10 ms·

Am I the only one that hates IPv6 ergonomics? I have to transcribe IPv4 addresses all the time, I'd hate to try and do it with a 128 bit address. Could they not

Am I the only one that hates IPv6 ergonomics? I have to transcribe IPv4 addresses all the time, I'd hate to try and do it with a 128 bit address. Could they not have gone with 64 bit addresses, was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 addresses really not enough?

londons_explore 5y ago
Half the bits are unusable anyway...
lnxg33k1 5y ago
As said in another reply, I've been in contact with IPv6 for like 20 years and every year I have to understand it again I fully agree with you and would even say that even 48 bits could have done something with 281,474,976,710,656 values possible
jacob019 5y ago
SLAAC works well and wouldn't without a >= 64 bit subnet. In a typical /64 assignment, the ipv6 equivalent of the 32-bit ipv4 public ip is the 64-bit prefix, I think squaring the address space is appropriate.
Latty 5y ago
Maybe a bit glib, but I see this as a good thing: a reason to finally fix whatever process requires you to transcribe IP addresses, which is a pain to do even with v4 ones.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Definitely not a pain for a LAN. Case in point: navigating to your router’s web interface. Very easy to do with IPv4 to do, a pain with IPv6. As my home router only supports stateless auto configuration, it’s an additional friction point to have stable addresses. Oh, and since the /56 is assigned by my ISP, it sometimes changes, so I can’t just rely on addresses being stable. I’m not saying that IPv6 is necessarily bad — we _need_ the extra address space! - but it definitely requires a different way of working and I haven’t completely cracked that nut myself yet. I’m almost at the point that I’m just considering using NAT with IPv6, but I fear the IP gods will spell an evil curse on me if I dare to do that.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Any decent network stack supports mDNS and you don't need to enter an ip address to access your gateway or any other hosts in your lan. I don't even know what's my workstation's IPv4 address. I just connect to desktop.local and my NAS with nas.local
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Link-local addresses are what you want, and “fixed” endings or whatever they’re called - so the router is always ::1 for example. Or just have IPv4 on the LAN.
    - stingraycharles 5y ago
      Aren’t link-local only applicable to a single switch, rather than a more involved LAN with several subnets and routers and whatnot?
      - bombcar 5y ago
        It is - but if you have multiple subnets on your local lan you should have local DNS or similar (or know prefix:1::1 is the router, etc).
        stingraycharles 5y ago
        But in that case, that is considerably more difficult than just IPv4, as I now need to remember the prefix. Which isn’t stable, as it’s often reassigned by my ISP.
        Latty 5y ago
        Are ISPs really doing dynamic IPs for v6? That seems incredibly silly.
        bombcar 5y ago
        They usually “do” but very long lived - every time my modem died I got a new prefix. Lightning.
dmitshur 5y ago
If https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110328 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110328 is still current, you’re not the only one.
- Latty 5y ago
  That article was really very optimistic about NAT traversal, while being very pessimistic about solutions to avoiding memorising IP addresses, which I think says something about their perspective going in. NAT is a nightmare that has directly lead to the crappy world of every "IoT" device relying on some remote service that can shut down any time, instead of just... connecting to your device. Also every game having connectivity issues when trying to do peer-to-peer play. Not to mention a reliance on NAT as security, something this article advocates for, despite being a job it isn't good at. The obsolescence of NAT is the bit of IPv4's demise I look forward to most.
  - syshum 5y ago
    NAT not being designed for security does not negate the effect of security it does have. This goes to the 80/20 rule, IPv6 is a security nightmare if not deployed correctly, and I am surprised more home users have not gotten hit with this security time bomb
    - normaler 5y ago
      I feel that. I have a VPS that i run OpenBSD on. I messed up my config and now my phone was publicly reachable via its /72 ipv6 from the /64 adress i was assigned. Kinda scary/weird
    - deadbunny 5y ago
      > Security nightmare How so? Allow established, then drop. You know. The same rules in ever consumer level router on the market now.
    - Dagger2 5y ago
      > NAT not being designed for security does not negate the effect of security it does have. This is true... but the security impact of NAT is negative. It provides no security benefit, but it does confuse people about the security properties of their network, often providing a false sense of security.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
