The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
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Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#2The most consequential one for slowing adoption was 128-bit addresses, because they are long and thus hard to remember or type. A 16-bit 4-tuple would be workable.
Also the post leaves something out that I think is equally bad: that hideous user hostile :-separated ASCII form. Just fixing this could really help adoption. What were they thinking? Using a character that requires a shift? And conflicts with the URL format?
“Use DNS” is the usual answer, and is a quick way to tell someone has never done IT or networking in the real world. DNS is a fragile inflexible protocol that requires standing up servers. It works for what it does but it does not eliminate the need for engineers to schlep IPs around.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#3The 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.”
Whatever the technical merits/demerits of the protocol, I believe this brain-damaged approach to describing addresses is behind the “failure” of IPv6.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#4You think IPv6 is bad? I hope your provider puts you and your company behind a CGNAT that forgets mappings after 30 seconds.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#5The most consequential one for slowing adoption was 128-bit addresses, because they are long and thus hard to remember or type. A 16-bit 4-tuple would be workable. Also the post leaves something out that I think is equally bad: that hideous user hostile :-separated ASCII form. Just fixing this could really help adoption. What were they thinking? Using a character that requires a shift? And conflicts with the URL form…
Really? Not just being ipv4 with a bigger address space has slowed it down for my org. Too much auto magic configuration and dhcpv6 feeling like an afterthought and getting consistent behavior on different Linux network configuration manage systems has sucked
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#6> IPv6 chose to have addresses on the interface connecting to the network instead of having addresses on the node. In contrast to IPv4, IPv6 supports multiple addresses on an interface, where each of the address has different properties.
IP Addresses were always interface-bound. And you always could have multiple addresse on the same interface. Your IPv4 loopback device has 2^24 addresses bound to it right in this moment. Do ping on 127.12.34.56 and you will see.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#7The 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 widely beneficial. (Discounting 6to4 and other local patches.)
However, since I upgraded my AP, I realized my ISP actually does support IPv6 really well, so perhaps we're close now...
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#8> IPv6 chose to have addresses on the interface connecting to the network instead of having addresses on the node. In contrast to IPv4, IPv6 supports multiple addresses on an interface, where each of the address has different properties. IP Addresses were always interface-bound. And you always could have multiple addresse on the same interface. Your IPv4 loopback device has 2^24 addresses bound to it right in this mo…
Having several IPv4 addresses per physical interface is a bit of an extension. It is called IP aliasing in Linux and it wasn't always there.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#9Why couldn't we have just added another byte to IPv4 addresses and called it a day? Hell add two bytes.
Re: The mistakes and missed opportunities in the design of IPv6
#10Why couldn't we have just added another byte to IPv4 addresses and called it a day? Hell add two bytes.
Because every node that is supposed to be able to route these packages need to be patched to understand the new package format. So its is equally difficult.