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IPv6 is the only way forward

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Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#151

Post by labcomputer »

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.

> IPv4 is not variable-length.

I get the impression that this fact is fundamentally lost on a lot of the people who want a "compatible" IPv6. Like, their mental model does not distinguish between how we as humans write down an IPv4 address in text and how that address is represented in the packet.

So they think "let's just add a couple more dots and numerals and keep everything else the same"

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#152

Post by opan »

boredatoms wrote: post #128
NekkoDroid wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember like 10 different IPv4 addresses, 6 of which are DNS servers where each octet is a single number, 1 is my router, 1 is my home network switch, 1 is my home server and the last one localhost. The main thing all those have in common is they are either something I frequently use (all mentioned local IPs) or just stupid easy to remember (DNS servers), neither of which isn't possible for IPv6. From memory isn't…

Telling people to use ULA subnet fddd:: with dhcpv6 is my way. fddd::7 is easier to type than 10.0.0.7

"ten oh oh 7" (how I'd say it or remember it) still seems simpler than "eff dee dee dee colon colon 7". While with ipv4 the dots can be assumed for pauses, v6 doesn't put colons as often, also I could easily see myself forgetting the amount of "d"s. I don't wanna seem too anti-v6, though, I am in favor of everyone adopting the more modern thing.

edit: Well, you said easier to type. I guess I probably agree with that.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#153

Post by labcomputer »

orangeboats wrote: post #150
sidcool wrote: post #146

What dictates the allocation per country?

IPv4 - first come first served, with a 24 karat FU to the 3rd world countries. It is their fault that they are poor. IPv6 - still the same, but the space is large enough that any first-mover advantage is minuscule.

I think that's a bit uncharitable.

32 bits seemed practically infinite at the time IPv4 was created, and the whole thing started as a way for the American military-industrial-research complex to communicate with itself anyway. Why would you even want to assign addresses on your defense network to foreign adversaries?

Now that it's a commercial thing, a more equitable distribution would have, with hindsight, been a good thing.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#154

Post by labcomputer »

wmf wrote: post #90
lern_too_spel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is that you're managing alright because you live in a country where your ISP can give you a public IP address. The author lives in a country where that is not possible and accesses the Internet behind layers of NAT.

It's possible for Indian ISPs to buy IPv4 addresses and assign them to customers. Maybe not for $5/month but if you're willing to pay US prices (plus tax) you should be able to get US quality service.

Yes, but they can't do that if every Indian wants one, and they especially can't do that if every Chinese person wants one at the same time.

IPv4 is 32 bits. It has a hard cap of ~4 billion addresses. China and India alone have 2.85 billion people.

Add in the United States and Europe, and now nobody else gets an IP address. South America, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Africa, the middle east, the rest of Southeast Asia, etc. don't get to use the internet. That's 4 billion people who don't get to use the internet.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#155

Post by jen729w »

kstrauser wrote: post #75
oconnore wrote: post #41

I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. I have done essentially zero home networking work and I just ran this successfully. It just works! ``` > ping6 google.com PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2605:59c0:236f:3a08:7883:9d04:c26d:5fa1 --> 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=0 hlim=117 time=22.262 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=1 hlim=117 time=26.124 m…

That's literally impossible, to hear some people tell it. "And also, look how hard it'd be to memorize that address", say the people who remember like 2 IPv4 addresses, one of them being 127.0.0.1.

Tailscale, perhaps ironically in this context, has shown me the value of not caring about an IP address.

I used to. When I had a home network I'd carefully assign `10.52.1.x` where `x` was the periodic number corresponding to the machine name! (I write from `lutetium`.)

Now, with Tailscale's magic DNS – `lutetium` being all I need – why on Earth would I give a crap about an IP address? I've gone from being obsessed to truly not caring at all.

So, give me IPv6. Auto-assign everything! All I want is a name.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#156

Post by ozim »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #40
ux266478 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great job, we took something that was meant to be a next frontier in humanity and let anyone connect with anyone else without gatekeepers/intermediaries We already had that, it's called shortwave radio. The internet, especially as it's implemented and as it's used, is a terrible way to achieve this. It's service providers the whole way down.

It would be funny if HAM radio came back because the social filter imposed by the limitations wound up being more important than the technological capability.

Problem is that HAM radio also has social filters you broadcast to everyone and you don’t know who is listening. Encrypted communication is not allowed in HAM.

You are not supposed to use it for „communication” as in Facebook. You are supposed to use spectrum to test your gear and keep transmissions short to leave space for others.