They have short cuts to the 128 bit. I think there will be a lot of unused space for a while.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Could they not have gone with 64 bit addresses, was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 addresses really not enough? Consider the counter-factual: what if 64 bits ended up being not enough? Given all the effort that needed and still needs to be done to move from IPv4 to IPv6, if we eventually needed to move to IPv7/8 it would even more difficult given how much IP in general has/is pervading civilization. It's better to have the extra addresses and not need them, than need them and not have them. It's the reason why ZFS went with 128 bits as well: > Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 2^64 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore's Law for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we'll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a decade. Storage systems tend to live for several decades, so it would be foolish to create a new one without anticipating the needs that will surely arise within its projected lifetime. > If 64 bits isn't enough, the next logical step is 128 bits. That's enough to survive Moore's Law until I'm dead, and after that, it's not my problem. But it does raise the question: what are the theoretical limits to storage capacity? * https://web.archive.org/web/20171118074243/https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high https://web.archive.org/web/20171118074243/https://blogs.ora...
- sliken 5y ago
  Heh, I'd argue that ZFS would be better if they went with 64 bits, especially since it's 2^128 blocks, not bytes, or bits. I did the math and it was something like a decade of the worlds production of disks, in a single filesystem. I could somewhat understand if it was a distributed filesystem, but it's not.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    According to back-of-the-napkin math, my home NAS has more storage than was manufactured globally in the year I bought my first computer. It doesn’t seem impossible that someone might have a single pool too big for 2^64 by the end of ZFS’s useful life.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
There are plenty of reasons to dislike IPv6 that are much less shallow. Like, it's overcomplicated, not backwards compatible, doesn't actually solve the NAT problems for home users because of how ISPs work in the real world, etc.
- welterde 5y ago
  The problem is that IPv4 is not forward-compatible and not that IPv6 is not backward compatible. There are things that map every IPv4 address to a IPv6 address, so from the IPv6-side it is backwards compatible.
- floatboth 5y ago
  > overcomplicated What exactly is complicated, using hexadecimal in addresses? The IP packet format itself is as simple as ever, and management things are done in a more elegant way (ND runs over ICMP rather than ARP being sort of there on the side not-in-IP-at-all). > not backwards compatible Massive service providers like T-Mobile US who use NAT64 as the only way to connect to v4 hosts anymore would disagree. > doesn't actually solve the NAT problems for home users because of how ISPs work in the real world My ISP delegates me a /56. How else do ISPs work in the "real world"? I've heard of some giving out smaller networks but never something egregiously small.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > What exactly is complicated, using hexadecimal in addresses? That isn't the complicated part, but thanks for strawmanning that as hard as you possibly could. > My ISP delegates me a /56. How else do ISPs work in the "real world"? I've heard of some giving out smaller networks but never something egregiously small. It's got nothing to do with the size of the address space, it's that they insist on changing it constantly which invalidates firewall rules and any non-dynamic DNS.
aaomidi 5y ago
In reality it does end up being 64 bits, as the other 64 is for a specific network.
Dagger2 5y ago
It was really not enough. Remember that the IP layer exists for the purpose of routing and aggregation. Instead of tracking the current location of every machine on the planet, we bundle them into networks, and then bundle those networks together, and then bundle those bundles together too, and so on. There are maybe something like 10 billion devices that are either on the internet or that want to be on it, but with all the aggregation we're only tracking about a million routes at the global level. This aggregation is critical for allowing the internet to scale to planetary size... but it also results in the vast majority of the addresses in the address space not being assigned to any end machine. In other words, having N in-use addresses needs a lot more than log_2(N) bits of address space. There's likely to be less than 2^64 devices on the internet in the long run, so if we could assign one address to each of them and not have to worry about routing table sizes, then a 64-bit address space probably would be enough. But that doesn't describe IP addresses... it describes MAC addresses. And MAC addresses are in fact 64 bits long for new L2 protocols today. Since L3 needs aggregation, which results in most L3 addresses being unused, it follows that we need more than 64 bits of L3 address space to handle the 2^64 devices that the 64-bit L2 addresses can handle.
whazor 5y ago
There is an added benefit of 'security' every device in your home could have their ipv6 address and because it is 128 bit, it would be harder to guess or perform internet wide port scans.

