwide by population of users in random samples at APNIC: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA US on 50%, India on 70% and China just shy of 40% -As China continues to grow (and it will) the likely outcome is > 50% IPv6 Capable. I doubt any new Mobile deployment will be single stack, the most likely is pure IPv6 with CGN for 4. So Africa which is still in growth, the most likely outcome is dualstack preferring…

It doesn't matter if even 98% of "the internet" is "on" IPv6. If public websites don't advertise an IPv6 address, every user is still going to use IPv4 to connect to them. All the cloud providers still prioritize IPv4, and usually don't support IPv6 at all until a few years after a new service comes out.

NAT64 handles the "public v4-only website" use case very well. I run my desktop without v4 today and it works fine.

A few websites without v6 aren't a blocker to either deploying v6 or undeploying v4.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#209

Post by ksec »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #176
jandrese wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it comes with all of the drawbacks of IPv6 but also ditches some of the advantages. You still need to update every router and application. Network admins still need to learn something new. The two protocols still don't interoperate. If you're going to go through all of that trouble why only do a half measure. IPv6 is supposed to be the final version of IP.

> The two protocols still don't interoperate. On the contrary, they would, the behavior's and quicks would be the same. And if we define, say, that if the last four components are zero, then the addr is the same as normal IPv4 address, then you could deploy the whole thing without having anybody assigning new addresses. NAT's/configs/etc could keep working. The big problem with IPv6 is that everything has to be doubl…

I have been stating something very similar this for close to 10 years.

It could possibly be known as IPv5 considering Internet Stream Protocol was never really used.

Or simply IP64.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#210

Post by BizarroLand »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #204
BizarroLand wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so let's just crank it all the way to 11, since 11 is 1 more than 10. I think smarter people than me can handle all the technical underlayment, but when it gets to the point of where the techs and sysadmins are using it, it should have an 8 digit hex key at the start and then an IPv4 "alike" address at the end, and 0000:0000:-whatever should encapsulate the current network schema for backwards compatibility. Then…

Probably anathema to the dreams of IPv6+ IP-for-everything, but in your putative scheme, could we also make a carve out for local network? I like that 192.168.*, 10.* are defined as local. So 0000:0000 local network, 0000:0001 legacy internet.

Yeah, that's smart. There's no need for everything to be uniquely identified on the internet anyway, right? Why would someone halfway around the world need to be able to ping my smart fridge after all?

Even for tech support purposes, people shouldn't have the ability to directly test my appliances firewall capabilities.

Actually, now that I've done the math, why not just extend IPv4 into hexadecimal?

Once again, none of the current addresses would change with this change, but it would turn 60 billion possible addresses (12^10 = 61,917,364,224) into 184 quadrillion addresses (12^16 = 184,884,258,895,036,416).

I feel like that would give us plenty of wiggle room. Sure, it's not on par with ipv6's ability to assign a unique address to every atom on the planet 100 times, but I think it would be enough for the next 40 years or so, right?

And it's inherently backwards compatible, what's not to love about it?

Post reply on HN