Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IPv6 Is A Disaster (but we can fix it)

matduggan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 98 posts

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

#51

Post by bell-cot »

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…

Yep. It's as if they didn't understand that ~nobody would want to leave the great old IPv4 Club (packed with all your friends, and everyone who you'd want to meet) for the shoddy new IPv6 Club (with ~zero people there, probably nobody you know, and good luck trying to get a waiter's attention). And also pay for memberships in both clubs during the vague "eventually" transition period.

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

#52

Post by hot_gril »

bauruine wrote: post #46
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I only have a v4 address with my ISP and cannot use a v6-only device at home.

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

#53

Post by bauruine »

hot_gril wrote: post #52
bauruine wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I only have a v4 address with my ISP and cannot use a v6-only device at home.

IPv6 is backwards compatible to IPv4 but not the other way around. If you have a solution how to address a 128bit IPv6 address with the 32bits available on v4 I'm sure many people are eager to talk to you. It's just not possible.

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

#54

Post by JohnFen »

bauruine wrote: post #48
JohnFen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Why is it so painful for you?

Mostly because of the number of machines that I have to fix up and the fact that updating each of them involves a fair bit of time. My estimation is I'm looking at at least a week's worth of work, during which my network isn't fully functioning.

It's also complicated by the number of devices I have that aren't possible to make work with IPv6 at all, which means I have to maintain some IPv4 segment and deal with making the two work together in a seamless way.

I'm also very concerned about security. I'm not confident that I know enough about how to secure an IPv6 network adequately, so I need to set aside a fair bit of time for study before I even start.

All in all, it's a large project with a lot of friction that wouldn't be as large if I didn't have to rethink everything.

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

#55

Post by bauruine »

JohnFen wrote: post #54
bauruine wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why is it so painful for you? Mostly because of the number of machines that I have to fix up and the fact that updating each of them involves a fair bit of time. My estimation is I'm looking at at least a week's worth of work, during which my network isn't fully functioning. It's also complicated by the number of devices I have that aren't possible to make work with IPv6 at all, which means I have to maintain some…

Going IPv6 only is a pain for sure but why not do dual stack and upgrade one by one and get comfortable with it first?

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

#56

Post by hot_gril »

bauruine wrote: post #53
hot_gril wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I only have a v4 address with my ISP and cannot use a v6-only device at home.

IPv6 is backwards compatible to IPv4 but not the other way around. If you have a solution how to address a 128bit IPv6 address with the 32bits available on v4 I'm sure many people are eager to talk to you. It's just not possible.

With a 6-to-4 gateway then yeah. But at that point you're using v4.

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

#57

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

Yes.

Also, any change to the protocol was going to be a massive shift regarding network hardware. It wasn't ever possible to slap a few more bytes onto the address.

If you're going to make a monumentap shift, why not do it right?

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

#58

Post by JohnFen »

hot_gril wrote: post #50
p1mrx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> People don't want every local network device to have a public IP

I absolutely don't want this. But as I understand it, I can avoid this by assigning my machines the IPv6 nonroutable addresses fe80::/64. They're the equivalent of 192.168.* and 10.*

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

#59

Post by unethical_ban »

hot_gril wrote: post #50
p1mrx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

NAT is a bandage over a crippling of proper network behavior. You trust your port forwarding isn't illicitly opening itself, no? Then you can trust a default deny inbound policy on IPv6.

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

#60

Post by hot_gril »

unethical_ban wrote: post #59
hot_gril wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NAT is a bandage over a crippling of proper network behavior. You trust your port forwarding isn't illicitly opening itself, no? Then you can trust a default deny inbound policy on IPv6.

My port forwarding would have to actively try to allow traffic to my host. It doesn't even know where to forward to. And like it or not, NAT has momentum. Getting rid of NAT would be a big migration in of itself.
Post reply on HN