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The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

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Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#121

Post by tenebrisalietum »

lproven wrote: post #96

I have several times cited it as a key article, more insightful than almost anything else I've ever read about IPv6, but I concede it is overlong and unclear and needs more illustrations. (Which, as a technical writer myself, I generally regard as a crutch.) I think the core argument can be summarised as this: 1. IPv6 is flawed because it has 2 main layers, but it needed 3. 2. It understands physical addresses, and i…

I read the article, also found it a bit confusing and wayward, and couldn't quite articulate why I disagreed with it at first, but I think I can now.

- The "mobile IP" problem isn't IP's job and should not be. IP should be as stateless as possible because this makes it cheap and easy to add capacity and redundancy to a network.

- IP addresses are assigned to interfaces, not people, computers, devices, applications, nodes, etc. If you want a fixed reference identifier associated to something across the wire, it is correct to implement that in addition to the state it requires on top of IP. If your application assigns or assumes identity based on IP address, that's a badly written application at this point.

> Y has no idea what that means, and throws it away.

X should have sent Y a session ID? The client and server should maintain session IDs and not the IP layer (imagine the security issues)?

- I think the author mostly has a problem with TCP. QUIC may become the next TCP. And that's fine.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#122

Post by Helmut10001 »

Astronaut3315 wrote: post #117
Helmut10001 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already get a headache when thinking of configuring firewall rules with a dynamic prefix for all my hosts.

I found building rules around a dynamic prefix to be simple enough on my old EdgeRouter once I found the poorly documented magic incantation to do so. It isn’t possible on the UniFi system that replaced it. Who needs basic core functionality anyway.

Yeah, pfsense apparently just solved this partly (except for aliases) [1], same with OPNsense [2], where there is still an open issue [3]. There are some declined PRs that are not "high priority" [4]. Note that I have just looked these issues up - I don't have insight into any of these. This is not meant as ranting.

    [1]: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/6626
    [2]: https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/2544
    [3]: https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/6158
    [4]: https://github.com/opnsense/core/pull/5574

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#123

Post by nikanj »

kalleboo wrote: post #101
OccamsMirror wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ll find the real transition to be a lot quicker than that. All it takes is one of the big companies drawing a line in the sand because they’re unable to buy enough IP addresses, so they finally take a stand. Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

I doubt a big company would draw the line in the sand. But I could see an upstart (think TikTok) not having up enough IP addresses and just giving a crappy, slow proxied experience over IPv4, but having it be native, zippy and good over IPv6. Suddenly you have teens begging their parents to switch ISPs.

That comes with a major assumption that switching ISPs is an option. Most people get to choose between their cable company, or a fleet of ill-trained pigeons

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#124

Post by denton-scratch »

> configuring DHCP really is a huge pain

Not sure why the author is so sniffy about DHCP. To me it seems easy to understand and configure.

Having said that, I appreciate the author's remarks about DHCP being a 'fake' IP protocol, and in reality being an ethernet protocol; I hadn't seen it that way before, but it's a reasonable way to look at it.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#125

Post by tsimionescu »

baq wrote: post #106
exabrial wrote: post #100

One thing I’ve realized lately is that scarcity is actually a benefit of ipv4, much in the way of the maximum amount of bitcoins theoretically increases their value. Ipv4 addresses are being ranked by their reputation. This is a good thing, at least right now, as it makes scammers/spammers/hackers/ddosers lives more expensive to acquire fresh addresses. This can only exist when a shortage exists.

in ipv6 you can (should) grade whole subnets as end customers typically get whole /64s.

There's still 2^64 /64 IPv6 subnets, and only 2^32 IPv4 addresses in total, of which huge swaths aren't even used.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#126

Post by throwaway154 »

mike_d wrote: post #20

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alternatively IPv4 is a mountain of small hacks, which is its biggest strength. We could have done a lot of good by adopting proposals to extend v4 like 0/8 and class D, but instead the decision was made to collectively drown the babies in the bathwater and insist…

It really doesn't matter if your part of the ocean didn't make it to the boiling committee.

The one thing that mattered was more address space. 4 billion addresses are not enough for the world. Anything else in ip6 is nice to have but falls off a cliff of importance and naval gazing that, if really of even nearly comparable significance, would be better directed to ipX or whatever's next.

IP6 is already facilitating connectivity for billions. Globally. That's a pretty major thing, more so than renditions of doing it my way.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#127

Post by convolvatron »

ianburrell wrote: post #22
mike_d wrote: post #20

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alternatively IPv4 is a mountain of small hacks, which is its biggest strength. We could have done a lot of good by adopting proposals to extend v4 like 0/8 and class D, but instead the decision was made to collectively drown the babies in the bathwater and insist…

Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year. IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.

I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal.

- changed arp. Ok, new design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone?

- prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think

- fusing the end system identifier in the public address was a mistake, and I thought so at the time, and I guess it’s been mostly rectified.

So what is so tragic here? ISPs just didn’t care for 20 years because the crunch was delayed. Now they do. So where did Steve screw up?

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#128

Post by alerighi »

runjake wrote: post #57
mike_d wrote: post #20

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alternatively IPv4 is a mountain of small hacks, which is its biggest strength. We could have done a lot of good by adopting proposals to extend v4 like 0/8 and class D, but instead the decision was made to collectively drown the babies in the bathwater and insist…

I run a large multi-campus network. At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6. Looking at home ISPs accessing our services, it’s at least the majority of them coming in on IPv6. My guess is it’s a similar ratio as outgoing. IPv6 has issues but it hasn’t failed.

Unfortunately in my country (Italy) our major provider (TIM) is not handing out IPv6 addresses to users. Other providers do, for the fact that nowadays IPv4 addresises are expensive and thus they no longer provide a public address. One of them (Iliad) is IPv6 only, and the IPv4 traffic is tunneled into IPv6 at the router level.

I think the only way that we will move to IPv6 is a law (probably from the EU) that imposes to every provider to give its consumers an IPv6 address.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#129

Post by SSLy »

jeroenhd wrote: post #66

IPv6's biggest problem remains not that it's badly designed (at least not nowadays, there were problems but they were solved ten years ago) but that millions of network engineers never bothered to look deeper into IPv6 than "I don't get it, this feels off". You can't make a backwards compatible "IPv4 with more bits" like people dream of. L2 routers and middleboxes would still need to be replaced, software would still…

the fedora dracut? or something else?

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#130

Post by convolvatron »

schoen wrote: post #68
ianburrell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year. IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.

We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4. While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/a…

Or we could just remove the purely artificial scarcity and call it a day. The cost here is backbone table size, not endpoint addresses
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