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> "I'll never run IPv6 because it's different!" is a closed mind, and is just choosing to not even try to solve problems. Bit of a straw-man argument here. IP

> "I'll never run IPv6 because it's different!" is a closed mind, and is just choosing to not even try to solve problems. Bit of a straw-man argument here. IPv6 is intimidating to work with, even for experienced engineers, but I don't believe that "just because it's different" is the reason that people don't like working with it. IPv6 solves some real problems with IPv4, but also adds a lot of non-intuitive standards to an already complex system. On your point about "NPT better than NAT, so IPv6 = superior!" - which I don't instinctively agree with, it's just different. The fact is, NAT still exists and will for a long time. It's so commonplace that almost every house and office in the modern world that has internet uses a NAT gateway. People generally understand what a LAN is and can differentiate between a LAN and a WAN (or "the internet"). Even high school kids can set up LAN parties with little difficulty. Telling people that "Hey, all that stuff you've know about the internet, well, it's still going to exist, but also we are going to throw a new standard on top of it that is suuuuper non-intuitive to work with but it makes things awesomer because, just take my word for it!! If you don't like it, you're just closed minded" is extremely closed minded... Also, try telling your friend over the phone, "The IP for my Minecraft server is ff01:119c:19f9:aaaa:8ade: NO 8a DEEE EEE. Not C E... Ugh....nevermind" IPv6 is awesome in many ways, but it comes with a lot of frustrations to work with. Which I believe the author covered pretty well.

