14 ms·

The energy that is being spent convincing millions of nodes to talk to 127/8 might be better spent convincing those nodes to talk IPv6.

yardstick 5y ago
There’s a lot less effort required to update an existing IPv4 system to accept a few more ranges than to entirely rearchitect a network to work with IPv6. Plus there’s a lot of energy in this world to do both without one taking away effort from the other. But as to the actual proposition, I would rather the 240/4 space was changed to RFC1918 private space, or at least half of it.
- svennek 5y ago
  Really? I for one am not looking forward to all the frankenbugs when new stuff on those IPs talk to old stuff (middle and endboxes)... The great part about IPv6 in that regard is that you are either capable or not, not mostly compatible as an older client would be with this "ipv4+" thingy..
  - yardstick 5y ago
    IPv6 implementors are inconsistent in what they support. Eg Android and it not supporting DHCPv6 [1]. Also NAT in IPv6 is not as widely supported as it is in IPv4 (and yes NAT can and is used for reasons other than security, such as policy based routing and routers with multiple disparate WANs like Fibre and Cellular). Plus there will always be someone somewhere with a middlebox, be it IPv4 or IPv6. 1. https://lostintransit.se/2020/05/22/its-2020-and-androids-ipv6-is-still-broken/ https://lostintransit.se/2020/05/22/its-2020-and-androids-ip...
    - dcbadacd 5y ago
      Not implementing DHCPv6 is not "inconsistent" it's from the start a thing you should NOT rely on existing.
    - 0xbeefbeefbeef 5y ago
      NAT is not security. [1] Why would you want to do NAT in IPv6? You can do all the things you mentioned with IPv6 without NAT. 1. https://samy.pl/slipstream/ https://samy.pl/slipstream/
      - yardstick 5y ago
        I never said NAT was security. No, the things I mentioned cannot be done easily with IPv6. You cannot easily switch a router from using one WAN to another (with different IPs) without requiring IPv6 clients having to obtain new addresses via SLAAC (and hence downtime), or use NAT (which is what IPv4 does, but not well supported in IPv6). You cannot easily have 2-3 levels of networks where router3 is attached to the lan of router2 which is attached to the lan of router1, which has internet access. This is because DHCP-PD is not well supported (see Comcast) or the prefix delegated is insufficiently sized (a /56 minimum should be standard but some will give a /60 or worse, just a /64!). This is bread and butter to do in IPv4.
        admax88qqq 5y ago
        > You cannot easily switch a router from using one WAN to another. You cannot easily do that with NAT either. Every single one of your TCP sessions will die, and likely every session going over UDP as well. Unless you're talking some special protocol specifically designed to handle clients changing IPs. Your machine may not notice, but the machines responding to your packets sure will.
        yardstick 5y ago
        Yes you can if you are using a SD-WAN solution running on top of those WANs.
        anthropodie 5y ago
        Isn't it possible to have IPs from both WANs assigned to devices on your network? In that case you don't even have to switch.
    - TavsiE9s 5y ago
      At this point Google's refusal to implement DHCPv6 is well documented and is being brought up in a lot of arguments. Easy solution: if you need DHCPv6 you don't deploy Android devices and move on.
      - yardstick 5y ago
        It’s only easy if you don’t have to support Android devices. Often it’s not possible to do so.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        That's not how it works. For BYOD or home use, the device is always more important than the network. You can't just tell somebody "lol, Android not supported". Most of the phones out there are Androids, and not everyone prefers iOS even without the extra cost attached to an Apple phone.
      - maccolgan 5y ago
        DHCPv6 isn't mandatory to use IPv6, and SLAAC works fine in those cases (and neither are mandatory actually, can't be). This isn't related to IPv6 overall.
      - unionpivo 5y ago
        Android devices are not optional in some parts of world with low iPhone adaption. In my previous company of 250+ people only 2 had iphones.
    - anthropodie 5y ago
      NAT is the worst thing that could have happened to Internet. Without NAT people would have been able to host their own blogs, pages, photos decades ago from their home. We could have had far more decentralized applications than we have today and would have prevented this walled garden mess of Internet. The ability to address any system on the Internet with it's unique IP is what original Internet was supposed to be. NAT was temporary solution to address the issue of limited IPs but now that is single protocol that is preventing the migration to IPv6
      - majidazimi 5y ago
        I don't know why this is being down voted. The entire modern bullshit Internet exists because of NAT. We can't host stuff ourselves and have to use some central system. Since nothing is free, the provider has to inject more and more ads everywhere.
        api 5y ago
        I bet the actual cost of NAT when all things are considered is well into the trillions of dollars. Any attempt to keep IPv4 alive is not a net win. It's another few trillion down the drain.
        rand49an 5y ago
