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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

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Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#141

Post by ajross »

kens wrote: post #36
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #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 th…

It seems like a lot of technology transitions go smoothly, while others painfully drag on for a decade (ipv6, Python3). Are there any common root causes for the semi-failures? Has anyone written about why some succeed and some don't?

> Are there any common root causes for the semi-failures?

Sure is: it weren't broke and they fixed it!

I mean, even today if you take a median python user (a devops person in a big shop, maybe) and ask them to name four major advantages that Python 3 has over Python 2... I doubt they could get past one. It's not that it isn't a better language, but for 90% of its user base who don't do library design it's almost indistinguishable. And it's incompatible!

IPv6 was similar for most of its life. IPv4 wasn't broke.

Now... it's getting toward broke. And in fact lots and lots of client ISPs (mostly mobile ones) are moving rapidly to IPv6, where their systems hit IPv6 backends of all the big content providers.

I honestly don't know that I agree with the thesis of this article. Network operators who want to deploy IPv6 in the modern world certainly can, and are. That's pretty much the definition of a smooth transition, even if its taking a few decades longer than expected.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#142

Post by Dagger2 »

geofft wrote: post #24
pixl97 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows uses ipv6 temporary addresses by default. NAT isnt security, and lot of implementations are faulty, so dont depend on it for security.

NAT absolutely is security. It prevents naming a resource that an attacker shouldn't have access to, which is the fundamental principle behind many successful security schemes: capability models, containers / virtualization, MMUs, etc. Sure, there are implementation flaws (as there have been in other such schemes), and sure, just clicking a NAT button and walking away doesn't get you security any more than just click…

It doesn't actually do that though. If you give a machine an IP of X, and then you turn on NAT on the upstream router so that its outbound connections appear to come from Y instead, the machine is still called X.

NAT won't prevent someone from sending a packet to X, and it won't cause the router to somehow drop the packet when it sees it either. That stuff is handled by firewalls, not by NAT.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#143

Post by AndrewKemendo »

The argument seems pretty straightforward and is a classic collective action problem:

v4 isn't expensive enough (in all cost measurements) to justify switching to v6. Once that flips, when there aren't any more v4 addresses then everyone will move there.

It sounds like the costs of v6 are so high that we basically need complete saturation of the v4 IP ranges, and then a market that trades IPs at a higher friction/cost rate than than implementing v6.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#144

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

zanny wrote: post #120
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less a redeeming quality and more the entire reason why we bothered to switch to a new system. So yes, that is the point.

I don't think its helpful to discredit all the other technical advantages of v6. Address assignment and configuration is significantly better under SLAAC than DHCP, multicasting actually makes sense, and routing logic and packet format are simplified. If you were to try implementing a router for ipv4 and v6 the v6 one would be dramatically simplier with a lot fewer convoluted edge cases.

I actually specifically do regard (most of) v6's additional features as a bug; I think most of them could and therefore should have been implemented as separate protocols (consider ipsec, which actually did get pulled out and back ported to 4). I think the protocol we ended up with suffers from horrible second system effect and its scope creep it's part of the reason why it's taken decades to get mass adoption.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#145

Post by iagovar »

zamadatix wrote: post #119
Pxtl wrote: post #106

Imho IPV6 failed because of a failure to make DNS usable to non-specialists. If every device on every network could be assigned a domain name, then we'd never have to know what underlying addressing scheme exists. My ISP has a name. I have an account with them. Every device on my network has a name. There's no good reason I don't have Device.accountName.pub.ispName.tld Bound to the phone I'm writing this on right now…

99% of users couldn't tell you what an IP address or port is let alone manually configure MACs and IPs into their router so I don't think that has anything to do with adoption of v6. To the vast majority of users they type a name in the URL bar and that's their full interaction with what they'd think of as "internet addresses". Those administering the systems users connect to have always handled DNS just fine so I do…

v6 adresses are hard to memorize tho

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#146

Post by Dylan16807 »

keypress wrote: post #45
lisper wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we really need is a killer app that requires end-to-end connectivity. That seems unlikely to emerge. Anything you can do with end-to-end connectivity you can do with a server in the middle forwarding packets. Servers are cheap and reliable, so there's very little incentive to get rid of them.

I still like the idea of a peer to peer web, with something like hosting in your own browser. This could be a great alternative fallback network with distributed DNS. Most phones are capable. Energy, speed and security are concerns, but in cracking them you'd probably make the web a better place.

You can make that work with hole punching, IPv6 isn't a major blocker.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#148

Post by zamadatix »

Dagger2 wrote: post #133
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPv6 firewall that gives at least if not more security than NAT provides That's just not true. NAT and firewall both achieve what little security they provide through simple blocking of packets based on state information. Firewalls generally provide more robust state information, but NAT is what lets you redirect sockets. They work together.

Except NAT gives no security, because NAT doesn't block packets. If a packet comes in that doesn't match any NAT state, then the packet isn't dropped on the floor -- it's processed as normal like any other packet would be, and in the absence of a firewall (which is logically separate, even if often implemented in the same software stack) it'll be routed to whatever the destination in the packet header is.

"If a packet comes in that doesn't match any NAT state, then the packet isn't dropped on the floor"

Yes it is, it's the same scenario as if there was no route to the destination just at a higher abstraction layer. Think about it this way: a packet just hit the NAT IP from the internet, the packet has hit it's destination. There was no NAT table match for the packet so it was not rewritten. Where would the packet be forwarded to if not the bit bucket?

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#149

Post by pbhjpbhj »

j1vms wrote: post #85
apple4ever wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLS is a great example of how to do it. IPv6 is a great example of how not to.

> TLS is a great example of how to do it. ASCII -> UTF8 VHS -> DVD not as successful: DVD -> BluRay : timing was rather close to the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.

The move to IPv6 seems a lot like the move to metric (over 40 years ago in UK).

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#150

Post by markbnj »

geofft wrote: post #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 transitio…

Thanks for the link to that MIT packet storm postmortem. The comments thread following contains a pretty fascinating debate involving some members of the original IETF committee and RFC authors.
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