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IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. IPv4 isn’t a huge issue but it sucks that so much of the internet is dependent on

IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. IPv4 isn’t a huge issue but it sucks that so much of the internet is dependent on cloud providers because it’s the simplest way to get a public IP address. The decentralized web didn’t happen, in part, because of this. Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address. We’ll never know what tiny services could have blown up if people didn’t hit this wall. I started off with computers by hosting garrysmod servers. My brother started off with computers by hosting a website dedicated to the digital tv switchover in Wisconsin (lol). This was only possible because my dad was a software engineer and paid a bit extra to get us 5 dedicated IP addresses. If he didn’t understand that, who knows what me or my brother would be doing today. Anyway, I say IPv6.

fy20 5y ago
> the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address VPS providers such as Linode were around at the time, and they weren't that expensive. $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. Or you just get shared PHP hosting which would have been cheaper or even free (with ads injected). And much simpler to deploy than today, just FTP the files and boom it's live. If you were lucky, your host had cPanel.
- Azsy 5y ago
  > $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. What? Have you forgotten what your first time was like? There is a huge difference between thinking: > "I build my first shitty website, if i leave my PC on everybody in the world can use it. Who knows what will happen?" And instead being required to go: > "I'll spend 20$ a month to maybe entertain a couple of people for a couple of minutes by using someone else's hardware"
  - compsciphd 5y ago
    if your PC only consumes 50w (somewhat low for a desktop). and your power is 20c a KWH (a little high on average, but not crazy high, though perhaps 0 in a dorm room). you'll be spending $7-$8 a month just on electricity. So it's not "free" to run it on your PC. now, if you view that your PC runs 24/7 anyways, perhaps (much like the dorm room case) the marginal cost is 0. I'm simply making the case that it might not be, and it could very well be a significant %age of the linode cost.
    - evilos 5y ago
      But it feels basically free which is the important thing vs having to set up billing. $20 a month is a lot if you're a teenager with limited or no income.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      It's not entirely free, but the cost is shared with other usage of your computer, and you have much more resources at your disposal. Then and now, any second hand hardware will yield more computing power than cheap VMs you can rent. (of course you can rent a dedicated server with 32 cores and 128GB RAM nowadays, this doesn't change that entry level offers are very limited on resources compared to what you can easily find AFK)
  - yyyk 5y ago
    There's a huge difference alright. It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer with all the sensitive personal data on it where it could be hacked or DDOSed. Even when IPv4 addresses were easy to get it was a very bad idea. When you factor buying a separate server, 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad.
    - dijit 5y ago
      I’d argue that it’s a huge barrier to innovation. Most people getting started are not going to understand systems administration enough to set up a server like that. But they can run software locally. One of the first projects I was ever a part of was a “WAMP” machine (Windows Apache MySQL & PHP) running Nuke Evolution forum software. I learned a lot from that and would never do it again but it was a useful project for some people and I learned a lot by patching around the source files and learning about MySQL enough to make backups and improvements and so on. Being able to put up a simple service is but only one of the reasons to be publicly addressable, P2P is also important (things like games, VoIP) but $20 for a VPS is no small barrier. Not for someone getting started.
liveoneggs 5y ago
ipv6 easily could have been the extended ipv4 but drank second-system syndrome in full and now pays the price
donatj 5y ago
I mean why not dream bigger. IPv6 is a mess, the absolute definition of second system syndrome. If I could fix anything, it would be IPv6 itself. The biggest thing preventing it's widespread adoption is it's complicated nature. An IPv4 with an extra octet or two would have seen complete adoption years ago.
- toast0 5y ago
  Yep, IPv4.1 with 128-bit (or whatever size; I'm not sure we really need 64-bits of local address in a subnet, but ok) addresses, none of the things that didn't work well by the mid 90s; no source routing, no router based fragmentation (maybe router based truncation instead, but maybe that's also too much to ask), no checksum or reduce checksum to not include ttl since it changes every hop, no optional fields (protocols can still have options), etc. No new/subsummed functionality. Stick with ARP and DHCP, etc. A better / more actionable upgrade path and plan to get things working so most devices could go v4.1 only quicker, etc.
- Thorentis 5y ago
  So glad I'm not the only one that has thought this. Every time an IPv6 discussion comes up I think to myself "why couldn't we just make IPv4 addresses longer". IPv6 tried to solve too many problems at once. We should've just focused on solving the address exhaustion issue. Instead, we have a very slow roll out of IPv6, and awful stuff like CG-NAT taking permanent hold.
  - saurik 5y ago
    This is a fairly common opinion, FWIW, though sadly not one widespread enough to be zeitgeist. There were some really great article explanations of this that I am not finding right now as I am not allocating enough time to it, but like here is some other commentary from Hacker News saying the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344911
- kazen44 5y ago
