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Why IPv6 is so complicated

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Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#191

Post by p1mrx »

montag wrote: post #168

My problem with IPv6 is that I can't double click 2001:db8::1428:57ab to select the entire address. It's a silly complaint but representative of real ergonomic issues.

It would be pretty straightforward to change the text selection rule, so that double-clicking anything matching the syntax of an IPv6 address selects the whole address.

The hard part is to find all the places to repeat that change, and convince the code owners to accept it. Probably start with a standard analogous to RFC 5952?

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#192

Post by rao-v »

At a high level one of the sad things about IPv6 is that it surrenders a wierd, valuable and emergent property of IPv4 for the average home user in $random_country:

IPv4 addresses in logs are not super helpful in tracking a specific person and household’s behavior long term (NAT, reuse etc.)

Almost every end user oriented IPv6 deployment makes it significantly easier to use IPv6 addresses to persistently track individual machines (ie individual people) and map them to a household (yes I’m aware of RFCs 7217 and 8981, I’m mostly talking about long term stable prefixes).

How much of a real concern this is is debatable but it’s perhaps a little bit unfortunate.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#193

Post by rao-v »

kalleboo wrote: post #188
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SLAAC/DHCPv6 combo seems really strange to me. Either IP/DNS/gateway discovery with one or the other could be tolerable. But allowing combinations such as SLAAC for addressing and DHCP for DNS discovery is lunacy. It’s as if one said, let’s take the most basic and critical step and make it as complicated as possible and explore the combinatorial explosion…

The article mentions that DHCPv6 was an afterthought because DHCP itself barely existed when IPv6 was being designed - they were still using things like RARP or BOOTP! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Address_Resolution_Pro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Protocol

The article does seem to simultaneously claim that IPv6’s design is the result of wierd no longer current pressures but also that it’s perfectly fine and correctly designed.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#194

Post by shibapuppie »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #137
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The nice thing about NAT [...] I really do think IPv6 missed a trick by not offering that IPv6 supports NAT [0], and nearly all routers make it easy to enable. The primary differences compared to IPv4 is that no-NAT is the default, and that it's more heavily discouraged, but it still works just as well as it does with IPv4. [0]: In the same way that IPv4 "supports" NAT, meaning that the protocol doesn't officially…

> IPv6 supports NAT You say that, but in practice it does not. My consumer router, and every router I have configured, implicitly supports IPv4 NAT out of the box. But it will never NAT an IPv6 network. If I enable IPv6 then it operates by IPv6 rules, which means each device gets a Network ID and each Network ID gets routed directly and transparently. The router has no NAT table and no NAT settings for this protocol.…

IPv6 DOES support NAT.

If you've got a car that can't go 100, that doesn't mean nobody can, or that it doesn't exist. I don't care if you can't do it, it IS supported in the spec.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#195

Post by vrighter »

jjav wrote: post #113
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #37

My first IPv6 implementation was in 2010-2011 (memory a but fuzzy). Carriers supporting BGP over IPv6 were few, websites over IPv6 were also scarce. Fast forward 15 years snd the situation has improved quite dramatically. IPv6 has some quirks that make it harder to digest. - link local gateway address, makes it hard to understand why the subnet does not have a gateway from the ssme address space - privacy extensions:…

> In the enterprise space, if you mention globally reachable address space, the discussion tends to end pretty fast because “its not secure”. Topic drift, but for younger people who didn't live it, that's how it used to be! For most of the 90s my workstation in the office (at several employers) was directly on the Internet. There were no firewalls, no filtering of any kind. I ran my email server on my desktop worksta…

i still do this today!

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#196

Post by orangeboats »

hnfong wrote: post #100
eqvinox wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you didn't fix anything, you just moved the problem around. (Worst case, you moved the problem to your finance department, for buying IPv4 address space. But even if you didn't do that, at some point sooner or later you'll get pressure to support IPv6. And then you'll have to "un-fix" everything you did, and fix the actual problem. Maybe it'll be after you're retire, but I wouldn't take bets on that.) [ed.: best…

> at some point sooner or later you'll get pressure to support IPv6 I've been told that for 20+ years. Nothing has changed.

Did you just miss the headline a few days ago, that IPv6 adoption has reached 50%?

You might be right if IPv6 adoption stayed at 10% or so. But the current trend suggests that sooner or later someone is going to demand IPv6 support on your side.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#197

Post by somat »

hnlmorg wrote: post #53
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #37

My first IPv6 implementation was in 2010-2011 (memory a but fuzzy). Carriers supporting BGP over IPv6 were few, websites over IPv6 were also scarce. Fast forward 15 years snd the situation has improved quite dramatically. IPv6 has some quirks that make it harder to digest. - link local gateway address, makes it hard to understand why the subnet does not have a gateway from the ssme address space - privacy extensions:…

The nice thing about NAT is it makes the security model easier to reason about. By this, I don’t mean it’s more secure, because I know it isn’t. But it is a lot easier to see and to explain what has access to what. And the problem with enterprise is that 80% of the work is explaining to other people, usually non-technical or pseudo-technical decision makers, why your design is safe. I really do think IPv6 missed a tr…

NAT is a statefull firewall with a trick.

One is exactly as complicated to reason about as the other.

Except on one you don't need the trick.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#198

Post by CodesInChaos »

vrighter wrote: post #195
jjav wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the enterprise space, if you mention globally reachable address space, the discussion tends to end pretty fast because “its not secure”. Topic drift, but for younger people who didn't live it, that's how it used to be! For most of the 90s my workstation in the office (at several employers) was directly on the Internet. There were no firewalls, no filtering of any kind. I ran my email server on my desktop worksta…

i still do this today!

You run a mail server on a residential IP? I thought that pretty much guarantees non delivery nowadays?

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#199

Post by thbb123 »

jjav wrote: post #113
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #37

My first IPv6 implementation was in 2010-2011 (memory a but fuzzy). Carriers supporting BGP over IPv6 were few, websites over IPv6 were also scarce. Fast forward 15 years snd the situation has improved quite dramatically. IPv6 has some quirks that make it harder to digest. - link local gateway address, makes it hard to understand why the subnet does not have a gateway from the ssme address space - privacy extensions:…

> In the enterprise space, if you mention globally reachable address space, the discussion tends to end pretty fast because “its not secure”. Topic drift, but for younger people who didn't live it, that's how it used to be! For most of the 90s my workstation in the office (at several employers) was directly on the Internet. There were no firewalls, no filtering of any kind. I ran my email server on my desktop worksta…

Pretty much all tech companies and universities had a drop-in ftp server where anyone could, anonymously, put and retrieve files. It was a collective 'pastebin' useful to exchange information with clients and partners.

On the ftp server of the company I worked for, someone had put a cracked copy of our software for their colleagues to use.

Re: Why IPv6 is so complicated

#200

Post by smolder »

orev wrote: post #164
smolder wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much more complicated than IPv4. There are more bits. The addresses are longer. It's not hard to grasp if you understand the prerequisites to understanding networking in general.

The idea that it’s just “more bits” it’s wrong, so I’m not sure your assessment is valid. Maybe at the packet level it’s just “more bits”, but at the network level a lot of processes changed. IP assignment, router discovery, etc. are different.

Yes, processes changed. Because you don't need NAT, mainly. Overall it's simpler, with more bits in the addresses.
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