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IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

matduggan.com

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Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#41

Post by hot_gril »

ClashTheBunny wrote: post #9
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #5

For an IPv6 advocate, this guy sure set up a lot of NAT. And while he claimed he's going IPv6-only, he set up public access via IPv4. That won't convince anyone to switch or upgrade. I understand that he's building a usable service and just trying to git 'er done, but it's a lot of hacks, so I'm glad they're documented in this here blogpost. I hope that he can continually probe the edges to find out when real IPv6 su…

What would you suggest they have done? I feel like excluding IPv4 folks is a large reason why IPv6 continues to fail. I feel like this is a pretty good compromise between pushing IPv6 and not being an IPv6 hermit in the IPv6 desert.

I would suggest letting v4 users keep their existing v4 addresses when going to v6.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#42

Post by WorldMaker »

JohnFen wrote: post #32
WorldMaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IPv4 with bigger addresses" would never have been backwards compatible and would always have been a compatibility break and would always have a slow rollout. The proposals that seemed backwards compatible were just aggressive CGNAT consolidating even more power in the hands of IPv4 address owners. That doesn't seem like a sustainable fix in the long run.

> "IPv4 with bigger addresses" would never have been backwards compatible and would always have been a compatibility break True, but it would limit that break to a single thing. That's much easier to deal with than the whole basket of things that IPv6 brings with it.

Compatibility breaks are always headaches. There's not "just broke a 'single' thing" when it comes to compatibility breaks. That is why strict semver suggests a major bump no matter how "small" a compatibility break appears to the developer. There is no such thing as a "simple" compatibility break to downstream users.

In general, despite the complex vocabulary about most of it, in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4. Its header has fewer fields. Its QoL/QoS fields aren't accidental hacks on top of old debugging fields but intentionally designed fields for that very purpose. SLAAC is a simpler protocol than DHCPv4, though the algorithm sounds more complex at first. (DHCPv6 is basically as complex, but fewer devices and fewer subnets should need DHCPv6 in the first place.) Much of the "basket of things" that IPv6 brings with it are designed to remove complexity that has concreted around IPv4.

They ripped the bandaid completely off with the backwards compatibility break that they made with IPv6, and apparently a lot of people loved the cute stickers they had applied on top of the bandaid. But at this point it is probably better for the skin below to heal without the bandaid than to continue to sticker and bandaid over that and let all that unnecessary glue fester in place. (To push such a metaphor almost to its breaking place.)

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#43

Post by toyg »

JohnFen wrote: post #24
Nextgrid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years ago if you made software that uses all kinds of lies and dark patterns to get access to a user's contacts list, uploads it to your server and then you did data mining on it, people would be concerned and consider the software malicious. Likewise with analytics - tracking every single action you do in an app (along with generic metadata such as IP addresses - which often leaks your general location and your r…

Indeed. When I look at how far things have fallen in this regard, it gets very hard to feel positive or optimistic about the internet.

And the human race. The biggest revolution in communication since Gutenberg, and in less than half a century it's been used almost exclusively for evil purposes.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#44

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

hot_gril wrote: post #40

Since the main problem was address space, they should've just expanded it. Let everyone keep their old v4 addresses (with 0-padding), focus on the protocol upgrade, and give new users longer addresses for cheaper. You wouldn't even need DNS changes initially. Instead, v6 became a whole new thing with additional goals like removing NAT (which I'm not even convinced is a good idea), so of course there'd be way more fri…

I agree. Instead of just making v4 addresses bigger (and related services around the protocol as well - ICMP, DNS, ...) a committee spawned jack of all trades, master of none IPv6 incompatible with current IPv4 stack.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#45

Post by JohnFen »

WorldMaker wrote: post #42
JohnFen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "IPv4 with bigger addresses" would never have been backwards compatible and would always have been a compatibility break True, but it would limit that break to a single thing. That's much easier to deal with than the whole basket of things that IPv6 brings with it.

Compatibility breaks are always headaches. There's not "just broke a 'single' thing" when it comes to compatibility breaks. That is why strict semver suggests a major bump no matter how "small" a compatibility break appears to the developer. There is no such thing as a "simple" compatibility break to downstream users. In general, despite the complex vocabulary about most of it, in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4.…

> in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4.

It's not really about whether or not IPv6 is simpler than IPv4, though. It's about how painful moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is. And it's very painful. If the only thing that changed between the two was that the IP address space is bigger, it would reduce the pain of changing.

I'm certainly not going to claim that my experience is representative of anyone except for me, but the reason that I'm not going to shift to IPv6 until I literally have no other choice is because doing so is an enormous undertaking. Since IPv6 doesn't bring me any benefit that I care about, there is no reason to do so unless I simply can't get on the internet without it anymore.

