IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4 • Hacker News Board

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#51

Post by Volundr » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

throw0101b wrote: post #38

batch12 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10.0.0.0/8 runs out pretty quick 16,777,216 containers, wow.

>> 10.0.0.0/8 runs out pretty quick > 16,777,216 containers, wow. Have you ever been involved in a corporate merger? IP conflicts are a huge pain point. Quite often you have to NAT with-in the company itself because the acquirer and acquiree are both using 10/8.

This was literally why we went IPv6 in a previous company. We were acquiring other companies like crazy and it and the conflicts were constant pain where we'd either have to re-IP a location (Active Directory does not like) or do internal facing NATs and DNS weirdness (AD also not a big fan).

We quickly discovered it was easier to get the new location up and running on IPv6 and mesh that so all inter-office traffic was IPv6 rather than resolving the conflicts. Sure you couldn't reach the printer in Boise from New York because it was IPv4 only, but for the stuff normal users were doing it worked great.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#52

Post by ryandvm » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #48

ryandvm wrote: post #44

IPv6 and Python 3 are case studies in How to Not Upgrade Something. They basically created entirely different products that provided a marginal immediate benefit to the users and then said "upgrade whenever you get around to it". They are both now in the 2nd decade of their upgrade cycle. PowerPC->Intel, Xbox/PlayStation emulation, x86 32-bit>64-bit, and Java are all technologies that had successful upgrade strategie…

> IPv6 and Python 3 are case studies in How to Not Upgrade Something. There was no other way to do it with IPv6: IPv4 has 32-bits of address space and >32 was needed for more addresses. That 32-bits is hard-coded in data structures, APIs, and even DNS formats (e.g., A records). So regardless of anything else related to IPv6 (ARP vs ND), you would have still needed to release a bunch of code that had to be installed o…

I won't be so brazen as to suggest I could have done any better, but the claim that never actually completing the upgrade was the only way is a bit too hand wavy I think.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#53

Post by throw0101a » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 6:11 PM UTC

ryandvm wrote: post #52

throw0101a wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPv6 and Python 3 are case studies in How to Not Upgrade Something. There was no other way to do it with IPv6: IPv4 has 32-bits of address space and >32 was needed for more addresses. That 32-bits is hard-coded in data structures, APIs, and even DNS formats (e.g., A records). So regardless of anything else related to IPv6 (ARP vs ND), you would have still needed to release a bunch of code that had to be installed o…

I won't be so brazen as to suggest I could have done any better, but the claim that never actually completing the upgrade was the only way is a bit too hand wavy I think.

> […] but the claim that never actually completing the upgrade was the only way is a bit too hand wavy I think.

Is it accurate to think of it as an "upgrade" versus "addition"? It's not like HTTP 1.1 went away just because HTTP 3/QUIC came around.

HTTP 3 may have certain useful features, but lots of folks do need/care about them and so may never activate it (at least on purpose, unless Apache/Nginx have them default-on). This thinking may not add much burden to the rest of the Internet for that protocol.

Whereas not supporting IPv6 can add burdens to others:

> Our [American Indian] tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.

* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...

* Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624

Getting people to follow new standards and follow best practices can be more difficult than herding cats.

Re: IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4

#54

Post by hashhar » Thu, Oct 24, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #28

vetinari wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the ISPs, that pretty much killed the IPv6 with their mishandled transition. Where I'm, I can choose 1 out of 1 broadband provider available in the area. With this provider, I can either have a public IPv4 address (or several) with their CPE in bridge mode, or DS-Lite, with IPv4 CGNAT without PCP and /64 for the IPv6 addresses (i.e. no address space for subnets, no prefix distribution) AND having to use their r…

Are you sure about this? It’s in the rfc from like 1998 that ISPs should allow customers to sla for larger prefixes. I don’t know a single US isp that doesn’t allow at least a 56. IPv6 is pointless and still a security risk but I’m guessing you’re misconfiguring something.

Yes, a lot of ISPs do this even after I try to write to them explaining why it doesn't make sense. My ISP is Airtel in India, they very recently started assigning IPv6 at all but it's a single /64 only.

The other big one I know, Jio (from Reliance) also offers just a single /64.