est31 6y ago
> "The IP for my Minecraft server is ff01:119c:19f9:aaaa:8ade: NO 8a DEEE EEE. Not C E... Ugh....nevermind" IMO ipv6 would have gotten far more adoption had they used a different assignment scheme: * Turn every ipv4 assignment into an ipv6 assignment by zero-extending to the left, i.e. 72.217.16.142 becomes ::72.217.16.142 * New addresses come from a new assignment ::2a00:0000:0000/96 which contains as much as the ipv4 space. So new addresses look like ::2a00:72.217.16.142. A little bit messier than ipv4, but still tidy mostly. In fact, this address syntax is a valid syntax variant of ipv6 addresses. These addresses are just not assigned today. Had we used this scheme instead of the current one with its extremely long addresses, we'd have had far greater adoption than now. Note: yes I'm aware of slight incompatibility issues between ipv6 and ipv4, like higher minimum MTU values of ipv6. I'm not suggesting a translation of ipv4 to ipv6 here, the hosts would still speak the two different protocols, but the assignment would match the ipv4 assignment.
- welterde 6y ago
  Then you are missing the chance to simplify things though. In IPv6 most ISPs (except very large ones) are assigned one /32, which they can then subdivide how it fits their network. Every LAN gets it's own /64 (now one could debate if that should be smaller or not) and one doesn't really have to think hard how many hosts one expects in that broadcast domain.. do I want a /26 or is a /28 enough? In addition in the IPv6 case you can get away with a single route in the routing table to reach all the networks of this ISP. Compare this to the IPv4 case where each ISP will have hundreds of /24s. Of course if one starts with multiple sites and traffic engineering that benefit goes away a bit, but still.. for most cases it does help with routing table fragmentation.
  - est31 6y ago
    Indeed the routing tables can be simplified with ipv6. However I believe that the current solution is optimized too much for routing tables, and not at all for end-user usability. You can modify my proposal to have multiple 16-bit prefixes to the 32-bit range syntax, and from that /80 range you give ASs depending on size a /104, /96, or /88, or something in between. That would still leave plenty of room for the ASs to distribute addresses to customers. Maybe customers could get /8s or such, with the option for bigger customers to get larger assignments. NAT on the router could be enabled by default, reserving the range for devices which explicitly request a publicly reachable address. Usually in most networks that number should be small.
    - miyuru 6y ago
      End users do not need easier IP address unless they host something. even then one can use address compressed address and DNS. The thing with IPv6 is it very different than IPv4, as such how we use it should not be compared with IPv4. My ISP gives /64 for CPE and the internal routing is very easily setuped. My devices in the hotspot has different IPv6 address, VMs have different IP address. The communication between the devices happen locally without any NAT.
- Dagger2 6y ago
  Every IPv4 address has its own IPv6 /48 automatically assigned to it. Forget getting more adoption, apparently it wasn't even enough to stop people from suggesting that v6 should've done something it already did!
johnklos 6y ago
> IPv6 is intimidating to work with, even for experienced engineers, but I don't believe that "just because it's different" is the reason that people don't like working with it. No, it's not. It has been around, in production, for TWENTY YEARS. If you didn't learn about it when you were learning IPv4 you're either old and should already have enough experience to know that new things come up, or you should've listened when everyone told you that attending ITT wasn't a good idea. "But MY company never deployed it!" Bad excuse. Your phone started using it years ago. If you're a network engineer and didn't realize that, nobody is going to feel bad for you. Not intuitive? The same can be said about most technologies. Without real examples, this means little. Can't phone a friend and give an IP address? I've literally never done this. We all use SMS, Messages, email, whatever, and anyone who does anything like run gaming servers knows about dynamic DNS services. Come up with some better complaints, please.
- kempbellt 6y ago
  > No, it's not. Apparently it is if we are still having this conversation after "TWENTY YEARS". Is there a particular reason that every aspect of your comment is toned with subversive rudeness and you made zero actual good points? Making snide comments about being "old" or how I "should've listened" and "no one is going to feel bad" really doesn't help anyone understand why IPv6 is all that great. > Come up with some better complaints, please. The author already listed several frustrations with the protocol. Feel free to read the article again if you'd like some examples. Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did. Also, mentioning dynamic DNS services at all in regards to trying to send an IP address to someone is yet another point to support why IPv6 is not an intuitive protocol to work with, even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends.
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    > Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did. This isn't down to the design of v6 though, it's down to two things: the design of v4, and human laziness. v4 isn't forwards compatible with a larger address space, so there's no way to magically integrate a larger address space with existing v4 nodes. All of the possible ways to make cross-compatibility easier are already available in v6. Updating the internet's L3 protocol is simply a hard problem with no real shortcuts. As for human laziness: v6 deployment didn't really start until 2013. Deployment was at 1% in 2013, and is at 30-35% today. People put it off until after the RIRs started running out of addresses to allocate, even at the cost of paying extra money to keep v4 working. This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem. > even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends. This isn't even possible in v4 for a lot of people today, due to v4 exhaustion. It's going to become less and less possible over time, as v4 exhaustion gets ever more acute. Even if we took at face value your claims that v6 is unintuitive (which I would disagree with), surely it's better to be able to set a gaming server up with v6 than to not be able to do it at all?
viraptor 6y ago
> try telling your friend over the phone You're both using computers at the time. Why not send a message and copy/paste the address instead?
- est31 6y ago
  It's just an example. Do you know the ipv6 address of your router? The fe80 one? Likely not. 10.0.0.1 is much easier to type.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    There are two scenarios though: a) you know the network and know you can rely on router.lan or whatever else the manual tells you, or b) you don't know the network and you'll have to check the gateway / route table anyway, so you can copy-paste. Or c) it's not a simple home network and you can design naming as you want / have routers documented. Sure, 10.0.0.1 is convenient, but my router changed from 10.0.0.1 to 10.1.1.1 with a firmware update. Not relying on remembering that IP would've been better.
  - miyuru 6y ago
    Thats why home routers has its own domain. mine is homerouter.cpe (this comes with the router) Also remembering IP address does not get you so far. the last company I worked at had a spreadsheet of IPv4 address of the Jenkins boxes that we managed.
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    fe80::1? Yeah, I know that. It's not hard to type either, although I don't really ever need to type it because v6 has a method to automatically configure the default route.
lopmotr 6y ago
> Also, try telling your friend over the phone, Try telling your friend a URL over the phone! They were designed to be human readable but they're usually far more impossible than IPv6 addresses. If you're going to complain about something, you should have an alternative solution in mind. Otherwise it might be possible that there really is no better way and nature just hates humans. Then your real complaint might be that humans are bad at long strings or there are too many devices on the internet or too many people in the world or whatever.
knorker 6y ago
I missed the word "NAT" once in my previous comment. IPv6 NAT exists. Works fine, if that's what you want. But also NPT is so much better. And/or enables several architectures with so much easier topology. > Also, try telling your friend over the phone, "The IP for my Minecraft server is ff01:119c:19f9:aaaa:8ade Why would you not use DNS? And even more: why would you use a phone? People don't call, anymore.

