7 ms·

Bernstein's rant shows its age. It kind of proves the reverse of what you are trying to state. The text starts with a question that undermines the whole text:

Bernstein's rant shows its age. It kind of proves the reverse of what you are trying to state. The text starts with a question that undermines the whole text: "does every node need direct Internet connection?". Today, with P2P traffic on the uprise, the answer is a striking Yes. If, even with the hurdles of poor performing NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client. The text then goes on about the impossible transition plan for IPv6. It's now obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6 traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic.

sillysaurus3 11y ago
It's happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6 traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic. It seems like this is another doomsday prediction. Evidence would make it persuasive.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 11y ago
  The article says growth has been by a factor of 2.5x every year (and is 10% now), and shows a very exponential-looking graph.
mirashii 11y ago
> No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic. The thing is, no sound company has to. No consumers have IPv6 only. Everyone is dual stack. By not deploying on IPv6, you don't lose a potential customer, you just make them use their existing IPv4 connection.
- danbolt 11y ago
  Too riff off geocar's parent comment, it's weird to think of a piece of network infrastructure needing a "killer app".
  - geocar 11y ago
    Convincing people to do things is hard. It may be that dealing with IP address exhaustion requires throwing away the Internet and creating a new Internet, but it must be accepted this is a tremendous ask. Finding a WIIFM[1] can help with that. [1]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=WIIFM http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=WIIFM
    - serge2k 11y ago
      > Convincing people to do things is hard more like convincing ISPs to do more than the bare minimum is hard.
- nextw33k 11y ago
  That's not entirely true though. IPv6 has been prioritised on various devices and Google taught us over a decade ago that response time makes the web experience feel better to the user. You'd better be on dual stack if you don't want your users to think the competitors feels faster/smoother. Otherwise you'll be the Yahoo of your market.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    Not true at all - the problem is that IPv6 routes are less mature and less monitored than IPv4 routes, so using v6 preferentially is actually often slower. I work with VOIP and we had to disable v6 for our customers because we were getting complaints about latency issues repeatedly from customers on v6. Disabled IPv6, no more complaints. IPv6 is more likely to make you "the Yahoo of your market" than the inverse, especially if you work in latency sensitive applications.
geocar 11y ago
> It's now obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's not obvious. A twenty-year deployment plan is a joke: Maybe this is the best they could come up with, but that doesn't convince me this was a good plan, or IPv8 should be modelled on this deployment. > No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4.
- sergiosgc 11y ago
  > It's not obvious. A twenty-year deployment plan is a joke: Maybe this is the best they could come up with, but that doesn't convince me this was a good plan, or IPv8 should be modelled on this deployment. It weren't broke, so nobody would ever fix it. A twenty year deployment period has no intrinsic problem, only philosophical ones. IPv6 was not needed, if not for the IPv4 exhaustion. When it became necessary, deployment started. > You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4. You read me wrong. I did not mean single stack IPv6. I meant dual stack IPv6/v4. The Internet is no longer IPv4 only. If it isn't clear to you yet, it will become so along the next 12-24 months.
JshWright 11y ago
> No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only There are a whole lot of "sound" companies using AWS, which has extremely limited (and in many cases nonexistent) IPv6 support.
- fulafel 11y ago
  Terminating the IPv6 connections in the load balancers is technically pretty primitive but covering "just" the IPv6 web clients in this way is adequate for most people using AWS. Here's eg Netflix on the subject (from 2012): http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/enabling-support-for-ipv6.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/enabling-support-for-ipv...
  - lflux 11y ago
    Except that only works in Classic and not VPC.
  - sandstrom 11y ago
    In practice, IPv6 isn't supported on AWS. See for example: https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-Web-Services-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-Web-Services-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-AWS-EC2-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-AWS-EC2-support-IPv6
    - fulafel 11y ago
      I see. Well, that sucks.
zanny 11y ago
You're going to hit a wall with every ISP in the US and any country whose major telecos don't give a shit. Fundamentally, why do they have to support ipv6? Especially when they have monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because the site v6 only the only loser is the website. I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job supporting v6, but now you have to get all ISPs to do it as well, and those ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve their customers well.
- lflux 11y ago
  Every? Comcast does IPv6 since a few years back.
- icehawk 11y ago
  Comcast has spoken a bit about why they're implementing IPv6. From: http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme... In the control plane, all devices need to be remotely managed, so NAT isn’t going to help us, nor is federated Net 10 islands… IPv6 is the clear solution for us.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    So they are managing devices inband as Sir Humphrey might say a "How very courageous"
    - X-Istence 11y ago
      The devices are set top boxes, modems and more. Those devices only have a single plug that plugs them into the network, technically it is all inband. It's only separated in that your cable modem gets a non-routable IPv6 address. It's non-routable within the internet but is a stock standard globally unique IP address. This is used for management purposes.
- 11y ago
rlpb 11y ago
> If, even with the hurdles of poor performing NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client. I think there's a fallacy here. IPv6 does not solve this problem. Even if all devices were IPv6, typical homes will still have a router that blocks incoming connections by default, even if it is now a deliberate stateful firewalling decision rather than a consequence of NAT. Firewalling P2P traffic effectively remains just as hard with IPv6 as with NAT. The only way to fix this currently is to either stop using firewalls (very dangerous in this era of never-security-updated IoT devices) or to use IPv6 equivalents of the same solutions the IPv4 NAT world has developed (NAT-PMP, uPnP, etc). The latter case won't improve anything in P2P connectivity using IPv6 over anything we have already with IPv4 NAT.
- zeroxfe 11y ago
  This is not correct, there are many ways to do this without resorting to NAT hacks like uPnP. For example, ISPs hand out entire /64 per customer (at a minimum, almost all will give you larger subnets if you ask). This allows you to have a separate IP address per application, which can be allocated from an unfirewalled pool. There's also the fact that almost all major OSs now come with sane firewall defaults, also allowing applications to punch holes via APIs. (You could also have done this with IPv4 if it had a larger address space.) If you spend some time thinking about how to solve these problems with IPv6, you will find that there are lots of ways to do it that are simpler and far more secure.
  - rlpb 11y ago
    None of the solutions you suggest exist today, to my knowledge. Am I wrong? For example, a single IP address per application would be fine, but there is no protocol that allows me to allocate addresses per application on a central home router such that I can then identify them to permit them individually. And applications punching holes via APIs does exist in uPnP and NAT-PMP, but isn't that the same thing as what you dismissed above as a hack?
    - zeroxfe 11y ago
echochar 11y ago
"The text starts with a question... "does every node need a direct Internet connection?"" I do not see the word "direct" in any part of the rant. Am I missing something? Are you sure that is what he meant? The text reads "do these computers really need to be on the Internet?" Indeed an internetwork like any other network should be symmetric but I am not sure adpoting IPv6 is the only way to achieve that. Nor that adoption of IPv6 would be used for that purpose. Instead I see asymmetric, data collection motivated ideas like "Internet of Things" being put forth as "the way of the future". Such ill advised ideas would more likley be the justification for using IPv6. Do all these "things" (computers) need to be on the Internet?
- woah 11y ago
  You're making some argument for a restricted address space? Why?
  - echochar 11y ago
    "You're making some argument..." Not that I know of. There's an argument, not made by me, that some IoT is foolish to which I alluded. Is that what you mean?
rconti 11y ago
For a pedantic asshole, DJB is on an awfully high horse here, bitching about interoperability and complexity, while his own tinydns/dnscache require a separate fucking utility to convert time/date stamps and IP addresses from hex into something actual people actually understand.

