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The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

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Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#81
post #24
post #5

35% worldwide by population of users in random samples at APNIC: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/XA US on 50%, India on 70% and China just shy of 40% -As China continues to grow (and it will) the likely outcome is > 50% IPv6 Capable. I doubt any new Mobile deployment will be single stack, the most likely is pure IPv6 with CGN for 4. So Africa which is still in growth, the most likely outcome is dualstack preferring…

There will be no larger MTU, this battle is lost. 1500 will live forever. If it makes you feel better, think about it as if Ethernet packets are just oversized ATM cells. Solving PMTU problem would have required reifying the MTU to the IP layer. It could have been done like this: 1. Use a 16-bit field in the non-checksummed portion of the IP header. Initially this field is set to the MTU of the link that originates t…

If you don't do 2, you can have 3) if the packet is too big, just truncate it.

If the destination gets a packet that isn't as big as it says in the header, it was truncated, and the MTU is the size of the packet it received.

Even easier!

You still really should occasionally probe up, in case the path changed, but that's not very well done today either.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#82

About a year ago I started the IPv6 migration for my home network (2 Remote sites, connected via IPSEC, with 10 VLANs (subnets) and about 70 devices, 10 people). - I started on one side of the IPSEC, where I have an OPNsense - there were like 5 updates of OPNsense in the last year where different IPv6 issues were fixed (and others have been introduced). - my ISP only hands out /64-Prefixes, and these are also dynamic…

You're comparing two remote sites linked by IPv4 NAT to distributing IPv6 from a /64 (which was never meant to be subdivided) which is dynamic..

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#83
post #79
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it didn't work. Other than already mentioned issues of hardware, you also had for years the issue of lots of applications requiring substantial rewrite to support another protocol due to use of BSD Sockets which leaked protocol internals up to application layer. It was a very big and vocal issue about porting to v6 even in early 2000s despite BSD Sockets finally getting a new API (lifted from the Streams-based XT…

> you also had for years the issue of lots of applications requiring substantial rewrite to support another protocol due to use of BSD Sockets Past tense? I still regularly see code that uses BSD sockets and doesn't support IPv6. Actually, I feel like among C and C++ codebases that make direct TCP or UDP connections, the majority are IPv4-only, even in 2023. Though, direct TCP and UDP connections themselves are less…

Past tense on have to write two complete code paths to support v4 and v6 at the same time.

Today we have getaddrinfo, so if you're writing from scratch you can just use that, you can also simplify older code with it and get v6 at the same time.

But there's a lot of old code that still doesn't use GAI and was never upgraded.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#84
post #82

About a year ago I started the IPv6 migration for my home network (2 Remote sites, connected via IPSEC, with 10 VLANs (subnets) and about 70 devices, 10 people). - I started on one side of the IPSEC, where I have an OPNsense - there were like 5 updates of OPNsense in the last year where different IPv6 issues were fixed (and others have been introduced). - my ISP only hands out /64-Prefixes, and these are also dynamic…

You're comparing two remote sites linked by IPv4 NAT to distributing IPv6 from a /64 (which was never meant to be subdivided) which is dynamic..

Yes, I know - but as the article mentions, it is not possible to "deprecate" IPv4 yet. I need both. And during this "migration phase", both IPv4+IPv6 must work alongside each other, which frankly speaking, I haven't yet managed to accomplish.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#85
post #78
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.

IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed. https://w…

Residential broadband has been getting v6 too. It saves money and provides added functionalityfor the same reasons as on mobile. And academic/research networks got there first long time ago. Corporate envirments seem the biggest holdout.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#86
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv4 addresses are getting increasingly expensive. And being behind an ISP’s NAT is terrible. I don’t want to share an IP with my street. It should be easy to run little network servers at home without worrying about reverse proxies or upnp or whatever nonsense we need today to make the network work. There’s plenty of numbers out there. Ipv6 lets my house have a whole subnet of them. It’s good.

I don't believe that they're expensive when I can rent VPS for few dollars per month. They might be more expensive than 10 years ago, but this cost is shared among all people behind NAT, so in the end it must be a rounding error. Running servers at home is a good thing to have, but I doubt that ISP cares much about users running servers at home. Users watch youtube and netflix. That's what they optimize for.

The version 4 address is now a substantial cost when renting a server. It starts getting billed separately, so you can drop it if you don't need it.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#88
post #80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eyeball networks are vastly different from content networks. Even among the tinkerer "homelab" and HN crowds, it is rare to host content from the same connection/address you browse from.

You're confusing cause and effect. They're very different precisely because of hacky nonsense like NAT.

How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall? You never want to have a policy where incoming connections/UDP streams are permitted by default to reach any random device on the network, regardless of whether that device has a routable IP or not.

Now, CGNAT is a different beast and more worrisome from that point of view.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#89
post #65
post #20

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alternatively IPv4 is a mountain of small hacks, which is its biggest strength. We could have done a lot of good by adopting proposals to extend v4 like 0/8 and class D, but instead the decision was made to collectively drown the babies in the bathwater and insist…

It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.

I'm worried about the long tail. IPv6 won't actually be useful until more or less everything supports v6; as long as there are enough clients which don't support v6 servers need v4, and as long as there are enough servers which don't support v6 clients need v4. And until we can start disabling v4, v6 gives no advantage and only causes significant added complexity.

I'm worried that the time when we can start removing v4 and therefore see the actual advantage of v6 won't be here for at least a hundred years, optimistically.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

#90
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing two remote sites linked by IPv4 NAT to distributing IPv6 from a /64 (which was never meant to be subdivided) which is dynamic..

Yes, I know - but as the article mentions, it is not possible to "deprecate" IPv4 yet. I need both. And during this "migration phase", both IPv4+IPv6 must work alongside each other, which frankly speaking, I haven't yet managed to accomplish.

Well, tbh dual-stack is enabled in 70% of France's customers for example.

If you start with a solid base (having a fixed IPv6 /56 delegation for example), or at least a dynamic allocation with IPv6-PD, then you'll see that it's way easier than IPv4 in the long end

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