  how is ipv6 more complicated then ipv4? the friction comes from having to manage two different network stacks at once, not the so called complexity of ipv6. ipv4 is a mess in many ways, ARP for instance, is a disaster once you reach a certain scale and many of the ipv4 header fields are unneeded leading to inefficiencies. multicast on ipv4 is a mess, rfc1918 is a neat idea but ipv6 fixes it in a far better way and gets rid of NAT in the process. (and no, NAT does not increase security, ipv6 still has firewalls !) in my opinion, ipv6 is the far simpler protocol, it is the migration from ipv4 to ipv6 which is resulting in all this complexity, but it is not the fault of ipv4. and before people ask why not just extend the address space... that only solves half of the problems ipv4 has and not to mention, results in having the same dual stack situation as we have right now. extending address space is simply not possible in a backwards compatible way. and if we have to break compatibility, we might aswell fix all the other issues with ipv4.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
josh_today 5y ago
“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address.” This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?
- djbusby 5y ago
  That campus had loads of public IPs that students could run services like thefacebook.com from. Public IPs to boxen in your dorm-room.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Can you ELI5? There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well. It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.
- dsukhin 5y ago
  I can speak using MIT as an example and I assume Harvard is the same way for the same reasons. Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago). As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)
  - jjav 5y ago
    > As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything. I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.
crehn 5y ago
What about the security aspects of NAT? e.g. Isolating subnets and restricting outbound access. Seems like a useful defence-in-depth mechanism in case of misconfigured firewall rules.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- icehawk 5y ago
  There isn't any security aspect to NAT, you're relying on the fact nobody's added an upstream route back to you: https://www.anvilsecure.com/blog/dhcp-games-with-smart-router-devices.html https://www.anvilsecure.com/blog/dhcp-games-with-smart-route...
  - effie 5y ago
    NAT without port forwarding done by router facing the ISP, the default kind of NAT which the subscriber does not have to worry about configuring, has very great security aspect. Connect your home network devices to the router doing that kind of NAT,and this automatically protects all devices in your local network from incoming connections.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Yes, but that's an unintended consequence and cannot be relied upon. Any default-configuration firewall would achieve the same, but in a more reliable manner.
      - kiallmacinnes 5y ago
        > that's an unintended consequence No, it's entirely unrelated to NAT. That's a consequence of the firewall on the router. IPv6 doesn't get rid of the firewall.
        southerntofu 5y ago
Ologn 5y ago
> IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. I went to the NANOG meeting in October 1997. Many (most?) of the people who were responsible for administering the core routers using Internet Protocol at the time were there. During one talk they were talking about IPv4 running out, and mitigations for this - NAT, dynamic IPs, reclaiming allocated IP space, web servers that could serve multiple domains from the same IP address etc. One questioner went to the microphone and asked in a serious manner, "can't we solve all of these problems by rolling out IPv6?" The entire room broke into laughter.
xupybd 5y ago
I have a static ip4 address. It costs $10 per month.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
It all makes sense until the "IPv6" part. I want a dedicated IPv4 address. Maybe the solution is not technical, but political. Even if the solution is technical rather than political, maybe IPv6 is not the best choice.
Kadin 5y ago
> Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address. I'm fairly certain the version of Facebook that was hosted from Zuckerberg's dorm room was just for Harvard students, and wasn't accessible from outside the campus network. Keep in mind that early FB was rolled out to only select universities on a campus-by-campus basis over the course of a year or two; it wasn't like it was today. Part of the whole appeal of FB early on was its exclusivity. There were and are lots of places with routable IPv4 addresses that still have various kinds of traffic management and firewalling. My uni handed out real IPv4 addresses in the early 2000s (may still today!), but absolutely didn't allow inbound connections from anywhere outside of the campus network, at least not on well-known ports. You could (and lots of people did) run a server, SMB or AppleTalk file share (so much porn...), etc., but it wasn't accessible to the entire Internet. (Hotline and Carracho servers, OTOH...) I would be absolutely astounded if Harvard didn't have some inbound filtering on its network at the time; keep in mind this was 2004: peak Windows XP era... students would have been getting hacked left and right if they hadn't. There are still some big companies around with very large IPv4 allocations for historic reasons (HP has at least two /8s I believe, its own original one plus one acquired from DEC; IBM has at least one; Apple has one, etc.) and some of them use routable addresses internally. I know IBM did this in its major offices in the mid to late 2000s. But you couldn't just spin up a server at your desk and hit it from home without going through IT and having them put in a firewall rule for you. This was all pretty standard network security stuff at that point.
- kjaftaedi 5y ago