I was in local HAM club and passed the exam for license but never got license to transmit mostly because you are not supposed to chat frivolously over the radio.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#157

Post by orangeboats »

LoganDark wrote: post #44
lern_too_spel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point is that you're managing alright because you live in a country where your ISP can give you a public IP address. The author lives in a country where that is not possible and accesses the Internet behind layers of NAT.

What's the difference, other than port forwarding? Does NAT cause some sort of unique issue that makes existence miserable?

>other than port forwarding

>other

Well you just handwaved away the most significant difference between NAT and native IP, obviously there won't be any major difference to discuss about anymore!

No, we can't ignore port forwarding. The key thing to realize about NAT is that someone owns the NAT. Back then, the NAT lived inside each of the home routers, so even if you have a "strict" NAT (endpoint-dependent mapping NAT, i.e. one that doesn't allow for hole-punching), you can easily bypass it by setting up a manual port forwarding entry.

With CGNAT that's no longer possible, you do not control the NAT. If your ISP decides to screw you over, you essentially do not have a choice but to get a relay, which needlessly costs you money.

---

But if you really want to know what advantages native IP has over NAT, I'd say the lack of keepalive packets (to keep a holepunched NAT entry from being removed) is a pretty nice thing.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#158

Post by rkagerer »

The main complaint I have against IPv6 is the addresses are so unwieldy. When I look at them I have the same reaction as when I look at some kind of complex scientific formula comprised of operators and symbols that are unfamiliar. It also takes extra mental effort to expand the compressed zeros and interpret what I'm viewing.

Even after reading about them many times and using them in (an albeit limited) fashion, they still just don't feel human friendly. Not like the more straightforward IPv4 addresses do. (Or even like a hypothetical "IPv5" that simply prefixes one extra octet).

Whenever I bring this up I'm told something like "Don't bother memorizing IPv6 addresses. Use DNS instead."[1]

That take completely overlooks the fact that if the numbers exist, you will inevitably wind up needing to deal with them at various points along the way. Eg. Debugging logs, sniffing network traffic, ruling out if DNS is down, etc. I'm a big fan of ergonomics to make things intuitive and reduce unnccessary cognitive overhead, and the new scheme is a regression in that regard.

If anyone has tips on how they became more fluent with IPv6 I'd love to hear.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossib...

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#159

Post by rkagerer »

rkagerer wrote: post #158

The main complaint I have against IPv6 is the addresses are so unwieldy. When I look at them I have the same reaction as when I look at some kind of complex scientific formula comprised of operators and symbols that are unfamiliar. It also takes extra mental effort to expand the compressed zeros and interpret what I'm viewing. Even after reading about them many times and using them in (an albeit limited) fashion, the…

This is without even getting into learning the new (old?) paradigm of "exposing" all addresses to the whole internet. I realize "NAT" is not equivalent to "firewall", but placing them at the same boundary made things simple to understand conceptually. I for one never had trouble opening/forwarding ports (and liked the control it provided over what goes in and out, especially in the days before it all just became HTTP) but I sympathize with the major headaches the NAT "workaround" caused.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#160

Post by magicalhippo »

oconnore wrote: post #41

I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. I have done essentially zero home networking work and I just ran this successfully. It just works! ``` > ping6 google.com PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2605:59c0:236f:3a08:7883:9d04:c26d:5fa1 --> 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=0 hlim=117 time=22.262 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=1 hlim=117 time=26.124 m…

> I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. [...] It just works!

Networking is a lot more than being able to ping a single host.

As a concrete counter-example, IPv6 routinely broke for me when I was using pfSense as a router. Why? Because pfSense, with no way of disabling this behavior, published its public IP as the DNS server for internal clients.

So each time I got a new prefix from my ISP, which happens about once a week or more often, machines stopped being able to perform DNS lookups for hours or until I rebooted them.

And, if I had bothered configuring IPv6 firewall rules, those would have had to be reconfigured manually with the new prefix. I understand this is mostly fixed in pfSense recently, but this was the case for many, many years.

Another counter-example is that Android only supports SLAAC, and SLAAC only supports providing a few key infrastructure details like router and DNS. If you want to tell the Android client something else, like NTP server, you're outta luck. Also, if Android successfully gets an IPv6 address via SLAAC, it requires the DNS server IP to also be an IPv6 address. So your internal DNS server must then also serve on IPv6. If that wasn't the case, it would just silently use Google's own DNS servers, breaking any local configuration you had.

Another point is that a lot of us tried using IPv6 decades ago, and so we still have scars from that time. IPv6 today is a lot better, but I still have a lot of IPv6 frustration associated with it from 15-20 years ago.

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