londons_explore 5y ago

Half the bits are unusable anyway...

lnxg33k1 5y ago

As said in another reply, I've been in contact with IPv6 for like 20 years and every year I have to understand it again I fully agree with you and would even say that even 48 bits could have done something with 281,474,976,710,656 values possible

jacob019 5y ago

SLAAC works well and wouldn't without a >= 64 bit subnet. In a typical /64 assignment, the ipv6 equivalent of the 32-bit ipv4 public ip is the 64-bit prefix, I think squaring the address space is appropriate.

Latty 5y ago

Maybe a bit glib, but I see this as a good thing: a reason to finally fix whatever process requires you to transcribe IP addresses, which is a pain to do even with v4 ones.

stingraycharles 5y ago
Definitely not a pain for a LAN. Case in point: navigating to your router’s web interface. Very easy to do with IPv4 to do, a pain with IPv6. As my home router only supports stateless auto configuration, it’s an additional friction point to have stable addresses. Oh, and since the /56 is assigned by my ISP, it sometimes changes, so I can’t just rely on addresses being stable. I’m not saying that IPv6 is necessarily bad — we _need_ the extra address space! - but it definitely requires a different way of working and I haven’t completely cracked that nut myself yet. I’m almost at the point that I’m just considering using NAT with IPv6, but I fear the IP gods will spell an evil curse on me if I dare to do that.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Any decent network stack supports mDNS and you don't need to enter an ip address to access your gateway or any other hosts in your lan. I don't even know what's my workstation's IPv4 address. I just connect to desktop.local and my NAS with nas.local
- bombcar 5y ago
  Link-local addresses are what you want, and “fixed” endings or whatever they’re called - so the router is always ::1 for example. Or just have IPv4 on the LAN.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    Aren’t link-local only applicable to a single switch, rather than a more involved LAN with several subnets and routers and whatnot?
    - bombcar 5y ago
      It is - but if you have multiple subnets on your local lan you should have local DNS or similar (or know prefix:1::1 is the router, etc).
      - stingraycharles 5y ago
        But in that case, that is considerably more difficult than just IPv4, as I now need to remember the prefix. Which isn’t stable, as it’s often reassigned by my ISP.
        Latty 5y ago
        Are ISPs really doing dynamic IPs for v6? That seems incredibly silly.
        bombcar 5y ago
        They usually “do” but very long lived - every time my modem died I got a new prefix. Lightning.

dmitshur 5y ago

If https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110328 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110328 is still current, you’re not the only one.

Latty 5y ago
That article was really very optimistic about NAT traversal, while being very pessimistic about solutions to avoiding memorising IP addresses, which I think says something about their perspective going in. NAT is a nightmare that has directly lead to the crappy world of every "IoT" device relying on some remote service that can shut down any time, instead of just... connecting to your device. Also every game having connectivity issues when trying to do peer-to-peer play. Not to mention a reliance on NAT as security, something this article advocates for, despite being a job it isn't good at. The obsolescence of NAT is the bit of IPv4's demise I look forward to most.
- syshum 5y ago
  NAT not being designed for security does not negate the effect of security it does have. This goes to the 80/20 rule, IPv6 is a security nightmare if not deployed correctly, and I am surprised more home users have not gotten hit with this security time bomb
  - normaler 5y ago
    I feel that. I have a VPS that i run OpenBSD on. I messed up my config and now my phone was publicly reachable via its /72 ipv6 from the /64 adress i was assigned. Kinda scary/weird
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    > Security nightmare How so? Allow established, then drop. You know. The same rules in ever consumer level router on the market now.
  - Dagger2 5y ago
    > NAT not being designed for security does not negate the effect of security it does have. This is true... but the security impact of NAT is negative. It provides no security benefit, but it does confuse people about the security properties of their network, often providing a false sense of security.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

They have short cuts to the 128 bit. I think there will be a lot of unused space for a while.