  Nearly all of your text about early Facebook is incorrect. It was originally hosted on Harvard's servers, and lasted only a few hours before the administration pulled the plug on facemash, which was basically a 'hot or not' clone. Then they rented a server for $85/mo. and launched thefacebook.com a few weeks later. Both sites were on the public internet. https://www.fastcompany.com/59441/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-hacker-dropout-ceo https://www.fastcompany.com/59441/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-...
DeathArrow 5y ago
You can host more than one domain per ip. And most hosting providers, not just cloud providers do also offer packages with a static IP address. Yes, we do not have enough IP address for all IoT devices, for all refrigerators and smart bulbs.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > You can host more than one domain per ip. Yes, but some things become tricky: - SMTP reputation is related with reverse DNS of your public IP - reverse-proxying TLS-encrypted trafic relies on SNI headers, which not all protocols implement - some protocols entirely don't have a virtualhost (domain) notion, like gopher or SSH Overall, it's not so easy and simple. Sure i don't care that IoT devices don't have public addresses. To be honest, i'm firmly against IoT as a dystopian nightmare (good luck breaking into your home when your "smart lock" fails). However, public addresses and symmetric bandwidth are very important politically speaking, because they ensure that everyone is given equal opportunity to publish information. Before the Internet, we had mostly asymmetrical communications. Newspaper required considerable resources to setup, and radio stations were (and still are) government-approved because there is limited channels available... so people could only consume information, not spread it. The Internet did away with this scarcity by having all IP addresses created equal, and everybody having as much upload than download speed (before xDSL). Internet was the first network where everybody could create content and actually practice what some people call "freedom of speech" for a marginal cost. If you take away public IPs or introduce asymmetric bandwidth, it's not the Internet anymore: you are creating yet another passive consumption network where big corps and nation states tell you what to think. I personally think asymmetric DSL is the worst that happened to the Internet so far. It's created the idea that there's different hardware and connectivity for clients (we the people), and for servers (fancy machines in datacenters)... two different classes of devices if you will. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this manipulation by the telco industry gave birth to the centralized hosting hellscape (GAFAM) that we know today.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    You are right that anyone having its own IP address would mean less censorship. But also those IPs should be available without an entity having to assign. And not only that but we would also need a free DNS system so you can't be denied host resolving. And the domain names shouldn't be controlled by someone entity because you can be denied having one or the issuer can withdraw you domain. Most censorship I've seen was done by DNS filtering. Also some domain names were withdrawn from their owners even if they didn't do something illegal.
jeroenhd 5y ago
God, IPv6 got the shaft hard. People complain that it's too complex and that it solves too many problems at once, but that's because they've become used to the ancient stack of random protocols that make IPv4 work. There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP. It's not widely implemented because hardware support is lagging behind (Ubiquity being a notorious example in the prosumer space), hardware support isn't being developed because it's not rolled out widely, software support is lacking because of a lack of rollout which is then used as an excuse not to roll out IPv6. I bet that if people learned IPv6 before they learned about IPv4 the conclusion would be that IPv4 is a mess. In my opinion, DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, but we've managed to staple some kind of management ideals on top of it (as if someone couldn't just set a static IP on their device) and using SLAAC feels like giving up control for some. Imagine trying to convince people that they have to set up a USBCP server on either their computer or their flash drive to make USB work without address conflicts, or to make Bluetooth work, they'll laugh at you and ask why that stuff isn't done automatically by the underlying protocols instead. DHCP is useful for many other settings, but address negotiation should've never been a problem it needed to solve in the first place. We've accepted NAT as a fact of life because of ISPs being stingy to hand out addresses years ago when multiple devices started appearing in home networks and now people treat it like some kind of firewall (which it usually isn't!) or absolute necessity because they can't imagine something else. Ask any console player about what type of NAT they have (NAT type 0? Type 1? Type 2? open? moderate? strict? I've never been able to figute out what these classifications even mean on a technical level!) and they'll shudder with flashbacks of getting basic connections to work with their crappy ISP router. This should never have been a problem, but everyone kept dragging their feet and eventually we decided to accept this mess. I think part of the reason is that many schools still only teach IPv4 in their networking classes, so when people encounter IPv6 in the real world they're scared and confused by concepts, protocols and mechanisms they were never prepared or trained for.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, Why?
pascoej 5y ago
CMU has public IPv4 on WiFi. It’s awesome to spin up a server on your laptop and send a link to anybody in the world.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-... It's out there, creeping up on 50% or just over in a significant chunk of the developed world.
flerovium 5y ago
OP here. Why are 128-bit addresses necessary? 64-bits would be more than the number of devices every made several orders of magnitude.