        Because it implies that it is the single reason that people don't host their own sites anymore, when in reality people don't because it is generally too difficult, expensive, unreliable and redundant to do so. Almost nobody wants to host their own social media or messenger site and if you did your friends wouldn't use it too. Besides, anyone who currently wants to do so can get a cheap VPS for dollars a month.
        6510 5y ago
        There is no telling what would happen. It is only difficult, expensive, unreliable because no one does it? I think there is proof of the opposite in how people host giant torrents without much issues, some buy seed boxes, their friends use it too.
  - yardstick 5y ago
    And for what it’s worth, linux has already supported 240/4 as unicast for many years already.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  The IPv4 systems that need to be updated - the hosts - will not be. Not in a year, not in ten years. This plan is a non starter. v4 should, at this point, basically exist as fallback prefixes for the devices that will hang around the next 30 Y without proper v6 support etc. Routing in the small is not hard. I am absolutely baffled that people are claiming BGP is some kind of super hard thing to deal with. BGP has a ton of problems and lots of ugly duct tape (rpki, etc.) that is just done poorly but it isn’t hard.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > BGP has a ton of problems and lots of ugly duct tape (rpki, etc.) that is just done poorly but it isn’t hard. For a lot of folks, for internal purposes, OSPF would also work pretty well (or IS-IS).
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      also very true
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  It’s probably easier to add some more addresses than to switch to IPv6 but I hope you agree that switching to IPv6 ultimately is inevitable. And then you are comparing the optional costs of adding that small number of addresses against the switch costs that you are going to incur anyway.
  - yardstick 5y ago
    IPv6 has been around since the mid-late 90s, it’s an incredibly slow migration as a lot of things were just not thought through. Yes the switch will eventually happen, but we’re already talking decades, which is a lot of time to unlock a few IPv4 subnets while we wait.
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      The alternative take is that it’s an incredibly slow migration because we keep unlocking a few IPv4 subnets so we can wait a little longer.
- knorker 5y ago
  > There’s a lot less effort required to update an existing IPv4 system to accept a few more ranges than to entirely rearchitect a network to work with IPv6. I'm not so sure, actually. It's still a case of literally billions of devices that just plain need to be replaced. Not to mention millions(?) of multimillion dollar routers that need to be scrapped, even though they handle IPv4 and IPv6 in silicon just fine. > But as to the actual proposition, I would rather the 240/4 space was changed to RFC1918 private space, or at least half of it. Nobody's stopping you. It'll never be usable on the Internet anyway.
dtaht 5y ago
I am a bit sad that what I felt was the proposal of most immediate benefit to the internet was not the one that got all the attention. That one is here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...
kaliszad 5y ago
There is some merit to having more IPv4 space e.g. for new players trying to start a business or for IPv6 transition technologies, where you need at least some IPv4 space e.g. for the NAT64 gateway. This should be considered in the application process for the space, if the unicast extension will be widely supported technically. The real question here is, whether Microsoft will patch Windows to support the unicast extension. More specifically, which versions and whether it will include Windows XP/ Windows Server 2003/ 7/ Windows Server 2008 and various Windows CE versions. I would say, there are so many WinXP/WS2003 machines in industrial networks still, that not having a patch enabling support might be a major blocker. In some cases, you just cannot replace the operating system without also replacing the machine it is driving. Yes, more or cheaper IPv4 space will prolong the pain of having two protocols one of which is the default but has inherent problems in terms of scalability (IPv4). There might also be some damage from changing 0/8 and 127/8 to be global unicast and carving out 0.0.0.0/32 and 127.0/16 for their current usage. Also the lower address as alternative broadcast to unicast switchover could be "fun" in some networks. The reality is, ransomware and other attacks are quite common and creating new doors into legacy networks with less than ideal maintenance through changing rules should be evaluated. I don't think the typical water treatment plant, hospital, pharmacy or an aluminum smelter follow even major RFCs closely. I know, I have discovered (and fixed) the 1/8 blackhole problem in a subsidiary at my previous job. I would need to really check 0/8 and 127/8 there to verify they are ready for the unicast extension as well. That company had an IT department and the IT worked reasonably well there but there were some very specific constraints such as Windows NT driving some industrial machines. This wasn't the common case, but it wasn't the only "special" host on the network. In such places, such changes perhaps don't need to be implemented, but you never know, when the inconsistency will bite you.

