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Why IPv6 is so complicated

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Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#181

Post by commandersaki »

Dagger2 wrote: post #150
commandersaki wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the at least 25 years thing is a cop out. The IPng committee specifically chose the protocol that didn't have a transition plan, and today still doesn't have a transition plan. I expect we're going to plateau with adoption for a long while now. 50% adoption is meaningless if it doesn't tangibly make a dent in the IPv4 exhaustion problem.

Well, other than the transition plans that it has and still has. The exact same plans that the other options like TUBA had. If you ignore those then sure, it didn't have a plan.

Stomping your foot angrily at ISPs and Internet facing entities to adopt a protocol noone cares and/or getting governments to intervene because you've exhausted all your options and progress is stagnant is not a transition plan, that's a hail mary.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#182

Post by Dagger2 »

commandersaki wrote: post #181
Dagger2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, other than the transition plans that it has and still has. The exact same plans that the other options like TUBA had. If you ignore those then sure, it didn't have a plan.

Stomping your foot angrily at ISPs and Internet facing entities to adopt a protocol noone cares and/or getting governments to intervene because you've exhausted all your options and progress is stagnant is not a transition plan, that's a hail mary.

If you can't enforce a flag day then that's all you're left with, isn't it? Other than maybe hacking into people's networks, upgrading them and then somehow preventing them from undoing your work.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#183

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

9dev wrote: post #180
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the ability to ping somehostname on the local network and have it work (where ping can be any command or browser). That's easy with DHCP+DNS, and either impossible or amazingly ugly with DLAAC.

It’s a no-brainer with SLAAC and mDNS, which is what pretty much all home routers do out of the box.

That's an extra service or two running on every device with extra configuration, and... Maybe it's more reliable now? I vaguely recall having a bad time.

What does the router do out of the box, or at all, for mdns? Isn't it a p2p service?

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#184

Post by Dagger2 »

general1465 wrote: post #173
MindSpunk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT is not a security device. A firewall, which will be part of any sane router's NAT implementation, is a security device. NAT is not a firewall, but is often part of one. Any sane router also uses a firewall for IPv6. A correctly configured router will deny inbound traffic for both v4 and v6. You are not less secure on IPv6.

Misconfigured firewall is a gaping hole. Misconfigured NAT is not letting data from outside into your local network. So firewall is actually worse than NAT.

Even a correctly-configured NAT will let connections in from outside, and a lot of people don't understand this.

Personally I'd count "your security thing doesn't actually do the thing it's supposed to do" as being pretty bad on the security scale. At least people understand firewalls.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#185

Post by eqvinox »

Dagger2 wrote: post #163
eqvinox wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dual-stack was the only coexistence option for a long time, until NAT64 came around. There were a whole bunch of attempts at compatibility, e.g. with "::1.1.1.1" and "::ffff:1.1.1.1" as IPv6 addresses, they just didn't go anywhere. (Well, not quite, the latter is in POSIX and in socket libraries around the planet. Doesn't leave the host though. At least it's not supposed to . I have some horror stories…) NAT64 starte…

NAT64 is a subset of a different thing that existed since 2000 though, when v6 was ~5 years old and before most OSs even had support for it.

What would that "thing" be?

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#186

Post by BobbyTables2 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #37

My first IPv6 implementation was in 2010-2011 (memory a but fuzzy). Carriers supporting BGP over IPv6 were few, websites over IPv6 were also scarce. Fast forward 15 years snd the situation has improved quite dramatically. IPv6 has some quirks that make it harder to digest. - link local gateway address, makes it hard to understand why the subnet does not have a gateway from the ssme address space - privacy extensions:…

The SLAAC/DHCPv6 combo seems really strange to me.

Either IP/DNS/gateway discovery with one or the other could be tolerable. But allowing combinations such as SLAAC for addressing and DHCP for DNS discovery is lunacy.

It’s as if one said, let’s take the most basic and critical step and make it as complicated as possible and explore the combinatorial explosion…

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#187

Post by duskwuff »

Paracompact wrote: post #47

> Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in {{RFC3513}} but deprecated by {{RFC4291}} because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. Any tl;dr on why/how the simplest solution imaginable w…

TL;DR: because it doesn't actually solve anything.

Being able to jam an IPv4 address into an IPv6 packet header doesn't mean you can send that packet to an IPv4-only host and have it be understood. You still need an IPv6 stack on both endpoints, and on all the routers in the middle - and at that point, why not just use IPv6 addresses?

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#188

Post by kalleboo »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #186
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #37

My first IPv6 implementation was in 2010-2011 (memory a but fuzzy). Carriers supporting BGP over IPv6 were few, websites over IPv6 were also scarce. Fast forward 15 years snd the situation has improved quite dramatically. IPv6 has some quirks that make it harder to digest. - link local gateway address, makes it hard to understand why the subnet does not have a gateway from the ssme address space - privacy extensions:…

The SLAAC/DHCPv6 combo seems really strange to me. Either IP/DNS/gateway discovery with one or the other could be tolerable. But allowing combinations such as SLAAC for addressing and DHCP for DNS discovery is lunacy. It’s as if one said, let’s take the most basic and critical step and make it as complicated as possible and explore the combinatorial explosion…

The article mentions that DHCPv6 was an afterthought because DHCP itself barely existed when IPv6 was being designed - they were still using things like RARP or BOOTP!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Address_Resolution_Pro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Protocol

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#189

Post by kalleboo »

b112 wrote: post #167
Dagger2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're at the very beginning, baby steps stage of inventing IPv6 there. You aren't the first person to come up with the idea of adding extra bits to IP addresses to make them longer. The problem isn't finding somewhere to stash the extra bits in the packet format (which is trivial; you can simply set the next-protocol field to a special value and then put the bits at the start of the payload), it's getting all softwa…

Please consider that maybe the people working on v6 weren't actually complete imbeciles and did in fact think things through. It is possible for the world to change, and for designs and plans and viewpoints 30+ years ago to be less correct today. This world is not that world. That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT. That was one reason for ipv6. It also had different ideas about where the net…

> That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT

The processing cost of NAT is still a problem. There's that classic post by a Native American tribal ISP where it was cheaper for them to pay to replace their clients IPv4-only Roku devices with IPv6 capable Apple TVs than to upgrade their CGNAT appliance to handle the video traffic.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#190

Post by b112 »

kalleboo wrote: post #189
b112 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please consider that maybe the people working on v6 weren't actually complete imbeciles and did in fact think things through. It is possible for the world to change, and for designs and plans and viewpoints 30+ years ago to be less correct today. This world is not that world. That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT. That was one reason for ipv6. It also had different ideas about where the net…

> That world had massive concerns about the processing cost of NAT The processing cost of NAT is still a problem. There's that classic post by a Native American tribal ISP where it was cheaper for them to pay to replace their clients IPv4-only Roku devices with IPv6 capable Apple TVs than to upgrade their CGNAT appliance to handle the video traffic.

You misunderstand.

The concerns about the "processing cost of NAT" were edge concerns. Companies, homes, edge-devices with 100 or 1000 RFC1918 addressed devices behind them. When ipv6 was created, NAT wasn't a thing, as processing power just wasn't there.

And it was thought the processing power would never be there.

Yet now everyone has NAT in little devices at home. So the need to route 100 IPs into every person's home isn't a thing. Which is inline with my comment about how the world looked different 30 years ago, and how the concept of "IPs for everything" is the reverse of what people even want now.

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