Earlier quoted context omitted.
IPv6 is backwards compatible. In multiple ways: Option 1: "6to4" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4 Option 2: "nat64" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT64 + DNS64 Option 2b: "nat46" (which makes a few ipv6 hosts available over ipv4 if yo ulike) Option 3: "Teredo" (also known as "6in4" "tunnel broker" "6over4" "tunneling" ...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling Option 4: 6rd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP…
The fact there are so many options shows the fundamental design problem.
AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
251–260 of 480 posts
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…
You say ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT. Can you explain why it doesn't? You then say the problem was built into ipv6 from the start. From looking it up it looks like it's mostly required when IP's change (e.g. when you change ISP), which for me is more of an argument to use DNS if you want fixed addresses.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The existence of NAT66 and NPTv6 are proof that there is still a need for NAT in an ipv6 environment. Maybe not in your environment, but people wouldn't make these solutions if there wasn't a need.
There's certainly a requirement for them, but it would be good to know what the justification of that requirement was before we know if there's a need. E.g. the justification could be "our SOPs say all network traffic must go through NAT", and if you dig deeper you might find that the SOP was written to save money on IPv4 addresses. That would not indicate a fundamental need.
Using a firewall is obviously an option, but why give an IP to something you don’t want accessible by the outside world?
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
That document has been going around for ages and is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients. This is just not possible. Most of the other criticism is not relevant anymore, since we now have a lot of transition technologies that allow IPv6 clients to interoperate with IPv4 servers (this way around is possible since…
> That document has been going around for ages and is based on the same fundamental misunderstanding that one somehow can extend IPv4 in a way somehow, but remain compatible with IPv4-only clients. Let me summarize my understanding of what he's saying, because I don't quite see why/how you disagree. I think you (or I) might be misunderstanding his claim. Imagine this topology: C (client, IPv4-only) R (intermediate ro…
How are R and S negotiating when R cannot even name S on the network? Its stack only allows for 32-bit addresses and S can't have a 32-bit address.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#255Can we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...
These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…
So every owner of a ipv4 would get, say, an entire 32 bit space that routes over existing IPv4 infrastructure. So, if the endpoints are upgraded, you have guaranteed end-to-end deliverability without silly hacks such as NAT or STUN.
This doesn't solve the "backwards compatibility" problem itself, because you still have two logical different IP networks running on top of each other, requiring separate name resolution, etc. But what it does solve is the "incentive problem": endpoints are incentivized to upgrade because it gives them an immediate benefit, end-to-end connectivity to other upgraded users with non-routable addresses sitting behind a dumb, non-upgraded IPv4 routers.
For example, VoIP or P2P software would immediately benefit and it would drive adoption for an immediate use-case. In the later stage, when the entire infrastructure can understand the extended packet format, you would start to publish extended routes that don't fall into the hierarchical range, similar to IPv6 today.
IPv6 lacks any such incentive, because me upgrading and enabling it has zero benefits until all hops separating me from the internet also enable it and correctly configure it. On the contrary, by requiring a completely new, complex configuration with no "default, just works" mode, IPv6 introduces a disincentive, because by enabling it not only do I not gain anything, but I risk breaking my internet due to misconfigured upstream. So the conservative setting for IpV6 has, for the last 3 decades, remained "off". This only recently began to change.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#256Can we go back in time and hit the designers of IPv6 upside the head? The decision not to make IPv6 backwards compatible, the belief that a beautiful new standard could magically replace something already so widespread... "Naive" is an inadequate word. We are still futzing with the transition 3 decades later, with no end in sight. Grrr, grumble...
These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…
There are billions of phones so sure, they should be on ipv6. ipv6 is a kind of super NAT that few people bother to learn
Sorry about that ipv6 committee
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#257GitHub.com still doesn't support IPv6. I know that there is some work going on to support it, but this shows that it is far from trivial.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.
> IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. Yikes, couldn't disagree with that more. There are a ton of things that ipv6 designers could have done to make the transition much easier. This is a (now quite old) blog post that is my "go to" that explains a lot of the problems with ipv6: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html FWIW I couldn't find the link to that post until finding it on one of…
Bernstein was certainly part of that discussion, at the later stages, and the document you link to reflected that. It was just one of many counter proposals that influenced what became IPv6.
Some people seem to suggest that Internet standards are written in some ivory tower and dropped down on the network engineers to implement. In that light, such criticism of IPv6 would be valid and important. But the IETF does not work like that. You can take part, and I can take part, and any reasonable criticism is discussed in the open. In general, practical proposals and code is taken more seriously than loose ideas.
There is no central command which decides what you or any other network operator should implement. People all over the world implements what they think is good for their network, in order to interoperate with other networks. If anything, Internet standard can be criticized for being slow to fruition because of this open process. That's the price we pay.
It's not very useful to come 20 years later and re-hash the exact same discussion all over again. All counter proposals turned out to be impossible to deploy, and the consensus and running code we ended up with is what we call IPv6. A dual stack approach was the only solution practical enough to get general deployment. There are certainly problems with any protocol, and let's suggest improvements and new protocols. Just make them relevant today if they should have any chance of deployment.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been hearing about ipv4 running out and the need to move to ipv6 for so many years/decades, but it keeps not happening. I’m wondering if anything will change in my lifetime.
> but it keeps not happening The article you're responding to is a dramatic demonstration that it has happened: Amazon's IPs would not be worth $4.5B if we hadn't run out. It requires us all to ration a resource (namely numbers) that should be near-infinite and essentially free.
There can only be ~4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, which means that mathematically IP addresses are severely limited - you can't assign even one single globally routable IPv4 address per human. That's why we have NAT and its evolution CGNAT in the first place.
Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…
The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…
The year is 2023, The chromium engine is full blown operating system, it has notifications, background task management, GPU acceleration for general compute, it's larger than Windows XP, and can in fact run windows XP in the browser. Teams consumes 500 mb of ram to do the same job ICQ did in 2002 with 5 mb of ram. Cars have 4G, lightbulbs need updates and security patches.
But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem.