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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)

#91

Post by api »

mike_d wrote: post #78
fulafel wrote: 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 often has it too. The laggards are corporate networks and cloud where IT is ultra conservative and “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.”

The only thing that will make corporate environments change is if something they need starts requiring it, and not a second before.

Cloud is slowly getting it. Slowly. GitHub still doesn’t have it though, which makes pure v6 nodes annoying for a lot of use cases.

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

#93

Post by mkl »

fulafel wrote: post #65
mike_d wrote: 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.

It spikes up 3-5 percentage points every weekend. Presumably mobile use goes up and computer use goes down.

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

#94

Post by Helmut10001 »

Faaak wrote: post #90
Helmut10001 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I already get a headache when thinking of configuring firewall rules with a dynamic prefix for all my hosts.

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

#95

Post by OccamsMirror »

mort96 wrote: post #89
fulafel wrote: 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.

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…

I think you’ll find the real transition to be a lot quicker than that. All it takes is one of the big companies drawing a line in the sand because they’re unable to buy enough IP addresses, so they finally take a stand. Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

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

#96

Post by lproven »

I have several times cited it as a key article, more insightful than almost anything else I've ever read about IPv6, but I concede it is overlong and unclear and needs more illustrations. (Which, as a technical writer myself, I generally regard as a crutch.)

I think the core argument can be summarised as this:

1. IPv6 is flawed because it has 2 main layers, but it needed 3.

2. It understands physical addresses, and it has its own logical addresses.

3. But it really needed another layer in between them: a virtual translation/mapping layer.

4. Crucially, it lacks this. As such it is not better enough than IPv4 to ever totally replace IPv4.

5. But apenwarr proposes that it is, in essence, possible to fake this using QUIC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC 6. Using this, it's possible to fake what IPv6 should have had but didn't, and get some of the benefits at the cost of more work.

7. However IPv6 remains doomed to never totally replace IPv4.

Boiling that down to 2 key points:

Point A: IPv6 is broken because it didn't go far enough; its mapping model is fundamentally inadequate.

Point B: It's OK, here's how we can work around that, but it doesn't fix the problem & never will.

And generalising from that argument, my take is this:

Butler Lampson said: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection."

David Wheeler pointed out: "… except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."

The corollary of this is: it is imperative to closely track how many layers of indirection you have.

Too many is bad, but arguably, not enough is worse.

With too many, you get inefficiency, but you can nonetheless get the job done. But with too few, you might not usefully be able to do the job at all.

IPv6 did not have enough, and so failed to achieve its primary goal.

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

#97

Post by peterfirefly »

mort96 wrote: post #89
fulafel wrote: 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.

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…

It has one huge advantage: larger address space.

(Which we could have had with a minor tweak of IPv4 instead.)

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

#98

Post by Sesse__ »

greyface- wrote: post #46
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire countries still do not have IPv6. Ukraine for example.

There is some IPv6 adoption in Ukraine. https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/UA

Funny enough, when I measured IPv6 readiness/use in the world for the very first time (2008), Ukraine was on top. IIRC it moved to third as we got more data, but it still was a very surprising result.

We found out much later that the reason was that Opera had broken RFC3484 handling and prioritized 6to4 way too high (which skewed the results), and Opera was popular in Ukraine at the time. :-)

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

#99

Post by mort96 »

peterfirefly wrote: post #97
mort96 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It has one huge advantage: larger address space. (Which we could have had with a minor tweak of IPv4 instead.)

The larger address space is only an advantage if we don't need a v4 address. The situation "I need a v4 address" is not worse than the situation "I need a v4 address and a v6 address".

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

#100

Post by exabrial »

One thing I’ve realized lately is that scarcity is actually a benefit of ipv4, much in the way of the maximum amount of bitcoins theoretically increases their value.

Ipv4 addresses are being ranked by their reputation. This is a good thing, at least right now, as it makes scammers/spammers/hackers/ddosers lives more expensive to acquire fresh addresses. This can only exist when a shortage exists.

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