fy20 5y ago

> the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address VPS providers such as Linode were around at the time, and they weren't that expensive. $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. Or you just get shared PHP hosting which would have been cheaper or even free (with ads injected). And much simpler to deploy than today, just FTP the files and boom it's live. If you were lucky, your host had cPanel.

Azsy 5y ago
> $20/mo would have got you enough to get started. What? Have you forgotten what your first time was like? There is a huge difference between thinking: > "I build my first shitty website, if i leave my PC on everybody in the world can use it. Who knows what will happen?" And instead being required to go: > "I'll spend 20$ a month to maybe entertain a couple of people for a couple of minutes by using someone else's hardware"
- compsciphd 5y ago
  if your PC only consumes 50w (somewhat low for a desktop). and your power is 20c a KWH (a little high on average, but not crazy high, though perhaps 0 in a dorm room). you'll be spending $7-$8 a month just on electricity. So it's not "free" to run it on your PC. now, if you view that your PC runs 24/7 anyways, perhaps (much like the dorm room case) the marginal cost is 0. I'm simply making the case that it might not be, and it could very well be a significant %age of the linode cost.
  - evilos 5y ago
    But it feels basically free which is the important thing vs having to set up billing. $20 a month is a lot if you're a teenager with limited or no income.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    It's not entirely free, but the cost is shared with other usage of your computer, and you have much more resources at your disposal. Then and now, any second hand hardware will yield more computing power than cheap VMs you can rent. (of course you can rent a dedicated server with 32 cores and 128GB RAM nowadays, this doesn't change that entry level offers are very limited on resources compared to what you can easily find AFK)
- yyyk 5y ago
  There's a huge difference alright. It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer with all the sensitive personal data on it where it could be hacked or DDOSed. Even when IPv4 addresses were easy to get it was a very bad idea. When you factor buying a separate server, 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I’d argue that it’s a huge barrier to innovation. Most people getting started are not going to understand systems administration enough to set up a server like that. But they can run software locally. One of the first projects I was ever a part of was a “WAMP” machine (Windows Apache MySQL & PHP) running Nuke Evolution forum software. I learned a lot from that and would never do it again but it was a useful project for some people and I learned a lot by patching around the source files and learning about MySQL enough to make backups and improvements and so on. Being able to put up a simple service is but only one of the reasons to be publicly addressable, P2P is also important (things like games, VoIP) but $20 for a VPS is no small barrier. Not for someone getting started.

