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Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

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21–30 of 74 posts

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#21
post #14

> One key reason for this uneven progress is the extension of IPv4’s lifespan through interim technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) and IPv4 address transfers. they completely ignore the actual problem with IPv6 which is that they didn't just extend IPv4 in a straightforward manner. they could have made the address fields 64 bits and been done with it. but, oh no, they had to make it the protocol for th…

I've never seen anyone explain a "straightforward" way to extend the bits without having 90% of the same adoption difficulty. What's your idea, specifically?

Also extension mechanisms like that already exist as part of ipv6.

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#22
post #15

One of my pet hot takes is that IPv6 will never exceed ~60% adoption. NAT and SNI routing (aka virtual hosts at the TLS layer) solve most problems for most users fairly well.

Eyeballing a sigmoid curve fit to the google's IPv6 charts would support that.

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... see 'IPv6 only support' column. Is that relevant? There's nothing wrong with having RFC1918 addresses and globally-routable IPv6 addresses assigned to your VPC. Have the RFC1918 addresses accessing IPv4-only AWS resources and the globally-routable IPv6 addresses serving the world. Easy. After all, the major cloud providers don't charge for RFC1918 addresses... they just charge for globally-routable IPv4 address…

> There's nothing wrong with having RFC1918 addresses and globally-routable IPv6 addresses assigned to your VPC. It's a pretty backwards way to build your network. You pay all the costs and gain none of the benefits.

I'm afraid I don't follow.

The way to express the design in a pure-IPv6 world would be that you use ULA addresses to reach the AWS services that you use and globally-routable addresses to reach the outside world.

Given that the cost that we're avoiding paying with the mechanism I described in my previous post is the ongoing cost for globally-routable IPv4 addresses, I'm not sure what cost you're talking about paying.

And given that the benefits are not having to pay for globally-routable IPs, I'm not sure what benefits you're talking about that we don't get?

Are you perhaps one of those "Hosts must be IPv6-only, no dual-stack allowed!" people? If so, I regard that as a silly stance today, and expect it will remain a silly stance for the next several decades (maybe even the next century, who knows?).

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#25
post #8
post #5

I am not sure if it is me on the article sounds like it was passed through an LLM. These days I see more and more content similar to how the chat GPT would generate and describe things

Indeed! Look at these formulations: "Respecting these governance frameworks is crucial to maintaining the open, collaborative model that underpins global Internet development and its technological evolution ... collaborative approaches that engage technical communities, promote open standards, and prioritise interoperability are essential... To overcome these challenges, a strategic approach combining economic and op…

How is that gibberish? It's clearly a policy paper/article, and the wording is very in-line with that: it's wordy, but there's nothing factually wrong or outlandish in it.

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#26
My ISP no longer allows port-forwarding of ipv4 addresses as 1 public ip is shared amongst many ISP customers. This is due to a migration to MAP-E.

IPV6 is pretty much my only choice for hosting stuff in offices and at home.

Is MAP-E becoming prevalent?

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#27
post #14

> One key reason for this uneven progress is the extension of IPv4’s lifespan through interim technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) and IPv4 address transfers. they completely ignore the actual problem with IPv6 which is that they didn't just extend IPv4 in a straightforward manner. they could have made the address fields 64 bits and been done with it. but, oh no, they had to make it the protocol for th…

I've never seen anyone explain a "straightforward" way to extend the bits without having 90% of the same adoption difficulty. What's your idea, specifically? Also extension mechanisms like that already exist as part of ipv6.

not have 128 bit addresses for one thing. 64 bits would have been fine. that was one of the biggest consternations that's a huge hit for small packets.

so nat sucks. we needed to have something better. but instead of just extending to 64 bit src/dest addresses, align the fields and drop the checksum or any straightforward extension like that we got an entirely new protocol with new rules, nuances and complexity. so people just said nope. if it had been just a superset of IP with a different packet format and wider fields, it would have been adopted widely 20 years ago.

this wasn't intended to be a contentious take, btw: i was genuinely surprised that the article was ignoring this take. it was a very common feeling in the late 90s and 2000s when IPv6 was coming out. "over-engineered"

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#28
Quasi related; how does one find out if your ISP is using CGNAT?

I'm rather lucky in that my ISP recently started offering IPv6 (and somehow my workstation appears to be using it by as the default), but none of the other PC's on my network do. (Win11 change perhaps?)

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#29

Quasi related; how does one find out if your ISP is using CGNAT? I'm rather lucky in that my ISP recently started offering IPv6 (and somehow my workstation appears to be using it by as the default), but none of the other PC's on my network do. (Win11 change perhaps?)

Check the IP that your router receives on its WAN interface and compare it to the IP printed by internet services like Google (search for "what is my ip" and there'll be a special card among the results) or https://ipinfo.io/ip . If they're not the same (because your router's IP is a private IP like 192.168.#.# or 10.#.#.#) then your router is being NAT'd.

Re: Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat

#30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anyone explain a "straightforward" way to extend the bits without having 90% of the same adoption difficulty. What's your idea, specifically? Also extension mechanisms like that already exist as part of ipv6.

not have 128 bit addresses for one thing. 64 bits would have been fine. that was one of the biggest consternations that's a huge hit for small packets. so nat sucks. we needed to have something better. but instead of just extending to 64 bit src/dest addresses, align the fields and drop the checksum or any straightforward extension like that we got an entirely new protocol with new rules, nuances and complexity. so p…

> What's your idea, specifically?

This is the problem. Lots of arm-chair protocol engineers claim it'd be easy if 'They did X'. Of course, these immediately fall apart under the barest of scrutiny but they keep coming up.

Here is your challenge. Create a way to add this address space extension in a way that doesn't break backwards compatibility. Remember, you need to be specific how you would add the change and how it would keep backwards compatibility.

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