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The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

ipv6.hanazo.no

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Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#41

Post by viraptor »

preisschild wrote: post #33
sherburt3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't think IPv6 addresses are human readable compared to IPv4 addresses. I know DNS makes that a non issue for the majority of users but I still think it's an important quality for people in charge of maintaining networks and stuff.

> I just don't think IPv6 addresses are human readable compared to IPv4 addresses Then you just didn't read enough into IPv6 documentation yet. IPv6 addresses can be short if you want because of the `::` operator. Example: Instead of IPv4 where you'd have the addresses `10.0.0.2` - `10.0.0.100` for clients on your LAN + a single global IPv4 address, you just have `2001:db8::2` - `2001:db8::100` (where `2001:db8` is t…

They can be short if they can be short. My fe80::3846:9cff:fe24:a5c7 is not going to get shorter.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#42

Post by ivanmontillam »

everfrustrated wrote: post #27

The story of the IPv6 transition is the story of the hubris of engineers thinking technical merit alone will drive change. Nobody wants IPv6. It's been 30 years now and we're what 60% complete? By any metric this is a massive failure. Until IPv6 can enable some societal benefit the transition will continue to just limp along. People buy products not technology.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I 100% agree with your comment.

> Nobody wants IPv6. It's been 30 years now and we're what 60% complete? By any metric this is a massive failure.

Yeah, this is a massive generalization, but I get the point you want to communicate.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#43

Post by williamdclt »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #38

>Stuck with 64-bit addresses Nail on head. This is obvious not only in retrospect, but also to anyone just learning networking. We somehow expected the entire planet to become the death star with every blinking LED having a unique address.

I don’t think it’s obvious at all, not even in retrospect. People have historically been wildly underestimating how computing usage would evolve (“640KB of memory ought to be enough for anybody”), interfaces connected to the internet have indeed multiplied exponentially and it’s showing no sign of slowing down.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#44

Post by PaulKeeble »

Borg3 wrote: post #24

I kinda agree with the arcticle. Here is my ideal IPv6: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6 It basically means, you grab IPv4 implementation, extend address space to 64bit, call it IPv6, vioala. Problem solved. IPv4 was battle proven for years. It mistakes were sorted out (CIDR addressing, ARP poisoning, DHCP/BOOTP, etc). It was widely understood. NAT is okey, CGNAT is not. The only problem was the address space. And the…

It would have been adopted a lot faster if they had just done this. Just extend the address space, make a small part of it the previous ipv4 address space so translation between the two was trivial and it would have been easy to run them both side by side and transition appropriately with some translation services where IPv6 interfaced with IPv4.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#45

Post by bluGill »

Borg3 wrote: post #24

I kinda agree with the arcticle. Here is my ideal IPv6: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?ipv6 It basically means, you grab IPv4 implementation, extend address space to 64bit, call it IPv6, vioala. Problem solved. IPv4 was battle proven for years. It mistakes were sorted out (CIDR addressing, ARP poisoning, DHCP/BOOTP, etc). It was widely understood. NAT is okey, CGNAT is not. The only problem was the address space. And the…

That is what they did. The number of bits is a detail. There is no way to use a different number of bits and remain compatible.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#47

Post by avhception »

flowerthoughts wrote: post #7
jonstewart wrote: post #3

The world had -just- gotten its parents and aunts and uncles and maybe some grandparents trained up on what an IP address is and looks like, and THEN the IETF approved this idiotic standard that said “forget all that, now it’s a bunch of hexadecimal digits with these confusing rules about colons to be ‘user-friendly.’ Also, be sure not to confuse your IPv6 address with the MAC address that’s printed on your devices.”…

The syntax of the address? MAC addresses seem to thrive, both in Ethernet and Bluetooth. Sure, it's only 48 bits, but it's a bunch of hexadecimal digits with colons. IPv6 failed because (1) it demanded too much of the networking hardware, (2) was a stupidly complex beast compared to IPv4 and (3) had the catch-22 of requiring both producers and consumers to upgrade at the same time to even make it usable, let alone wi…

I don't think that it's a foregone conclusion that IPv6 "failed".

I'm rolling out services on v6 only now for my hobby projects. Just next week, I'll be switching over our company backups to v6 because I can have a dedicated port 22 on the backup machine instead of port forwarding. I've been running company VPNs v6-only (inside the VPNs) for some years now. Our corporate services and my private hobby projects are all v6-enabled (in addition to v4), the latter since 2018 or something.

A non-techie friend of mine has CGNAT at home on v4, and simply used his consumer-grade router to open a port to the v6 address of his NAS. He and some friends and colleagues from his Uni been using that for half a year before they stumbled into a situation where somebody had no v6 address and could not access the NAS.

I think we're getting there fast.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#48

Post by PaulKeeble »

In the UK there are FTTH products being rolled out by a variety of companies in addition to BTs (and virgins) fibre networks. Many of which are being bought out by the biggest of these alternative fibre providers CityFibre. Many of the ISPs on CityFibre aren't able to buy the IPv4 space they need and are too young to have acquired it years ago like the older ISPs have. Instead they use CGNAT to provide service IPv4. Carrier grade NAT is definitely an issue for the average person because the bank websites often don't work properly/kicks off security as they expect unique IPs for their customers.

The need for CGNAT on IPv4 I can understand, it shows the extent of the problem and cost of acquiring IPv4 addresses, but they are also choosing to not deploy IPv6. Unlike the older ISPs they have no legacy to worry about with hardware to be upgraded and reconfigured and potentially a complex roll out, some of these companies are mere years old. When that use case can't bring IPv6 to the ISPs I have no idea what will.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#49

Post by 1970-01-01 »

williamdclt wrote: post #43
1970-01-01 wrote: post #38

>Stuck with 64-bit addresses Nail on head. This is obvious not only in retrospect, but also to anyone just learning networking. We somehow expected the entire planet to become the death star with every blinking LED having a unique address.

I don’t think it’s obvious at all, not even in retrospect. People have historically been wildly underestimating how computing usage would evolve (“640KB of memory ought to be enough for anybody”), interfaces connected to the internet have indeed multiplied exponentially and it’s showing no sign of slowing down.

https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion.htm

It's obvious.

Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6

#50

Post by matja »

flowerthoughts wrote: post #7
jonstewart wrote: post #3

The world had -just- gotten its parents and aunts and uncles and maybe some grandparents trained up on what an IP address is and looks like, and THEN the IETF approved this idiotic standard that said “forget all that, now it’s a bunch of hexadecimal digits with these confusing rules about colons to be ‘user-friendly.’ Also, be sure not to confuse your IPv6 address with the MAC address that’s printed on your devices.”…

The syntax of the address? MAC addresses seem to thrive, both in Ethernet and Bluetooth. Sure, it's only 48 bits, but it's a bunch of hexadecimal digits with colons. IPv6 failed because (1) it demanded too much of the networking hardware, (2) was a stupidly complex beast compared to IPv4 and (3) had the catch-22 of requiring both producers and consumers to upgrade at the same time to even make it usable, let alone wi…

> was a stupidly complex beast compared to IPv4

How are you measuring complexity?

IPv4 started simple, but had a lot of extensions (literally header "options") to fix and mitigate various issues and underspecified behaviour.

IPv6 started more complex, but had a lot of those shortcomings addressed from decades of experience in the real world.

In the Linux kernel, IPv6 is actually implemented with fewer lines of code than IPv4 (as of 6.12.19, IPv4 = 82kloc, IPv6 = 58kloc).

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