Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

matduggan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 98 posts

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#11

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

stop50 wrote: post #10
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if he disabled IPv4 support in the kernel and stacks, or if he simply removed the IPv4 address from network interfaces and A records from DNS?

If the host has no v4 it switches to v6 if possible. Disabling the support is not needed

Very ambiguous reply. Which host? The remote or the local? What do you mean "has no v4"? No A record? No v4 address on an interface?

Which hardware and OS are you describing? Clearly the blog post illustrated some examples where switching to v6 was not happening, so it seems to contradict your comment right off the bat. There are many implementations of dual-stack IPv4/v6. In fact, they are more divergent than IPv4 implementations, because the latter often derives from the BSD-RENO codebase, while IPv6 was introduced after Linux became King, so Microsoft, Apple, and Linux (and lots of router/firewall vendors) have ostensibly developed IPv6 stacks separately, some being more open than others. They're not all going to work the same way with fallbacks/failovers.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#12

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

ClashTheBunny wrote: post #9
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #5

For an IPv6 advocate, this guy sure set up a lot of NAT. And while he claimed he's going IPv6-only, he set up public access via IPv4. That won't convince anyone to switch or upgrade. I understand that he's building a usable service and just trying to git 'er done, but it's a lot of hacks, so I'm glad they're documented in this here blogpost. I hope that he can continually probe the edges to find out when real IPv6 su…

What would you suggest they have done? I feel like excluding IPv4 folks is a large reason why IPv6 continues to fail. I feel like this is a pretty good compromise between pushing IPv6 and not being an IPv6 hermit in the IPv6 desert.

At this point, I feel like the onus should be on IPv4-only clients to adapt to an IPv6 world, by enabling proxies and translators that enable them to access IPv6 sites until their support comes up to speed.

This could be done on the ISP/enterprise level, but it is more counterproductive to tell IPv6 adopters and promoters that we need to bend over backwards and hack in NAT and purchase/rent/lease public IPv4 addresses, when this is not our problem anymore.

I feel like the more juicy services that are IPv6-accessible-only, the more it will drive consumer demand, and will light a fire under people who are responsible to update the support and ensure that IPv6 works, even when IPv4 doesn't.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#13

Post by zamadatix »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #5

For an IPv6 advocate, this guy sure set up a lot of NAT. And while he claimed he's going IPv6-only, he set up public access via IPv4. That won't convince anyone to switch or upgrade. I understand that he's building a usable service and just trying to git 'er done, but it's a lot of hacks, so I'm glad they're documented in this here blogpost. I hope that he can continually probe the edges to find out when real IPv6 su…

The nice thing about NAT64 is you only NAT when you're talking to a v4 only client, otherwise you still have pure v6. This leaves no hacks to remove for a pure IPv6 experience it just means you can have single stacked IPv6 devices instead of needing to dual stack or wait for the entire rest of the world to also configure IPv6 too.

I.e. it allows you to push IPv4 to your internet edge only in a way that doesn't downgrade anything about actual IPv6 capable connections. For a single server that probably does seem pretty silly but once you have multiple it can make more sense.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#14

Post by AndreasHae »

Nextgrid wrote: post #7
bell-cot wrote: post #4

My IPv6 philosophy: If any "new" computer technology has been around even half as long as IPv6 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Major_mileston... ), with even a tenth of the "you gotta start using this!" push from the Big Boys - and yet still is very widely avoided/resisted, and the older-tech alternative commands a price premium due to widespread demand...gosh, that "new" technology must absolutely su…

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed. The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a de…

> The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a decade ago.

Sounds a bit over the top. Can you name some examples?

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#15

Post by unethical_ban »

AndreasHae wrote: post #14
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed. The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a de…

> The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a decade ago. Sounds a bit over the top. Can you name some examples?

Instagram, for one.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#16

Post by JohnFen »

Nextgrid wrote: post #7
bell-cot wrote: post #4

My IPv6 philosophy: If any "new" computer technology has been around even half as long as IPv6 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Major_mileston... ), with even a tenth of the "you gotta start using this!" push from the Big Boys - and yet still is very widely avoided/resisted, and the older-tech alternative commands a price premium due to widespread demand...gosh, that "new" technology must absolutely su…

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed. The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a de…

I think that it's fair to blame the specification. I don't think the problem is that the industry has changed, I think it's that there's a huge amount of friction and headache for shifting to it. I think that's because it was too large of a change all at once, combined with the initial specification having some real problems (that did eventually get mitigated in later specs).

