Live data from Hacker News

IPv6 is the only way forward

ankshilp.in

171–180 of 350 posts

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#171
post #26

> There are countless threads online on forums like Hacker News, Reddit where people who never really got comfortable with idea of IPv6 It’s clumsier than ipv4. It’s unnecessary since NAT was invented. In practice IPv6 requires dual stack, which means twice as many firewalls, names and routes to manage — so 4x the debugging because you have 2 dimensions that can either be working or failing. Addresses are too long to…

... and annoying casting from `sockaddr ` to either `sockaddr_in ` or `sockaddr_in6*` while you pass around a socklen_t. 10 years ago I was all gung-ho about IPv6, but it's annoying at every level.

Why are you casting to sockaddr_in/6? The whole point of that system is that you can just pass around the sockaddr* without even needing to have a definition for sockaddr_in or sockaddr_in6. All of the socket API functions accept sockaddr*, and if you need to get the IP or port out then you use getnameinfo(), which also takes sockaddr*. There should be little reason to ever cast to either of those types in normal use. (I can think of one or two cases where you might, but they're not common.)

Having to deal with the separate socklen_t is mildly annoying, but you can just make a little struct that holds both.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#173
post #22

The US doesn't have excessive IPv4 Addresses. We have a real shortage and big pain because we don't have anywhere near enough. Sure we have 40% of them all - but that has no indication of what enough is.

I worked at an ISP way back in the dark ages of 2008 and we were all worried about IP exhaustion then. It's now 17 years later and what do you know, IPv4 is still trucking.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#174

I don't understand why people are so negative about IPv6. I have done essentially zero home networking work and I just ran this successfully. It just works! ``` > ping6 google.com PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2605:59c0:236f:3a08:7883:9d04:c26d:5fa1 --> 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=0 hlim=117 time=22.262 ms 16 bytes from 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e, icmp_seq=1 hlim=117 time=26.124 m…

That's literally impossible, to hear some people tell it. "And also, look how hard it'd be to memorize that address", say the people who remember like 2 IPv4 addresses, one of them being 127.0.0.1.

When people are managing 20 devices on a network, they access everything by IP address directly and struggle with constant DNS issues.

Introducing a more complex system without easing any of the cognitive load and making fun of it is just cruel at this moment.

Users need a simpler way to connect to their devices, and what tailscale did with magic dns shows that users don’t even care about IPv4 they just want to connect to their devices with something simple they can remember.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#175
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or ... people can use the DoD/Mod and assorted other space to get their IPv4 allocations. There is a ton of unused space in IPv4. Reserved, allocated but entirely unused. Also take back some /8's from greedy companies that don't need all that space. stares at HP When I say take I mean take as in a forceful annex and a timeline.

You have to be really special if you think a 32-bit address space can cope with the ever expanding internet. We only managed to scrape by for now because ISPs keep on putting more and more people behind CGNAT. (My country's ISPs forced the migration to CGNAT because they literally couldn't get more IPv4 blocks without spending a hefty amount)

You have to be really special

I am very special, mama said so.

I stand by what I said. Get countries to do what I said and DHCP will take care of the rest. CGNAT can be binned once people do what I said.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a concrete counter-example, IPv6 routinely broke for me when I was using pfSense as a router. Why? Because pfSense, does really bad things. I mean, I have a router that is trash with IP4. Therefore IP4 is trash!

Please don't put words in my mouth. I did not say "Because pfSense, does really bad things." How pfSense works is fairly reasonable if every IPv6 deployment had been as the original designers intended, ie you have a static prefix. It's just that the way IPv6 ended up getting deployed in practice was often not aligned with that original vision. And that has been a large source of IPv6 frustration.

There's a few things here that are a bit iffy tbh!

I can't see why an ISP is dynamically changing the IPv6 addressing for a client, but if that's what is going on, then v6 NPT is your friend (RFC6296 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6296).

But pfsense's behaviour is a bit iffy too, unless when you say 'public IP', you mean the IPv6 address being used on the pfsense facing the clients? (I'm assuming it's using DHCPv6 prefix delegation, and the delegation is being changed? And potentially the uplink subnet as well).

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#177
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first thing in the IP header is the version number. So you just change the version number… like was done with IPv6? How would this be any different: all hosts, firewalls, routers, etc , would have to be updated… like with IPv6. So would all application code to handle (e.g.) connection logging… like with IPv6.

I was addressing the narrow claim that you cannot distinguish ASCII from UTF-7. You can distinguish IPv4 from IPv6 by looking at the version field (and I forgot to mention the L2 protocol field is out of band from IP's perspective). Obviously if the receiver doesn't support UTF-7 or IPv6 then it won't be understood. Forward compatibility isn't possible in this case.

Weirdly, the version field is actually irrelevant. You can't determine the type of a packet by looking at its first byte; you must look at the EtherType header in the Ethernet frame, or whatever equivalent your L2 protocol uses. It's redundant, possibly even to the point of being a mistake.

I mean, yes, in practice you can peek at the first byte if you know you're looking at an IP packet, but down that route lies expensive datacenter switches that can't switch packets sent to a destination MAC that starts with a 04 or 06 (looking at you, Cisco and Brocade: https://seclists.org/nanog/2016/Dec/29).

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally impossible, to hear some people tell it. "And also, look how hard it'd be to memorize that address", say the people who remember like 2 IPv4 addresses, one of them being 127.0.0.1.

When people are managing 20 devices on a network, they access everything by IP address directly and struggle with constant DNS issues. Introducing a more complex system without easing any of the cognitive load and making fun of it is just cruel at this moment. Users need a simpler way to connect to their devices, and what tailscale did with magic dns shows that users don’t even care about IPv4 they just want to conne…

Weirdly this might be a CPE problem, e.g. crappy ISP routers.

Put in something more interesting, e.g. OpenWRT, or there are proprietary options too, that provides simple & reliable local LAN DNS, then the problem just goes away.

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#179
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be really special if you think a 32-bit address space can cope with the ever expanding internet. We only managed to scrape by for now because ISPs keep on putting more and more people behind CGNAT. (My country's ISPs forced the migration to CGNAT because they literally couldn't get more IPv4 blocks without spending a hefty amount)

You have to be really special I am very special, mama said so. I stand by what I said. Get countries to do what I said and DHCP will take care of the rest. CGNAT can be binned once people do what I said.

DHCP? For country-level IP allocation?

Yeah, your mama was not wrong - you indeed are a special one. Now, let's bring you to a nearby playground...

Re: IPv6 is the only way forward

#180

Reading the comments, it looks like some people dismiss IPv6 just because they need to sit down and learn a couple of new things.

Yeah, it's always the same with IPv6 discussions. The main points being:

  1. IPv6 addresses are too long to remember
  2. IPv6 doesn't need NAT and people are uncomfortable with their devices having a public address as they see NAT as an additional layer of security
Post reply on HN