liveoneggs 5y ago

ipv6 easily could have been the extended ipv4 but drank second-system syndrome in full and now pays the price

donatj 5y ago

I mean why not dream bigger. IPv6 is a mess, the absolute definition of second system syndrome. If I could fix anything, it would be IPv6 itself. The biggest thing preventing it's widespread adoption is it's complicated nature. An IPv4 with an extra octet or two would have seen complete adoption years ago.

toast0 5y ago
Yep, IPv4.1 with 128-bit (or whatever size; I'm not sure we really need 64-bits of local address in a subnet, but ok) addresses, none of the things that didn't work well by the mid 90s; no source routing, no router based fragmentation (maybe router based truncation instead, but maybe that's also too much to ask), no checksum or reduce checksum to not include ttl since it changes every hop, no optional fields (protocols can still have options), etc. No new/subsummed functionality. Stick with ARP and DHCP, etc. A better / more actionable upgrade path and plan to get things working so most devices could go v4.1 only quicker, etc.
Thorentis 5y ago
So glad I'm not the only one that has thought this. Every time an IPv6 discussion comes up I think to myself "why couldn't we just make IPv4 addresses longer". IPv6 tried to solve too many problems at once. We should've just focused on solving the address exhaustion issue. Instead, we have a very slow roll out of IPv6, and awful stuff like CG-NAT taking permanent hold.
- saurik 5y ago
  This is a fairly common opinion, FWIW, though sadly not one widespread enough to be zeitgeist. There were some really great article explanations of this that I am not finding right now as I am not allocating enough time to it, but like here is some other commentary from Hacker News saying the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17344911
kazen44 5y ago
how is ipv6 more complicated then ipv4? the friction comes from having to manage two different network stacks at once, not the so called complexity of ipv6. ipv4 is a mess in many ways, ARP for instance, is a disaster once you reach a certain scale and many of the ipv4 header fields are unneeded leading to inefficiencies. multicast on ipv4 is a mess, rfc1918 is a neat idea but ipv6 fixes it in a far better way and gets rid of NAT in the process. (and no, NAT does not increase security, ipv6 still has firewalls !) in my opinion, ipv6 is the far simpler protocol, it is the migration from ipv4 to ipv6 which is resulting in all this complexity, but it is not the fault of ipv4. and before people ask why not just extend the address space... that only solves half of the problems ipv4 has and not to mention, results in having the same dual stack situation as we have right now. extending address space is simply not possible in a backwards compatible way. and if we have to break compatibility, we might aswell fix all the other issues with ipv4.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

josh_today 5y ago

“ But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address.” This sounds interesting. Can you ELI5?

djbusby 5y ago
That campus had loads of public IPs that students could run services like thefacebook.com from. Public IPs to boxen in your dorm-room.
southerntofu 5y ago
> Can you ELI5? There was a time when the Internet was not divided between producers and consumers of content, but everyone was an equal netizen with publishing capabilities. Then came asymmetric connections, and datacenters, and the modern hellhole we all know to well. It's never too late to act: many "community networks" are doing an amazing job to promote selfhosting and hosting cooperatives.
dsukhin 5y ago
I can speak using MIT as an example and I assume Harvard is the same way for the same reasons. Big research institutions that were present when IP addresses were being allocated got A LOT of IPs by simply asking for them. Apple has the entire 17.0.0.0/8 range. Ford Motor Company has one, the US Gov has a lot [0]. Up until recently MIT had all of 18. (they sold something like half to AWS for a hefty sum not too long ago). As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC 18.something that was in the global address space because they had so many IPs available. This meant you could literally host something on the public internet from your dorm room because every device on the network was publicly routable by a unique public IP address. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_add... (see the last section on the original allocation)
- jjav 5y ago
  > As a student (or visitor), when you joined the network (wired or Wi-Fi) you weren’t allocated some internal IP behind a router but a PUBLIC As an interesting detail, which seems alien today, is that this was also true at my various employers throughout the 90s. My desktops at work all had public IP addresses and were directly on the Internet, no firewall or anything. I ran mail and web servers, fully internet accessible, on my work desktops (and lab machines). It was a natural thing to do.