yardstick 5y ago

There’s a lot less effort required to update an existing IPv4 system to accept a few more ranges than to entirely rearchitect a network to work with IPv6. Plus there’s a lot of energy in this world to do both without one taking away effort from the other. But as to the actual proposition, I would rather the 240/4 space was changed to RFC1918 private space, or at least half of it.

svennek 5y ago
Really? I for one am not looking forward to all the frankenbugs when new stuff on those IPs talk to old stuff (middle and endboxes)... The great part about IPv6 in that regard is that you are either capable or not, not mostly compatible as an older client would be with this "ipv4+" thingy..
- yardstick 5y ago
  IPv6 implementors are inconsistent in what they support. Eg Android and it not supporting DHCPv6 [1]. Also NAT in IPv6 is not as widely supported as it is in IPv4 (and yes NAT can and is used for reasons other than security, such as policy based routing and routers with multiple disparate WANs like Fibre and Cellular). Plus there will always be someone somewhere with a middlebox, be it IPv4 or IPv6. 1. https://lostintransit.se/2020/05/22/its-2020-and-androids-ipv6-is-still-broken/ https://lostintransit.se/2020/05/22/its-2020-and-androids-ip...
  - dcbadacd 5y ago
    Not implementing DHCPv6 is not "inconsistent" it's from the start a thing you should NOT rely on existing.
  - 0xbeefbeefbeef 5y ago
    NAT is not security. [1] Why would you want to do NAT in IPv6? You can do all the things you mentioned with IPv6 without NAT. 1. https://samy.pl/slipstream/ https://samy.pl/slipstream/
    - yardstick 5y ago
      I never said NAT was security. No, the things I mentioned cannot be done easily with IPv6. You cannot easily switch a router from using one WAN to another (with different IPs) without requiring IPv6 clients having to obtain new addresses via SLAAC (and hence downtime), or use NAT (which is what IPv4 does, but not well supported in IPv6). You cannot easily have 2-3 levels of networks where router3 is attached to the lan of router2 which is attached to the lan of router1, which has internet access. This is because DHCP-PD is not well supported (see Comcast) or the prefix delegated is insufficiently sized (a /56 minimum should be standard but some will give a /60 or worse, just a /64!). This is bread and butter to do in IPv4.
      - admax88qqq 5y ago
        > You cannot easily switch a router from using one WAN to another. You cannot easily do that with NAT either. Every single one of your TCP sessions will die, and likely every session going over UDP as well. Unless you're talking some special protocol specifically designed to handle clients changing IPs. Your machine may not notice, but the machines responding to your packets sure will.
        yardstick 5y ago
        Yes you can if you are using a SD-WAN solution running on top of those WANs.
      - anthropodie 5y ago
        Isn't it possible to have IPs from both WANs assigned to devices on your network? In that case you don't even have to switch.
  - TavsiE9s 5y ago
    At this point Google's refusal to implement DHCPv6 is well documented and is being brought up in a lot of arguments. Easy solution: if you need DHCPv6 you don't deploy Android devices and move on.
    - yardstick 5y ago
      It’s only easy if you don’t have to support Android devices. Often it’s not possible to do so.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      That's not how it works. For BYOD or home use, the device is always more important than the network. You can't just tell somebody "lol, Android not supported". Most of the phones out there are Androids, and not everyone prefers iOS even without the extra cost attached to an Apple phone.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      DHCPv6 isn't mandatory to use IPv6, and SLAAC works fine in those cases (and neither are mandatory actually, can't be). This isn't related to IPv6 overall.
    - unionpivo 5y ago
      Android devices are not optional in some parts of world with low iPhone adaption. In my previous company of 250+ people only 2 had iphones.
  - anthropodie 5y ago
    NAT is the worst thing that could have happened to Internet. Without NAT people would have been able to host their own blogs, pages, photos decades ago from their home. We could have had far more decentralized applications than we have today and would have prevented this walled garden mess of Internet. The ability to address any system on the Internet with it's unique IP is what original Internet was supposed to be. NAT was temporary solution to address the issue of limited IPs but now that is single protocol that is preventing the migration to IPv6
    - majidazimi 5y ago
      I don't know why this is being down voted. The entire modern bullshit Internet exists because of NAT. We can't host stuff ourselves and have to use some central system. Since nothing is free, the provider has to inject more and more ads everywhere.
      - api 5y ago
        I bet the actual cost of NAT when all things are considered is well into the trillions of dollars. Any attempt to keep IPv4 alive is not a net win. It's another few trillion down the drain.
      - rand49an 5y ago
        Because it implies that it is the single reason that people don't host their own sites anymore, when in reality people don't because it is generally too difficult, expensive, unreliable and redundant to do so. Almost nobody wants to host their own social media or messenger site and if you did your friends wouldn't use it too. Besides, anyone who currently wants to do so can get a cheap VPS for dollars a month.
        6510 5y ago
        There is no telling what would happen. It is only difficult, expensive, unreliable because no one does it? I think there is proof of the opposite in how people host giant torrents without much issues, some buy seed boxes, their friends use it too.
- yardstick 5y ago
  And for what it’s worth, linux has already supported 240/4 as unicast for many years already.
foobiekr 5y ago
The IPv4 systems that need to be updated - the hosts - will not be. Not in a year, not in ten years. This plan is a non starter. v4 should, at this point, basically exist as fallback prefixes for the devices that will hang around the next 30 Y without proper v6 support etc. Routing in the small is not hard. I am absolutely baffled that people are claiming BGP is some kind of super hard thing to deal with. BGP has a ton of problems and lots of ugly duct tape (rpki, etc.) that is just done poorly but it isn’t hard.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > BGP has a ton of problems and lots of ugly duct tape (rpki, etc.) that is just done poorly but it isn’t hard. For a lot of folks, for internal purposes, OSPF would also work pretty well (or IS-IS).
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    also very true
tinus_hn 5y ago
It’s probably easier to add some more addresses than to switch to IPv6 but I hope you agree that switching to IPv6 ultimately is inevitable. And then you are comparing the optional costs of adding that small number of addresses against the switch costs that you are going to incur anyway.
- yardstick 5y ago
  IPv6 has been around since the mid-late 90s, it’s an incredibly slow migration as a lot of things were just not thought through. Yes the switch will eventually happen, but we’re already talking decades, which is a lot of time to unlock a few IPv4 subnets while we wait.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    The alternative take is that it’s an incredibly slow migration because we keep unlocking a few IPv4 subnets so we can wait a little longer.
knorker 5y ago
> There’s a lot less effort required to update an existing IPv4 system to accept a few more ranges than to entirely rearchitect a network to work with IPv6. I'm not so sure, actually. It's still a case of literally billions of devices that just plain need to be replaced. Not to mention millions(?) of multimillion dollar routers that need to be scrapped, even though they handle IPv4 and IPv6 in silicon just fine. > But as to the actual proposition, I would rather the 240/4 space was changed to RFC1918 private space, or at least half of it. Nobody's stopping you. It'll never be usable on the Internet anyway.