Please note: I am not bashing IPv6 here, and I'm not saying that a change isn't needed. I'm just expressing some of the reasons I've seen why people resist changing to it, and that I think adopting it would have happened within a reasonable timeframe if it weren't as ambitious.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#46

Post by bauruine »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #44
hot_gril wrote: post #40

Since the main problem was address space, they should've just expanded it. Let everyone keep their old v4 addresses (with 0-padding), focus on the protocol upgrade, and give new users longer addresses for cheaper. You wouldn't even need DNS changes initially. Instead, v6 became a whole new thing with additional goals like removing NAT (which I'm not even convinced is a good idea), so of course there'd be way more fri…

I agree. Instead of just making v4 addresses bigger (and related services around the protocol as well - ICMP, DNS, ...) a committee spawned jack of all trades, master of none IPv6 incompatible with current IPv4 stack.

IPv6 is compatible with IPv4 there are millions of devices with only an IPv6 address that work just fine.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#47

Post by p1mrx »

hot_gril wrote: post #40

Since the main problem was address space, they should've just expanded it. Let everyone keep their old v4 addresses (with 0-padding), focus on the protocol upgrade, and give new users longer addresses for cheaper. You wouldn't even need DNS changes initially. Instead, v6 became a whole new thing with additional goals like removing NAT (which I'm not even convinced is a good idea), so of course there'd be way more fri…

> Cloudflare public DNS is 1.1.1.1. If I switch to ipv6, I get to use 2606:4700:4700::1111. You telling me that's an upgrade?

The concept of vanity IPv4 addresses was invented in 2009, when Google acquired 8.8.8.0/24 from Level3. This is an emergent feature of a small, densely packed address space. IPv6 had existed for a decade (EDIT: not two decades) by that point, so you can't really blame the designers.

Sprint controls 2600::, probably by accident, but they're not doing anything interesting with it.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#48

Post by bauruine »

JohnFen wrote: post #45
WorldMaker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compatibility breaks are always headaches. There's not "just broke a 'single' thing" when it comes to compatibility breaks. That is why strict semver suggests a major bump no matter how "small" a compatibility break appears to the developer. There is no such thing as a "simple" compatibility break to downstream users. In general, despite the complex vocabulary about most of it, in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4.…

> in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4. It's not really about whether or not IPv6 is simpler than IPv4, though. It's about how painful moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is. And it's very painful. If the only thing that changed between the two was that the IP address space is bigger, it would reduce the pain of changing. I'm certainly not going to claim that my experience is representative of anyone except for me, but the re…

Why is it so painful for you? As someone that has been running everything dualstack for over a decade I'm seriously interested where people are struggling with it.

The only pain I've ever seen is in corporate networks where all the tooling around the network management are IPv4 only but those would break even if you add a single bit to an IPv4 address.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#49

Post by bauruine »

JohnFen wrote: post #27
zamadatix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about NAT64 is you only NAT when you're talking to a v4 only client, otherwise you still have pure v6. This leaves no hacks to remove for a pure IPv6 experience it just means you can have single stacked IPv6 devices instead of needing to dual stack or wait for the entire rest of the world to also configure IPv6 too. I.e. it allows you to push IPv4 to your internet edge only in a way that doesn't downgr…

When the day comes that I have to shift to IPv6, I think I still want to NAT, though. I could be (and probably am) misunderstanding things, but I don't see how I can eliminate my need for it. What I want it for is so that I can have services exposed through my domain name, but operated on different internal servers.

There are some services that have a different resource record in DNS like email (MX) or use SRV records like XMPP but else yes you are forced to either use a different hostname (like www. and ftp. and mail.) or do it port based with NAT like you used to.

Re: IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

#50

Post by hot_gril »

p1mrx wrote: post #47
hot_gril wrote: post #40

Since the main problem was address space, they should've just expanded it. Let everyone keep their old v4 addresses (with 0-padding), focus on the protocol upgrade, and give new users longer addresses for cheaper. You wouldn't even need DNS changes initially. Instead, v6 became a whole new thing with additional goals like removing NAT (which I'm not even convinced is a good idea), so of course there'd be way more fri…

> Cloudflare public DNS is 1.1.1.1. If I switch to ipv6, I get to use 2606:4700:4700::1111. You telling me that's an upgrade? The concept of vanity IPv4 addresses was invented in 2009, when Google acquired 8.8.8.0/24 from Level3. This is an emergent feature of a small, densely packed address space. IPv6 had existed for a decade (EDIT: not two decades) by that point, so you can't really blame the designers. Sprint con…

That's true, but even the less memorable v4 addresses are easier to deal with and nicer on the eyes. And on a LAN with a NAT, you typically get memorable addresses like 192.168.1.2.

Maybe the bigger issue was trying to get rid of NAT. People don't want every local network device to have a public IP and have to trust that the router's v6 firewall will do its job.

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