crehn 5y ago

What about the security aspects of NAT? e.g. Isolating subnets and restricting outbound access. Seems like a useful defence-in-depth mechanism in case of misconfigured firewall rules.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
icehawk 5y ago
There isn't any security aspect to NAT, you're relying on the fact nobody's added an upstream route back to you: https://www.anvilsecure.com/blog/dhcp-games-with-smart-router-devices.html https://www.anvilsecure.com/blog/dhcp-games-with-smart-route...
- effie 5y ago
  NAT without port forwarding done by router facing the ISP, the default kind of NAT which the subscriber does not have to worry about configuring, has very great security aspect. Connect your home network devices to the router doing that kind of NAT,and this automatically protects all devices in your local network from incoming connections.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Yes, but that's an unintended consequence and cannot be relied upon. Any default-configuration firewall would achieve the same, but in a more reliable manner.
    - kiallmacinnes 5y ago
      > that's an unintended consequence No, it's entirely unrelated to NAT. That's a consequence of the firewall on the router. IPv6 doesn't get rid of the firewall.
      - southerntofu 5y ago

Ologn 5y ago

> IPv6 dates back to 1997 and it really should have been adopted more urgently. I went to the NANOG meeting in October 1997. Many (most?) of the people who were responsible for administering the core routers using Internet Protocol at the time were there. During one talk they were talking about IPv4 running out, and mitigations for this - NAT, dynamic IPs, reclaiming allocated IP space, web servers that could serve multiple domains from the same IP address etc. One questioner went to the microphone and asked in a serious manner, "can't we solve all of these problems by rolling out IPv6?" The entire room broke into laughter.

xupybd 5y ago

I have a static ip4 address. It costs $10 per month.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

It all makes sense until the "IPv6" part. I want a dedicated IPv4 address. Maybe the solution is not technical, but political. Even if the solution is technical rather than political, maybe IPv6 is not the best choice.

Kadin 5y ago

> Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address. I'm fairly certain the version of Facebook that was hosted from Zuckerberg's dorm room was just for Harvard students, and wasn't accessible from outside the campus network. Keep in mind that early FB was rolled out to only select universities on a campus-by-campus basis over the course of a year or two; it wasn't like it was today. Part of the whole appeal of FB early on was its exclusivity. There were and are lots of places with routable IPv4 addresses that still have various kinds of traffic management and firewalling. My uni handed out real IPv4 addresses in the early 2000s (may still today!), but absolutely didn't allow inbound connections from anywhere outside of the campus network, at least not on well-known ports. You could (and lots of people did) run a server, SMB or AppleTalk file share (so much porn...), etc., but it wasn't accessible to the entire Internet. (Hotline and Carracho servers, OTOH...) I would be absolutely astounded if Harvard didn't have some inbound filtering on its network at the time; keep in mind this was 2004: peak Windows XP era... students would have been getting hacked left and right if they hadn't. There are still some big companies around with very large IPv4 allocations for historic reasons (HP has at least two /8s I believe, its own original one plus one acquired from DEC; IBM has at least one; Apple has one, etc.) and some of them use routable addresses internally. I know IBM did this in its major offices in the mid to late 2000s. But you couldn't just spin up a server at your desk and hit it from home without going through IT and having them put in a firewall rule for you. This was all pretty standard network security stuff at that point.

kjaftaedi 5y ago
Nearly all of your text about early Facebook is incorrect. It was originally hosted on Harvard's servers, and lasted only a few hours before the administration pulled the plug on facemash, which was basically a 'hot or not' clone. Then they rented a server for $85/mo. and launched thefacebook.com a few weeks later. Both sites were on the public internet. https://www.fastcompany.com/59441/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-hacker-dropout-ceo https://www.fastcompany.com/59441/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-...

