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

IPv6 is the only way forward

ankshilp.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 350 posts

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#61

Post by tonymet »

Chu4eeno wrote: post #48
tonymet wrote: post #26

> There are countless threads online on forums like Hacker News, Reddit where people who never really got comfortable with idea of IPv6 It’s clumsier than ipv4. It’s unnecessary since NAT was invented. In practice IPv6 requires dual stack, which means twice as many firewalls, names and routes to manage — so 4x the debugging because you have 2 dimensions that can either be working or failing. Addresses are too long to…

... and annoying casting from `sockaddr ` to either `sockaddr_in ` or `sockaddr_in6*` while you pass around a socklen_t. 10 years ago I was all gung-ho about IPv6, but it's annoying at every level.

Having 2 sockets for loopback or multiple interfaces is a huge pain

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#62

Post by SkiFire13 »

j1elo wrote: post #23
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 cannot be backward-compatible with IPv4 in the way UTF-8 is with ASCII. Any argument built on that comparison reflects a misunderstanding of the protocols and leads to flawed conclusions.

Why not? Sincere question. As a very superficial idea, if we go back to the drawing board, for example we could decide our new cool concept of address to be an IPv4 + an hex suffix, maybe at the expense of not having a humongous address space. So 10.20.30.40 would be an IPv4 address, and 10.20.30.40:fa:be:4c:9d could be an IPv6 address. With the :00:00:00:00 suffix being equivalent to the IPv4 version. I just made th…

How would you get someone that only knows about IPv4 addresses like 10.20.30.40 to send a packet to someone with an address 10.20.30.40:fa:be:4c:9d?

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#63

Post by gmuslera »

It is the only way forward, but the reason for that is not the correlation between population and IP addresses. After all, most of the use of internet today is not by people, but by bots, crawlers, AI agents, b2b and more, and that is far more than the human population, and then you have the virtual networks built over IP like VPNs, Tor and more. It is more related to privacy, bidirectional communication and protocols, security, identity and possibilities.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#64

Post by zamadatix »

j1elo wrote: post #51
IsTom wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you squeeze that in IPv4 packet? Especially in a way that won't get mangled by random ossified devices in between?

In IPv4 you only need to transmit IPv4 addresses. If the "cannot be" in parent post is referring to the exact byte disposition in packets, then I go the other way around to claim that I agree. Because the only way that a UTF8 character can pretend to be ASCII is because ASCII didn't use all of the 8 bits in a byte to begin with. Only way to have something similar in this case, would be that IPv4 didn't use all of the…

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4291#section-2.5.5....

& the following section for the follow-up embedding.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#65

Post by p1mrx »

jcgl wrote: post #20
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 cannot be backward-compatible with IPv4 in the way UTF-8 is with ASCII. Any argument built on that comparison reflects a misunderstanding of the protocols and leads to flawed conclusions.

Yep. Translation technologies like NAT64 and company basically as good a job as can be hoped for. And they're quite good nowadays! But to stick with the ASCII->UTF-8 comparison: how would you have done the transition if you had to stay within ASCII's size of 7 bits?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7 exists, but was rarely used.

UTF-8 is convenient because ASCII has a spare bit, but UTF-8 is fundamentally possible because ASCII is variable-length. IPv4 is not variable-length.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#66

Post by Yizahi »

thomasdziedzic wrote: post #60
Yizahi wrote: post #57

I honestly don't understand why IPv6 is not actively deployed in 2026. Every piece of networking hardware over past decade supports IPv6 and often dual stack too. And to switch between both often takes a few clicks if DHCPv6 server is up and reachable. Absolutely transparent, free, zero performance hit. But no, so many persist at doing v4. PS: I'm talking about MSO hardware. But client hardware should be at the same…

2026: $ ping6 github.com ping6: github.com: Address family for hostname not supported

Yeah, that's the problem. And I bet they could enable it, they just don't want to for some reason.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#67

Post by Bender »

The only place I have utilized an IPv6 address publicly is on my authoritative name servers only because some DNS testing tools assume it is there. It's not really needed however. My home firewall does have one but I have never used it. I can't think of a use for it. I have multiple static IPv4 addresses and they have suited me just fine for decades. I suppose I could bind a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy to it in case a site blocks me but I would probably leave it off most of the time.

I never use them on my web, chat, voice, IRC and other servers as I personally find blocking shenanigans on IPv4 and not having to implement the same checks on IPv6 is just easier for a lazy person like me. IPv6 just feels like an after-thought bolt on to me. Clunky, not well thought out. Some privacy gotchas that can be disabled but some will not. That's just my take. I doubt anyone will have the same take.

I think IPv4 will be fine for another 100 years even if we have to re-purpose some DoD/MoD ranges given they don't use them and maybe annex some /8's from a few greedy companies. But that's a problem for Gen Delta. Gen Foxtrot can deal with repurposing some multicast ranges.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#68

Post by jcgl »

p1mrx wrote: post #65
jcgl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Translation technologies like NAT64 and company basically as good a job as can be hoped for. And they're quite good nowadays! But to stick with the ASCII->UTF-8 comparison: how would you have done the transition if you had to stay within ASCII's size of 7 bits?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7 exists, but was rarely used. UTF-8 is convenient because ASCII has a spare bit, but UTF-8 is fundamentally possible because ASCII is variable-length. IPv4 is not variable-length.

Right, the variable-length thing was my point. That's fine when you're dealing with byte slices that you scan through incrementally. But it's not fine for packets and OS data structures that had their lengths fixed at 32 bits.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#70

Post by jcgl »

jmyeet wrote: post #56

I find it fascinating how these key technologies handle upgrades and breaking changes. For example, Python eschewed breaking changes through 2.7.x but the dam has burst since 3.0 and every point release (it seems?) makes breaking changes, sometimes reversing itself (eg the whole s/u string prefix thing). Many here will be familiar with the second system effect [1]. Usually people want to avoid making breaking changes…

> 3. History has shown that upgrading network backbone hardware (in particular) is incredibly difficult through a process that's been described as "ossification", which is a nice description. Basically, network relays and routers wanted to avoid security issues and decided to discard things they didn't understand.

What makes you suggest that it's backbone hardware that is the problem? It's largely enterprise customers and tier 3 providers that don't really do IPv6 afaics.

Post reply on HN