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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

11–20 of 399 posts

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#11

Perhaps I just misunderstand IPv6 but I prefer IPv4 with NAT and temporarily leased public router address for privacy and security reasons. AFAIK IPv6 means every device gets assigned a stable unique address everybody can identify and reach it by. And I have never seen a SOHO WiFi router that would support IPv6 anyway (perhaps latest fancy expensive ones do).

IPv6 allows for so many IP addresses that you could give yourself a new IP address every minute and never worry about running out.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#12

Perhaps I just misunderstand IPv6 but I prefer IPv4 with NAT and temporarily leased public router address for privacy and security reasons. AFAIK IPv6 means every device gets assigned a stable unique address everybody can identify and reach it by. And I have never seen a SOHO WiFi router that would support IPv6 anyway (perhaps latest fancy expensive ones do).

I'm not sure what routers you've used or seen but every home router I've touched in the last 5 to 10 years has had the option to enable IPv6 in its settings.

Also, IPv6 has a unique address that everybody can reach but most if not all routers have an IPv6 firewall that gives at least if not more security than NAT provides.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#13

Perhaps I just misunderstand IPv6 but I prefer IPv4 with NAT and temporarily leased public router address for privacy and security reasons. AFAIK IPv6 means every device gets assigned a stable unique address everybody can identify and reach it by. And I have never seen a SOHO WiFi router that would support IPv6 anyway (perhaps latest fancy expensive ones do).

[deleted]

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#14
This article completely fails to mention that IPv6 is not just an extension of the address space but a whole different worldview about how to run a network:

- IPv6-to-IPv6 NAT has only been accepted very recently and very begrudgingly. Whatever your views are on NAT, the fact is that lots of people have network designs that rely on it, and if you want them to stop, you're now asking them to couple two major transitions, which is a significant economic cost. (Option 3 in this article is IPv6-to-IPv4 NAT, assuming that the public internet will indefinitely be IPv4; it's noteworthy that none of their options ever envision the public internet becoming IPv6.)

- IPv6 recommends the use of its own scheme, SLAAC, for address assignment, with DHCPv6 being also very recent and poorly implemented - for instance, Android has no DHCPv6 support and plans to never implement it https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=32621 . There's also a "stateless DHCPv6" for communicating DNS servers but using SLAAC for addressing; without it, SLAAC expects you to use a scheme called RDNSS to communicate your DNS servers, which is also not 100% supported. So you now need to spend engineering time supporting all of these options because some devices only support one and some only support the other, and you need to come up with network designs that work with both SLAAC (which has strong opinions on how you use /64s) and DHCPv6 (which doesn't).

- IPv6 doesn't use ARP, on the grounds that it's a layering violation, a separate layer-3 protocol that runs directly on top of Ethernet but talks about IP addresses. Instead, IPv6 has a clever scheme for using multicast to transfer the information that ARP would convey, by having machines join multicast groups based on their MAC address. This works very, very poorly with networks that aren't designed to support significant multicast load - for instance an attempted deployment of IPv6 caused packet storms in the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab's network for about a week because their switches were falling back from multicast to broadcast: https://blog.bimajority.org/2014/09/05/the-network-nightmare... So a working IPv6 deployment involves upgrading all of your hardware to hardware that has good support for multicast, which is also a significant economic cost.

- Various protocols like Teredo and ISATAP attempt to set up tunneled IPv6 routing in preference to IPv4 routing, making it hard to do a staged deployment, especially if you have BYOD on your network. For bonus points, because they're tunneled, you get different and possibly worse routes over IPv6, making debugging harder. So that's a cost in additional L1 and L2 support.

If someone had come up with an IPv7 that's just "We extended IPv4 to 128-bit addresses and we left ARP and DHCP and NAT and everything alone," people would have switched to it already. But the powers that be are drowning in the second-system effect and nobody wants all the features they added.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#15
I hope (but am skeptical) that folks look at the overall failure of ipv6 from a deployment perspective to understand the root causes of why it failed (some may think "failure" is too strong a word, but I remember v6 being "just around the corner" in 2000, yet in 2019 I'm still connecting to a GCP database with v4).

Coming up with a solution that looks like a huge technological advancement, with no real respect for the motivations or incentives of those who'll need to implement and use it, is a fairly common occurrence in tech and something engineers should be trained to guard against.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#16
post #8
post #2

I always disable IPv6 at home and computers I administer. IPv6: for machines (IoT) IPv4: for humans

if it doesnt do ipv6 it's broken

I think that is an overstatement.

A car is not broken because it does not drive on rail, you can get you to the same places.

There is currently very little you cannot do without IPv6.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#17
post #5

What if we started charging a small but slowly increasing annual fee for each IPv4 address? And with the proceeds ICANN starts buying back IPv4 blocks and permanently retiring them.

This article is largely about IPv6 in internal networks, not IPv6 in the internet as a whole - as they say, "No one uses IPv6 only. All public network operators, and nearly all private ones, must offer full compatibility with all other network operators and as many end points and applications as possible." Their three choices are about remaining on IPv4 only, running dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6, and using a translation layer to run IPv6-only internally and convert to IPv4 at the border. All of them involve public IPv4 addressing, and the assumption is that the internet will forever be IPv4.

So this means two things. The first is that the desire to move to IPv6 on the part of the article's authors has nothing to do with public IPv4 address space exhaustion, it's based on other alleged inherent benefits of IPv6. The second is that IPv4 NAT already solves the exhaustion problem - you're either doing NAT to IPv4 or NAT to IPv6 (using your favorite 6preposition4 encoding/tunneling scheme), but as far as the public internet is concerned, it looks like you're doing plain old IPv4 NAT.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#18
post #8
post #2

I always disable IPv6 at home and computers I administer. IPv6: for machines (IoT) IPv4: for humans

if it doesnt do ipv6 it's broken

The article says the exact opposite: if it doesn't do IPv4 (either on its own, or via reliance on a NAT somewhere) it's broken.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#19
post #2

I always disable IPv6 at home and computers I administer. IPv6: for machines (IoT) IPv4: for humans

IPv4 is for machines. IP addresses were never intended for humans, which is why domain names exist.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#20
The weird thing is that on some countries IPv4 only turned effectively into the premium offering. This is for instance the case in Austria where you generally have the option of ipv4 or ipv6 with dslite or worse only.

All new contracts are ipv6 and the only way to get to ipv4 is via customer support. However right now ipv4 gives you the better experience.

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