throw0101a 5y ago

> Could they not have gone with 64 bit addresses, was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 addresses really not enough? Consider the counter-factual: what if 64 bits ended up being not enough? Given all the effort that needed and still needs to be done to move from IPv4 to IPv6, if we eventually needed to move to IPv7/8 it would even more difficult given how much IP in general has/is pervading civilization. It's better to have the extra addresses and not need them, than need them and not have them. It's the reason why ZFS went with 128 bits as well: > Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 2^64 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore's Law for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we'll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a decade. Storage systems tend to live for several decades, so it would be foolish to create a new one without anticipating the needs that will surely arise within its projected lifetime. > If 64 bits isn't enough, the next logical step is 128 bits. That's enough to survive Moore's Law until I'm dead, and after that, it's not my problem. But it does raise the question: what are the theoretical limits to storage capacity? * https://web.archive.org/web/20171118074243/https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high https://web.archive.org/web/20171118074243/https://blogs.ora...

sliken 5y ago
Heh, I'd argue that ZFS would be better if they went with 64 bits, especially since it's 2^128 blocks, not bytes, or bits. I did the math and it was something like a decade of the worlds production of disks, in a single filesystem. I could somewhat understand if it was a distributed filesystem, but it's not.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  According to back-of-the-napkin math, my home NAS has more storage than was manufactured globally in the year I bought my first computer. It doesn’t seem impossible that someone might have a single pool too big for 2^64 by the end of ZFS’s useful life.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

There are plenty of reasons to dislike IPv6 that are much less shallow. Like, it's overcomplicated, not backwards compatible, doesn't actually solve the NAT problems for home users because of how ISPs work in the real world, etc.

welterde 5y ago
The problem is that IPv4 is not forward-compatible and not that IPv6 is not backward compatible. There are things that map every IPv4 address to a IPv6 address, so from the IPv6-side it is backwards compatible.
floatboth 5y ago
> overcomplicated What exactly is complicated, using hexadecimal in addresses? The IP packet format itself is as simple as ever, and management things are done in a more elegant way (ND runs over ICMP rather than ARP being sort of there on the side not-in-IP-at-all). > not backwards compatible Massive service providers like T-Mobile US who use NAT64 as the only way to connect to v4 hosts anymore would disagree. > doesn't actually solve the NAT problems for home users because of how ISPs work in the real world My ISP delegates me a /56. How else do ISPs work in the "real world"? I've heard of some giving out smaller networks but never something egregiously small.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > What exactly is complicated, using hexadecimal in addresses? That isn't the complicated part, but thanks for strawmanning that as hard as you possibly could. > My ISP delegates me a /56. How else do ISPs work in the "real world"? I've heard of some giving out smaller networks but never something egregiously small. It's got nothing to do with the size of the address space, it's that they insist on changing it constantly which invalidates firewall rules and any non-dynamic DNS.

aaomidi 5y ago

In reality it does end up being 64 bits, as the other 64 is for a specific network.

Dagger2 5y ago

It was really not enough. Remember that the IP layer exists for the purpose of routing and aggregation. Instead of tracking the current location of every machine on the planet, we bundle them into networks, and then bundle those networks together, and then bundle those bundles together too, and so on. There are maybe something like 10 billion devices that are either on the internet or that want to be on it, but with all the aggregation we're only tracking about a million routes at the global level. This aggregation is critical for allowing the internet to scale to planetary size... but it also results in the vast majority of the addresses in the address space not being assigned to any end machine. In other words, having N in-use addresses needs a lot more than log_2(N) bits of address space. There's likely to be less than 2^64 devices on the internet in the long run, so if we could assign one address to each of them and not have to worry about routing table sizes, then a 64-bit address space probably would be enough. But that doesn't describe IP addresses... it describes MAC addresses. And MAC addresses are in fact 64 bits long for new L2 protocols today. Since L3 needs aggregation, which results in most L3 addresses being unused, it follows that we need more than 64 bits of L3 address space to handle the 2^64 devices that the 64-bit L2 addresses can handle.

whazor 5y ago

There is an added benefit of 'security' every device in your home could have their ipv6 address and because it is 128 bit, it would be harder to guess or perform internet wide port scans.