DeathArrow 5y ago

You can host more than one domain per ip. And most hosting providers, not just cloud providers do also offer packages with a static IP address. Yes, we do not have enough IP address for all IoT devices, for all refrigerators and smart bulbs.

southerntofu 5y ago
> You can host more than one domain per ip. Yes, but some things become tricky: - SMTP reputation is related with reverse DNS of your public IP - reverse-proxying TLS-encrypted trafic relies on SNI headers, which not all protocols implement - some protocols entirely don't have a virtualhost (domain) notion, like gopher or SSH Overall, it's not so easy and simple. Sure i don't care that IoT devices don't have public addresses. To be honest, i'm firmly against IoT as a dystopian nightmare (good luck breaking into your home when your "smart lock" fails). However, public addresses and symmetric bandwidth are very important politically speaking, because they ensure that everyone is given equal opportunity to publish information. Before the Internet, we had mostly asymmetrical communications. Newspaper required considerable resources to setup, and radio stations were (and still are) government-approved because there is limited channels available... so people could only consume information, not spread it. The Internet did away with this scarcity by having all IP addresses created equal, and everybody having as much upload than download speed (before xDSL). Internet was the first network where everybody could create content and actually practice what some people call "freedom of speech" for a marginal cost. If you take away public IPs or introduce asymmetric bandwidth, it's not the Internet anymore: you are creating yet another passive consumption network where big corps and nation states tell you what to think. I personally think asymmetric DSL is the worst that happened to the Internet so far. It's created the idea that there's different hardware and connectivity for clients (we the people), and for servers (fancy machines in datacenters)... two different classes of devices if you will. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this manipulation by the telco industry gave birth to the centralized hosting hellscape (GAFAM) that we know today.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  You are right that anyone having its own IP address would mean less censorship. But also those IPs should be available without an entity having to assign. And not only that but we would also need a free DNS system so you can't be denied host resolving. And the domain names shouldn't be controlled by someone entity because you can be denied having one or the issuer can withdraw you domain. Most censorship I've seen was done by DNS filtering. Also some domain names were withdrawn from their owners even if they didn't do something illegal.

jeroenhd 5y ago

God, IPv6 got the shaft hard. People complain that it's too complex and that it solves too many problems at once, but that's because they've become used to the ancient stack of random protocols that make IPv4 work. There are also a lot of people who have it out for IPv6 because their ISPs aren't handing out static addresses, somehow equating IPv6's problems with the shittiness of their ISP. It's not widely implemented because hardware support is lagging behind (Ubiquity being a notorious example in the prosumer space), hardware support isn't being developed because it's not rolled out widely, software support is lacking because of a lack of rollout which is then used as an excuse not to roll out IPv6. I bet that if people learned IPv6 before they learned about IPv4 the conclusion would be that IPv4 is a mess. In my opinion, DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, but we've managed to staple some kind of management ideals on top of it (as if someone couldn't just set a static IP on their device) and using SLAAC feels like giving up control for some. Imagine trying to convince people that they have to set up a USBCP server on either their computer or their flash drive to make USB work without address conflicts, or to make Bluetooth work, they'll laugh at you and ask why that stuff isn't done automatically by the underlying protocols instead. DHCP is useful for many other settings, but address negotiation should've never been a problem it needed to solve in the first place. We've accepted NAT as a fact of life because of ISPs being stingy to hand out addresses years ago when multiple devices started appearing in home networks and now people treat it like some kind of firewall (which it usually isn't!) or absolute necessity because they can't imagine something else. Ask any console player about what type of NAT they have (NAT type 0? Type 1? Type 2? open? moderate? strict? I've never been able to figute out what these classifications even mean on a technical level!) and they'll shudder with flashbacks of getting basic connections to work with their crappy ISP router. This should never have been a problem, but everyone kept dragging their feet and eventually we decided to accept this mess. I think part of the reason is that many schools still only teach IPv4 in their networking classes, so when people encounter IPv6 in the real world they're scared and confused by concepts, protocols and mechanisms they were never prepared or trained for.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
> DHCP is a stupid protocol for assigning addresses that shouldn't have been necessary, Why?

pascoej 5y ago

CMU has public IPv4 on WiFi. It’s awesome to spin up a server on your laptop and send a link to anybody in the world.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-... It's out there, creeping up on 50% or just over in a significant chunk of the developed world.

flerovium 5y ago

OP here. Why are 128-bit addresses necessary? 64-bits would be more than the number of devices every made several orders of magnitude.