4 ms·

But v6 works fine as a "v4 with more bits" - Maybe some of the new features are underused, but they don't get in the way either or hinder deployment.

EarthLaunch 6y ago
> just
- fulafel 6y ago
  Well, nobody knew which new features would work out. I think looking back the bet on features that would pay off in saner network architectures are still quite defensible and some will likely pay off in the future when we move on from the dual stack norm.
magicalhippo 6y ago
No, it really doesn't. The whole point of v6 was no more NAT. The consequence is that a prefix change is a major event. The original designers imagined the prefix to be eternal. Reality, predictably, turned out to be quite different. Sure there are ways to deal with this, but it's far from "v4 with more bits".
- avian 6y ago
  This. ISP treating delegated prefixes the same way as a dynamic IP in IPv4 (as in, change it often and randomly) is one of my major pains as a user of IPv6. The whole network stack is very bad at handling this - it results in a very annoying, semi-broken network where things kind of work, but not really: hosts on local network might be reachable or not, depending on when they get the prefix change and adjust their global addresses accordingly. Hosts further uplink might be reachable or not, depending on when and in what sequence the ISP's routers get notified of the change. It's a nightmare if you want to have any kind of reliable connectivity.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I agree this is a major pain, however... fd00::/7 (technically fc00::/7 but IIRC the lower half is reserved) is supposed to be used for all local addresses and is equivalent to the private reserved ranges in IPv4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address Getting connections to actually get MADE on the ULA first rather than a global address and to handle firewall rules... now THAT is the actual PITA.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ghaff 6y ago
    As I understood it back in the day--which is how long IPv6 has been floating around--one of the whole ideas was that every smart dust mote or whatever would have its own fixed IP address. I'm not sure many people were thinking much about multi-tier edge architectures. There were central servers, maybe PCs, and then "things." And those things were going to exist in very large numbers and needed IP addresses.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    If your ISP is swapping prefixes on you without warning (vs giving you lifetimes and chance to deprecate old addresses) then they are providing bad v6 service and you should complain loudly. That said, it's still no worse than what you get with v4...
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  > The whole point of v6 was no more NAT. But people like the NAT. I'd guess it's the only part of networking that gives people a warm and nice feeling; it appeals to our senses of ownership and security.
  - namibj 6y ago
    No, they like the firewall. NAT is a thing that creates real problems, for example inhibiting low-latency video calls.
    - iso1210 6y ago
      I run video with sub-100ms latency through multiple nats.
      - Dagger2 6y ago
        Have a cookie. 100ms isn't that low, and those NATs are introducing additional latency and complexity that don't need to exist. If both sides are behind NAT then you may well need to relay the connection through a third party server, introducing even more cost, complexity and latency and involving an otherwise-unnecessary third party. "I managed to get something working" doesn't invalidate any of that.
        iso1210 6y ago
        100ms is very low for doing decent compression and decompression. Network latency added by natting is microseconds. Imagine I had a public IP - no natting involved. How would my video client tell my stateful firewall to allow a new incoming connection from the calling device?
        namibj 6y ago
        The issue isn't the NAT itself, it's the inhibition of P2P connections (to a further extend, spontaneous queries for distributed routing technologies like seen in IPFS, but those are just preventing full decentralization). Once you have to bounce the data through a hosted proxy, you're forcing no less than 10 ms on to the users (of course there are rare exceptions for users really close to your proxy).
- fulafel 6y ago
  The designers didn't imagine the prefix to be eternal, that's why there's a lot of support for automatic renumbering (address lifetimes with concurrent deprecated and active addresses, with support for this built into address autoconfiguration mechanisms like dhcpv6 and slaac from the start, etc). So it's better than "v4 with more bits".

EarthLaunch 6y ago

> just

fulafel 6y ago
Well, nobody knew which new features would work out. I think looking back the bet on features that would pay off in saner network architectures are still quite defensible and some will likely pay off in the future when we move on from the dual stack norm.

magicalhippo 6y ago

No, it really doesn't. The whole point of v6 was no more NAT. The consequence is that a prefix change is a major event. The original designers imagined the prefix to be eternal. Reality, predictably, turned out to be quite different. Sure there are ways to deal with this, but it's far from "v4 with more bits".

avian 6y ago
This. ISP treating delegated prefixes the same way as a dynamic IP in IPv4 (as in, change it often and randomly) is one of my major pains as a user of IPv6. The whole network stack is very bad at handling this - it results in a very annoying, semi-broken network where things kind of work, but not really: hosts on local network might be reachable or not, depending on when they get the prefix change and adjust their global addresses accordingly. Hosts further uplink might be reachable or not, depending on when and in what sequence the ISP's routers get notified of the change. It's a nightmare if you want to have any kind of reliable connectivity.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I agree this is a major pain, however... fd00::/7 (technically fc00::/7 but IIRC the lower half is reserved) is supposed to be used for all local addresses and is equivalent to the private reserved ranges in IPv4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address Getting connections to actually get MADE on the ULA first rather than a global address and to handle firewall rules... now THAT is the actual PITA.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  As I understood it back in the day--which is how long IPv6 has been floating around--one of the whole ideas was that every smart dust mote or whatever would have its own fixed IP address. I'm not sure many people were thinking much about multi-tier edge architectures. There were central servers, maybe PCs, and then "things." And those things were going to exist in very large numbers and needed IP addresses.
- fulafel 6y ago
  If your ISP is swapping prefixes on you without warning (vs giving you lifetimes and chance to deprecate old addresses) then they are providing bad v6 service and you should complain loudly. That said, it's still no worse than what you get with v4...
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> The whole point of v6 was no more NAT. But people like the NAT. I'd guess it's the only part of networking that gives people a warm and nice feeling; it appeals to our senses of ownership and security.
- namibj 6y ago
  No, they like the firewall. NAT is a thing that creates real problems, for example inhibiting low-latency video calls.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    I run video with sub-100ms latency through multiple nats.
    - Dagger2 6y ago
      Have a cookie. 100ms isn't that low, and those NATs are introducing additional latency and complexity that don't need to exist. If both sides are behind NAT then you may well need to relay the connection through a third party server, introducing even more cost, complexity and latency and involving an otherwise-unnecessary third party. "I managed to get something working" doesn't invalidate any of that.
      - iso1210 6y ago
        100ms is very low for doing decent compression and decompression. Network latency added by natting is microseconds. Imagine I had a public IP - no natting involved. How would my video client tell my stateful firewall to allow a new incoming connection from the calling device?
        namibj 6y ago
        The issue isn't the NAT itself, it's the inhibition of P2P connections (to a further extend, spontaneous queries for distributed routing technologies like seen in IPFS, but those are just preventing full decentralization). Once you have to bounce the data through a hosted proxy, you're forcing no less than 10 ms on to the users (of course there are rare exceptions for users really close to your proxy).
fulafel 6y ago
The designers didn't imagine the prefix to be eternal, that's why there's a lot of support for automatic renumbering (address lifetimes with concurrent deprecated and active addresses, with support for this built into address autoconfiguration mechanisms like dhcpv6 and slaac from the start, etc). So it's better than "v4 with more bits".