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IPv6 is the only way forward

ankshilp.in

251–260 of 350 posts

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty sweet. By using ULA addresses for everything, all internal networking keeps working as-is if my ISP allocation changes. Every host can talk to its neighbors using internal addresses, and still connect to remote hosts without NAT breakage.

You also get this if you use mDNS, but without the ULA hassle and you get to use DNS names instead of hardcoding IP addresses.

You can use both. I do.

I do want some hardcoded addresses. In particular, some of the daemons I run get twitchy when the remote address changes unexpectedly.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#252
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen any situation where this is not already necessary other than UPnP which already almost never works reliably. A publicly-addressable relay is already practically non-negotiable for anything over the internet.

uPnP works fine though? What was the problem you had with it?

uPnP fails when multiple devices are fighting over the same port assignments. uPnP fails when people have it disabled, as has been recommended many times over the years.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes...? I know that, but does that cause any issues in practice other than death of P2P? Well: > If you’re a gamer using PS5, Xbox, or PC in 2025, running into Double NAT or CGNAT port forwarding issues can make online play nearly impossible. Many 5G home internet and satellite services (like T-Mobile Home Internet and Starlink) put users behind carrier-grade NAT, which blocks direct connections and port forwarding…

> What kind of applications and services are not being invented because we're stuck with the current non-P2P / centralized setup of IPv4+NAT? I don't know? I've never had CG-NAT and yet I've never seen a piece of software that takes advantage of that except maybe for games that use UPnP to open ports.

Games, voice/video chat (especially open source ones), stuff like Tailscale, stuff like Magic Wormhole, ... stuff like Dropbox.

Is there anything you do on a computer that involves communicating with another user? That's not just anything - that's most things! All communication between two computers is improved by not requiring NAT.

Corporations love to keep us dependent on their central servers, of course.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#254

IPv6 feels like we just can't admit to ourselves that it has been a failed transition. What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.

The only place the IPv6 transition seems to be failing is in "command-and-control" corporate networks. (A majority of home/consumer/cellular users are quietly using IPv6 by default every day, per most statistics.) The lessons to be learned there don't seem to be technical but economic incentives.

Big companies believe that they have plenty of IPv4 space, especially because they've always been lax in how they read IPv4 RFCs and use IPv4 routing behind corporate firewalls. Big companies also have the most cash to buy IPv4 blocks as they go to auction. Big companies have massive firewalls and strict VPNs which also insulate them from IPv4 scarcity.

IPv4 leases don't impact enough companies' bottom lines today that they need to assess IPv6 support.

Solving those economic incentive problems would likely be a massive sociopolitical problem: you would need IANA and the RIRs to agree to inflate costs in various ways (and in the short term that might have done a lot of harm to small countries already facing IPv4 inequity and their RIRs that lost the very earliest IPv4 assignment lotteries). You'd probably need new RFCs and political enforcement to support things like "taxing" company to company IPv4 block assignments. You'd probably need collusion or regulation from the big "Cloud Providers" to enforce higher costs on IPv4-only networking.

It would take those kind of "strong handed" tactics to speed up IPv6 adoption in corporate networks. Waiting for the "invisible hand" of the "free market" can be very slow and takes patience. That's mostly what we've been seeing with IPv6 adoption: the "invisible hand" is a lot slower than some people predicted. Especially engineers that hoped technical superiority alone would be a market winner.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hole punching, which has various forms, may or may not work. This means if you're doing something realtime, you may need to stick a server(reachable endpoint) in between it, at the very least reducing performance.

I have never seen any situation where this is not already necessary other than UPnP which already almost never works reliably. A publicly-addressable relay is already practically non-negotiable for anything over the internet.

Without NAT, it wouldn't be. That's the point.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#256
post #5

If UTF-8 represents the triumph of a design prioritizing backwards compatibility with an existing standard (ASCII) to facilitate a transition, then IPv6 is the cautionary tale of a design which could have made the transition simpler but did not.

Backwards compatibility point is interesting.

Found this visual breakdown of IPv4 -> IPv6 transition.

Dual stack and tunneling sections show how much complexity came from not having a clean migration path - https://vectree.io/c/ipv4-vs-ipv6-address-architecture-nat-a...

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#257
For everyone getting into the details about how all of this should work please look at RFC7084: Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7084

It describes in detail what a home router needs to be doing to make all of this work seamlessly.

Things work so well that half the world has working IPv6 already.

Openwrt pretty much implements all of this out of the box.

If you are struggling with IPv6 I recommend reading up on where it is at today and figuring out how whatever makes your network special can be done using IPv6 with no fuss.

Personally I have moved several times changing ISPs in the process and my IPv6 setup involving multiple LANs on my home network has just continued to work. IPv6 renumbering events just work seamlessly and completely automatically.

Historically the only practical hold up to IPv6 adoption has been the ISPs not rolling it out to their customers.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#258

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.

This recent article begs to differ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352236

Come on... that's the top comment on the thread you shared.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355046

This article that "begs to differ" is inventing IPv6 all over again. It just refuses to call itself so.

I quote from the top comment:

>So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support IPv4x. Just like with IPv6.

and

>So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types [...] Just like with IPv6.

and

>You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#259

IPv6 is totally an equality issue. If a sizeable proportion of this forum had to share an IP address we would've had IPv6 done years ago.

I agree. If you click through to the original Wikipedia table that's cited in this article you can see a pretty clear correlation between countries with more IPv4 addresses than people vs. wealth/hegemonic clout of the country. In the UK, US, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, etc. there are way more than enough IPv4s to go around. Some ISPs here in the UK will even lease you bundles of four or eight IPv4s for very little additional cost.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This recent article begs to differ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352236

Come on... that's the top comment on the thread you shared. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355046 This article that "begs to differ" is inventing IPv6 all over again. It just refuses to call itself so. I quote from the top comment: >So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support IPv4x. Just like with IPv6. and >So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types [...] Just like w…

The key difference, you don't do dual stack, you can incrementally roll it out and get tangible relief, unlike IPv6.

The point is less about the technology proposed, but the point that there could be an interoperable version of a next generation IP and IPv4.

IPv6 did the braindead thing and completely threw out the idea of transition and interoperability for a clean slate. We're paying for it many decades later.

Also, rather than regurgitate a comment, perhaps you should read the article, because that comment misunderstands what is being proposed and thus completely missing the point.

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