I suspect that if IPv6 limited itself to just increasing the size of IP addresses, IPv4 would largely be a distant memory by now.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#17

Post by nottorp »

Nextgrid wrote: post #7
bell-cot wrote: post #4

My IPv6 philosophy: If any "new" computer technology has been around even half as long as IPv6 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Major_mileston... ), with even a tenth of the "you gotta start using this!" push from the Big Boys - and yet still is very widely avoided/resisted, and the older-tech alternative commands a price premium due to widespread demand...gosh, that "new" technology must absolutely su…

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed. The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a de…

> The problem is that the computing industry has changed.

Nah, the problem is ipv6 has been designed by a commitee for a lot of enterprise-ish features so the hobbyists have taken a look and postponed setting it up internally for when they have absolutely no choice.

I've asked for simple ipv6 tutorials in discussions on HN and elsewhere and whatever I got pointed at was always longer than the article we're discussing and incomplete.

Basic set up of ipv4 for a home network can be explained over just one pint. Looks like you need two barrells for ipv6.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#18

Post by danudey »

bell-cot wrote: post #4

My IPv6 philosophy: If any "new" computer technology has been around even half as long as IPv6 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Major_mileston... ), with even a tenth of the "you gotta start using this!" push from the Big Boys - and yet still is very widely avoided/resisted, and the older-tech alternative commands a price premium due to widespread demand...gosh, that "new" technology must absolutely su…

A big part of it is how much actually needs to change, and work properly, before you can actually rely on IPv6 the way you can on IPv4.

I recall reading about Facebook's internal IPv6 migration for their data centers and the problems they ran into. The two that stuck out the most to me and which I still remember details for are:

1. The PHP function developers used to convert an IPv4 address into an integer to store into a database or something. It didn't work in IPv6, meaning the code broke badly when it was considering an IPv6 host. They kept asking developers to stop using it, but new code kept getting added which used it. Eventually the decision was made that 'we've warned you enough, so from now on we're just going to go ahead and let your code break'.

2. Their networking hardware wasn't extensively tested for an IPv6 single-stack deployment. Turns out that when presented with a BGP advertisement that contained only IPv6 routes and no IPv4 routes, their switches would immediately crash. How did they discover this? By sending out a BGP advertisement that contained only IPv6 routes and no IPv4 routes, crashing every rack switch in the data center. There's no reason why this should happen; it's not a violation of the BGP spec or anything, it's just a bug for a case that no one tested on the vendor's end because none of their customers tried to do that.

So it's not that IPv6 sucks; it's actually pretty great in a lot of ways. The problem is that everything else sucks; people don't bother to support things, they don't consider it in their code, they don't test for it, they don't bother to roll out support because no one else has done so either so why bother, and so on.

In the end, IPv6 is 'avoided' because of the problems that Facebook ran into, or that OP ran into, and is 'resisted' because it's extra work that they could put into doing other things with their limited time and engineering work.

To be clear, dual-stack deployments work great; my ISP recently did a trial of a dual-stack deployment which I was lucky enough to participate in, and it was almost completely transparent. My Unifi gateway picked up the address and handed addresses out to clients internally, clients used IPv6 where appropriate and fell back to IPv4 when necessary, and everything worked completely transparently.

TL;DR IPv6 isn't the problem, the industry is the problem.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#19

Post by yesco »

nottorp wrote: post #17
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed. The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a de…

> The problem is that the computing industry has changed. Nah, the problem is ipv6 has been designed by a commitee for a lot of enterprise-ish features so the hobbyists have taken a look and postponed setting it up internally for when they have absolutely no choice. I've asked for simple ipv6 tutorials in discussions on HN and elsewhere and whatever I got pointed at was always longer than the article we're discussing…

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6/configurati...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/routing/examples...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6_ipv4_transi...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6/ipv6_extras

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#20

Post by unethical_ban »

bell-cot wrote: post #4

My IPv6 philosophy: If any "new" computer technology has been around even half as long as IPv6 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Major_mileston... ), with even a tenth of the "you gotta start using this!" push from the Big Boys - and yet still is very widely avoided/resisted, and the older-tech alternative commands a price premium due to widespread demand...gosh, that "new" technology must absolutely su…

But no one has pushed.

Consumer routers still suck regarding IPv6. Last time I tried setting up IPv6 on my wan I got a /128 which is utterly incompetent.

No service wants to cut off access to the ipv4 customers so they've made things just work. We have only recently hit address exhaustion (relative to IPv6 age).

No one wants to jump first and there is no government mandate for support.

I don't know who you think the big boys are, but it's not like Google or Meta have throttled ipv4 services or put banners on their site warning users they are on a legacy protocol.

Post reply on HN