est31 6y ago

> "The IP for my Minecraft server is ff01:119c:19f9:aaaa:8ade: NO 8a DEEE EEE. Not C E... Ugh....nevermind" IMO ipv6 would have gotten far more adoption had they used a different assignment scheme: * Turn every ipv4 assignment into an ipv6 assignment by zero-extending to the left, i.e. 72.217.16.142 becomes ::72.217.16.142 * New addresses come from a new assignment ::2a00:0000:0000/96 which contains as much as the ipv4 space. So new addresses look like ::2a00:72.217.16.142. A little bit messier than ipv4, but still tidy mostly. In fact, this address syntax is a valid syntax variant of ipv6 addresses. These addresses are just not assigned today. Had we used this scheme instead of the current one with its extremely long addresses, we'd have had far greater adoption than now. Note: yes I'm aware of slight incompatibility issues between ipv6 and ipv4, like higher minimum MTU values of ipv6. I'm not suggesting a translation of ipv4 to ipv6 here, the hosts would still speak the two different protocols, but the assignment would match the ipv4 assignment.

welterde 6y ago
Then you are missing the chance to simplify things though. In IPv6 most ISPs (except very large ones) are assigned one /32, which they can then subdivide how it fits their network. Every LAN gets it's own /64 (now one could debate if that should be smaller or not) and one doesn't really have to think hard how many hosts one expects in that broadcast domain.. do I want a /26 or is a /28 enough? In addition in the IPv6 case you can get away with a single route in the routing table to reach all the networks of this ISP. Compare this to the IPv4 case where each ISP will have hundreds of /24s. Of course if one starts with multiple sites and traffic engineering that benefit goes away a bit, but still.. for most cases it does help with routing table fragmentation.
- est31 6y ago
  Indeed the routing tables can be simplified with ipv6. However I believe that the current solution is optimized too much for routing tables, and not at all for end-user usability. You can modify my proposal to have multiple 16-bit prefixes to the 32-bit range syntax, and from that /80 range you give ASs depending on size a /104, /96, or /88, or something in between. That would still leave plenty of room for the ASs to distribute addresses to customers. Maybe customers could get /8s or such, with the option for bigger customers to get larger assignments. NAT on the router could be enabled by default, reserving the range for devices which explicitly request a publicly reachable address. Usually in most networks that number should be small.
  - miyuru 6y ago
    End users do not need easier IP address unless they host something. even then one can use address compressed address and DNS. The thing with IPv6 is it very different than IPv4, as such how we use it should not be compared with IPv4. My ISP gives /64 for CPE and the internal routing is very easily setuped. My devices in the hotspot has different IPv6 address, VMs have different IP address. The communication between the devices happen locally without any NAT.
Dagger2 6y ago
Every IPv4 address has its own IPv6 /48 automatically assigned to it. Forget getting more adoption, apparently it wasn't even enough to stop people from suggesting that v6 should've done something it already did!