sillysaurus3 11y ago

It's happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6 traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic. It seems like this is another doomsday prediction. Evidence would make it persuasive.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lmm 11y ago
The article says growth has been by a factor of 2.5x every year (and is 10% now), and shows a very exponential-looking graph.

mirashii 11y ago

> No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic. The thing is, no sound company has to. No consumers have IPv6 only. Everyone is dual stack. By not deploying on IPv6, you don't lose a potential customer, you just make them use their existing IPv4 connection.

danbolt 11y ago
Too riff off geocar's parent comment, it's weird to think of a piece of network infrastructure needing a "killer app".
- geocar 11y ago
  Convincing people to do things is hard. It may be that dealing with IP address exhaustion requires throwing away the Internet and creating a new Internet, but it must be accepted this is a tremendous ask. Finding a WIIFM[1] can help with that. [1]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=WIIFM http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=WIIFM
  - serge2k 11y ago
    > Convincing people to do things is hard more like convincing ISPs to do more than the bare minimum is hard.
nextw33k 11y ago
That's not entirely true though. IPv6 has been prioritised on various devices and Google taught us over a decade ago that response time makes the web experience feel better to the user. You'd better be on dual stack if you don't want your users to think the competitors feels faster/smoother. Otherwise you'll be the Yahoo of your market.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Not true at all - the problem is that IPv6 routes are less mature and less monitored than IPv4 routes, so using v6 preferentially is actually often slower. I work with VOIP and we had to disable v6 for our customers because we were getting complaints about latency issues repeatedly from customers on v6. Disabled IPv6, no more complaints. IPv6 is more likely to make you "the Yahoo of your market" than the inverse, especially if you work in latency sensitive applications.

geocar 11y ago

> It's now obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's not obvious. A twenty-year deployment plan is a joke: Maybe this is the best they could come up with, but that doesn't convince me this was a good plan, or IPv8 should be modelled on this deployment. > No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4.

sergiosgc 11y ago
> It's not obvious. A twenty-year deployment plan is a joke: Maybe this is the best they could come up with, but that doesn't convince me this was a good plan, or IPv8 should be modelled on this deployment. It weren't broke, so nobody would ever fix it. A twenty year deployment period has no intrinsic problem, only philosophical ones. IPv6 was not needed, if not for the IPv4 exhaustion. When it became necessary, deployment started. > You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4. You read me wrong. I did not mean single stack IPv6. I meant dual stack IPv6/v4. The Internet is no longer IPv4 only. If it isn't clear to you yet, it will become so along the next 12-24 months.