dtaht 5y ago

I am a bit sad that what I felt was the proposal of most immediate benefit to the internet was not the one that got all the attention. That one is here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-lowest-address/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...

kaliszad 5y ago

There is some merit to having more IPv4 space e.g. for new players trying to start a business or for IPv6 transition technologies, where you need at least some IPv4 space e.g. for the NAT64 gateway. This should be considered in the application process for the space, if the unicast extension will be widely supported technically. The real question here is, whether Microsoft will patch Windows to support the unicast extension. More specifically, which versions and whether it will include Windows XP/ Windows Server 2003/ 7/ Windows Server 2008 and various Windows CE versions. I would say, there are so many WinXP/WS2003 machines in industrial networks still, that not having a patch enabling support might be a major blocker. In some cases, you just cannot replace the operating system without also replacing the machine it is driving. Yes, more or cheaper IPv4 space will prolong the pain of having two protocols one of which is the default but has inherent problems in terms of scalability (IPv4). There might also be some damage from changing 0/8 and 127/8 to be global unicast and carving out 0.0.0.0/32 and 127.0/16 for their current usage. Also the lower address as alternative broadcast to unicast switchover could be "fun" in some networks. The reality is, ransomware and other attacks are quite common and creating new doors into legacy networks with less than ideal maintenance through changing rules should be evaluated. I don't think the typical water treatment plant, hospital, pharmacy or an aluminum smelter follow even major RFCs closely. I know, I have discovered (and fixed) the 1/8 blackhole problem in a subsidiary at my previous job. I would need to really check 0/8 and 127/8 there to verify they are ready for the unicast extension as well. That company had an IT department and the IT worked reasonably well there but there were some very specific constraints such as Windows NT driving some industrial machines. This wasn't the common case, but it wasn't the only "special" host on the network. In such places, such changes perhaps don't need to be implemented, but you never know, when the inconsistency will bite you.