johnklos 6y ago

> IPv6 is intimidating to work with, even for experienced engineers, but I don't believe that "just because it's different" is the reason that people don't like working with it. No, it's not. It has been around, in production, for TWENTY YEARS. If you didn't learn about it when you were learning IPv4 you're either old and should already have enough experience to know that new things come up, or you should've listened when everyone told you that attending ITT wasn't a good idea. "But MY company never deployed it!" Bad excuse. Your phone started using it years ago. If you're a network engineer and didn't realize that, nobody is going to feel bad for you. Not intuitive? The same can be said about most technologies. Without real examples, this means little. Can't phone a friend and give an IP address? I've literally never done this. We all use SMS, Messages, email, whatever, and anyone who does anything like run gaming servers knows about dynamic DNS services. Come up with some better complaints, please.

kempbellt 6y ago
> No, it's not. Apparently it is if we are still having this conversation after "TWENTY YEARS". Is there a particular reason that every aspect of your comment is toned with subversive rudeness and you made zero actual good points? Making snide comments about being "old" or how I "should've listened" and "no one is going to feel bad" really doesn't help anyone understand why IPv6 is all that great. > Come up with some better complaints, please. The author already listed several frustrations with the protocol. Feel free to read the article again if you'd like some examples. Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did. Also, mentioning dynamic DNS services at all in regards to trying to send an IP address to someone is yet another point to support why IPv6 is not an intuitive protocol to work with, even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends.
- Dagger2 6y ago
  > Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did. This isn't down to the design of v6 though, it's down to two things: the design of v4, and human laziness. v4 isn't forwards compatible with a larger address space, so there's no way to magically integrate a larger address space with existing v4 nodes. All of the possible ways to make cross-compatibility easier are already available in v6. Updating the internet's L3 protocol is simply a hard problem with no real shortcuts. As for human laziness: v6 deployment didn't really start until 2013. Deployment was at 1% in 2013, and is at 30-35% today. People put it off until after the RIRs started running out of addresses to allocate, even at the cost of paying extra money to keep v4 working. This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem. > even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends. This isn't even possible in v4 for a lot of people today, due to v4 exhaustion. It's going to become less and less possible over time, as v4 exhaustion gets ever more acute. Even if we took at face value your claims that v6 is unintuitive (which I would disagree with), surely it's better to be able to set a gaming server up with v6 than to not be able to do it at all?

viraptor 6y ago

> try telling your friend over the phone You're both using computers at the time. Why not send a message and copy/paste the address instead?

est31 6y ago
It's just an example. Do you know the ipv6 address of your router? The fe80 one? Likely not. 10.0.0.1 is much easier to type.
- viraptor 6y ago
  There are two scenarios though: a) you know the network and know you can rely on router.lan or whatever else the manual tells you, or b) you don't know the network and you'll have to check the gateway / route table anyway, so you can copy-paste. Or c) it's not a simple home network and you can design naming as you want / have routers documented. Sure, 10.0.0.1 is convenient, but my router changed from 10.0.0.1 to 10.1.1.1 with a firmware update. Not relying on remembering that IP would've been better.
- miyuru 6y ago
  Thats why home routers has its own domain. mine is homerouter.cpe (this comes with the router) Also remembering IP address does not get you so far. the last company I worked at had a spreadsheet of IPv4 address of the Jenkins boxes that we managed.
- Dagger2 6y ago
  fe80::1? Yeah, I know that. It's not hard to type either, although I don't really ever need to type it because v6 has a method to automatically configure the default route.

lopmotr 6y ago

> Also, try telling your friend over the phone, Try telling your friend a URL over the phone! They were designed to be human readable but they're usually far more impossible than IPv6 addresses. If you're going to complain about something, you should have an alternative solution in mind. Otherwise it might be possible that there really is no better way and nature just hates humans. Then your real complaint might be that humans are bad at long strings or there are too many devices on the internet or too many people in the world or whatever.

knorker 6y ago

I missed the word "NAT" once in my previous comment. IPv6 NAT exists. Works fine, if that's what you want. But also NPT is so much better. And/or enables several architectures with so much easier topology. > Also, try telling your friend over the phone, "The IP for my Minecraft server is ff01:119c:19f9:aaaa:8ade Why would you not use DNS? And even more: why would you use a phone? People don't call, anymore.