JshWright 11y ago

> No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only There are a whole lot of "sound" companies using AWS, which has extremely limited (and in many cases nonexistent) IPv6 support.

fulafel 11y ago
Terminating the IPv6 connections in the load balancers is technically pretty primitive but covering "just" the IPv6 web clients in this way is adequate for most people using AWS. Here's eg Netflix on the subject (from 2012): http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/enabling-support-for-ipv6.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/enabling-support-for-ipv...
- lflux 11y ago
  Except that only works in Classic and not VPC.
- sandstrom 11y ago
  In practice, IPv6 isn't supported on AWS. See for example: https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-Web-Services-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-Web-Services-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-AWS-EC2-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-AWS-EC2-support-IPv6
  - fulafel 11y ago
    I see. Well, that sucks.

zanny 11y ago

You're going to hit a wall with every ISP in the US and any country whose major telecos don't give a shit. Fundamentally, why do they have to support ipv6? Especially when they have monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because the site v6 only the only loser is the website. I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job supporting v6, but now you have to get all ISPs to do it as well, and those ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve their customers well.

lflux 11y ago
Every? Comcast does IPv6 since a few years back.
icehawk 11y ago
Comcast has spoken a bit about why they're implementing IPv6. From: http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme... In the control plane, all devices need to be remotely managed, so NAT isn’t going to help us, nor is federated Net 10 islands… IPv6 is the clear solution for us.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  So they are managing devices inband as Sir Humphrey might say a "How very courageous"
  - X-Istence 11y ago
    The devices are set top boxes, modems and more. Those devices only have a single plug that plugs them into the network, technically it is all inband. It's only separated in that your cable modem gets a non-routable IPv6 address. It's non-routable within the internet but is a stock standard globally unique IP address. This is used for management purposes.
11y ago

rlpb 11y ago

> If, even with the hurdles of poor performing NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client. I think there's a fallacy here. IPv6 does not solve this problem. Even if all devices were IPv6, typical homes will still have a router that blocks incoming connections by default, even if it is now a deliberate stateful firewalling decision rather than a consequence of NAT. Firewalling P2P traffic effectively remains just as hard with IPv6 as with NAT. The only way to fix this currently is to either stop using firewalls (very dangerous in this era of never-security-updated IoT devices) or to use IPv6 equivalents of the same solutions the IPv4 NAT world has developed (NAT-PMP, uPnP, etc). The latter case won't improve anything in P2P connectivity using IPv6 over anything we have already with IPv4 NAT.

zeroxfe 11y ago
This is not correct, there are many ways to do this without resorting to NAT hacks like uPnP. For example, ISPs hand out entire /64 per customer (at a minimum, almost all will give you larger subnets if you ask). This allows you to have a separate IP address per application, which can be allocated from an unfirewalled pool. There's also the fact that almost all major OSs now come with sane firewall defaults, also allowing applications to punch holes via APIs. (You could also have done this with IPv4 if it had a larger address space.) If you spend some time thinking about how to solve these problems with IPv6, you will find that there are lots of ways to do it that are simpler and far more secure.
- rlpb 11y ago
  None of the solutions you suggest exist today, to my knowledge. Am I wrong? For example, a single IP address per application would be fine, but there is no protocol that allows me to allocate addresses per application on a central home router such that I can then identify them to permit them individually. And applications punching holes via APIs does exist in uPnP and NAT-PMP, but isn't that the same thing as what you dismissed above as a hack?
  - zeroxfe 11y ago

echochar 11y ago

"The text starts with a question... "does every node need a direct Internet connection?"" I do not see the word "direct" in any part of the rant. Am I missing something? Are you sure that is what he meant? The text reads "do these computers really need to be on the Internet?" Indeed an internetwork like any other network should be symmetric but I am not sure adpoting IPv6 is the only way to achieve that. Nor that adoption of IPv6 would be used for that purpose. Instead I see asymmetric, data collection motivated ideas like "Internet of Things" being put forth as "the way of the future". Such ill advised ideas would more likley be the justification for using IPv6. Do all these "things" (computers) need to be on the Internet?

woah 11y ago
You're making some argument for a restricted address space? Why?
- echochar 11y ago
  "You're making some argument..." Not that I know of. There's an argument, not made by me, that some IoT is foolish to which I alluded. Is that what you mean?

rconti 11y ago

For a pedantic asshole, DJB is on an awfully high horse here, bitching about interoperability and complexity, while his own tinydns/dnscache require a separate fucking utility to convert time/date stamps and IP addresses from hex into something actual people actually understand.