4 ms·

The more optimistic of us really did think we'd all be using IPv6 by 2006.

SilverRed 6y ago
The funny thing is Telegram just ran in to the issue where the 32bit user id column was about to overflow but overnight it went from 32bit to 64bit. No decades of waiting and hacks. Just goes to show how hard it is to make any kind of change without a central authority.
- munk-a 6y ago
  That is a very, very different situation - it's highly likely that the values from that column are generally being read out into numeric-ish typed variables that default to using 64 bits of storage anyways. Additionally, they can actually see and potentially review all of the code using that value and adjust it as necessary. The central authority doesn't hurt but this is really an apples to elephants comparison.
- astrea 6y ago
  One is global infrastructure with billions of users to appease making a potentially breaking change that the end user directly sees. The other is an app used by a order of magnitude less users simply changing int to int64 in their code and rolling over some databases.
- topranks 6y ago
  Yeah. It’d never be as easy to convert a decentralised system like the internet to a new protocol. That said, simply increasing the IP address field size in the header would have been a lot simpler and been easy to upgrade. A big part of the IPv6 story is how they made so many changes there is a relatively steep learning curve to adopt. And NAT etc gave us another way not to.
arpa 6y ago
And if ipv6 weren't balls to the wall insane with the only goal of being as different as possible from v4, we would have. But we have what we have.
- Dagger2 6y ago
  It's actually very similar to v4, just with more bits. It has an identical network model to v4: routing and address assignment work the same way. It works over the same L2 links as v4, and L4 protocols like TCP and UDP all work the same. DNS is the same. The socket API is the same. Link-local addresses exist in v4 too, and v4 even had router advertisements already before v6 was even out. If they intended v6 to be as different as possible to v4, they wouldn't have designed it to work mostly like v4 with bigger addresses. They could've given it variable length addresses, or a locator/identifier split, or any number of other useful features that would've made it different to v4... but they didn't.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- shaicoleman 6y ago
  "The world in which IPv6 was a good design" (long read) dives into why it was designed that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324
  - arpa 6y ago
    Thanks!
- arpa 6y ago
  Hm. Perhaps better put it this way: if the adoption would be as simple as changing 4bytes to 6, we would be using it for 20 years already.

The funny thing is Telegram just ran in to the issue where the 32bit user id column was about to overflow but overnight it went from 32bit to 64bit. No decades of waiting and hacks. Just goes to show how hard it is to make any kind of change without a central authority.

munk-a 6y ago
That is a very, very different situation - it's highly likely that the values from that column are generally being read out into numeric-ish typed variables that default to using 64 bits of storage anyways. Additionally, they can actually see and potentially review all of the code using that value and adjust it as necessary. The central authority doesn't hurt but this is really an apples to elephants comparison.
astrea 6y ago
One is global infrastructure with billions of users to appease making a potentially breaking change that the end user directly sees. The other is an app used by a order of magnitude less users simply changing int to int64 in their code and rolling over some databases.
topranks 6y ago
Yeah. It’d never be as easy to convert a decentralised system like the internet to a new protocol. That said, simply increasing the IP address field size in the header would have been a lot simpler and been easy to upgrade. A big part of the IPv6 story is how they made so many changes there is a relatively steep learning curve to adopt. And NAT etc gave us another way not to.

arpa 6y ago

And if ipv6 weren't balls to the wall insane with the only goal of being as different as possible from v4, we would have. But we have what we have.

Dagger2 6y ago
It's actually very similar to v4, just with more bits. It has an identical network model to v4: routing and address assignment work the same way. It works over the same L2 links as v4, and L4 protocols like TCP and UDP all work the same. DNS is the same. The socket API is the same. Link-local addresses exist in v4 too, and v4 even had router advertisements already before v6 was even out. If they intended v6 to be as different as possible to v4, they wouldn't have designed it to work mostly like v4 with bigger addresses. They could've given it variable length addresses, or a locator/identifier split, or any number of other useful features that would've made it different to v4... but they didn't.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
shaicoleman 6y ago
"The world in which IPv6 was a good design" (long read) dives into why it was designed that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324
- arpa 6y ago
  Thanks!
arpa 6y ago
Hm. Perhaps better put it this way: if the adoption would be as simple as changing 4bytes to 6, we would be using it for 20 years already.