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I read all the time about how great the latest technology like Docker and Kubernetes is, and how one should always update every 20 minutes or else you'll have y

by spc476 5y ago

I read all the time about how great the latest technology like Docker and Kubernetes is, and how one should always update every 20 minutes or else you'll have your entire life, much less your identity, stolen by hackers, and besides, who wants to use software that's an entire six months old? And yet, trying to get anyone to upgrade to IPv6 and suddenly the entire world gets super conservative and "hey now! Let's not get too hasty here!" I can't quite square this circle.

Spivak 5y ago
I think because the only thing IPv6 really has going for it is the larger address space and the bigger number in the name. That’s not nothing but if IPv6 had been literally just IPv4 but with 8 octets then adoption would have been a lot faster. And it doesn’t help that IPv6rs want to change the internet architecture as well so even if you port you still run into the flame war that is IPv6 NAT that was only begrudgingly was implemented in Linux in 2012. You can’t upgrade to IPv6 you have to port your code to IPv6. There’s no concept of broadcast domains, IPSec built in for some reason — sorry WireGuard. And because IPv6 is fundamentally different it’s not enough to just be like okay all my shit is IPv6 capable turn it on, you also have to rearchitect your network since everyone builds their network with the concept of public and private addresses and IPv6 is/was openly hostile to it. TLDR IPv6 made it really god damn hard to just turn it on. Would it have been so bad to just support the way of the IPv4 world for compatibility and then say “hey there’s this cool new thing that’s better” which is an easier sell once you’re already using IPv6.
- Plasmoid 5y ago
  > IPv4 but with 8 octets then adoption would have been a lot faster. > You can’t upgrade to IPv6 you have to port your code to IPv6. There is no physical way to increase the address space without requiring code changes. People having making the same complaint for 20 years and it's even more hollow now then it was then. 99% of the time, you will use your OS standard library functions and completely ignore the networking underneath. Literally, all the libraries will transparently handle IPv4 or IPv6 with no problem. If you're in the 1% of software that has coding in some implicit assumption of field size for IPv4 then you are the 2020 equivalent of the Y2K problem. Grow your field sizes, fix your regexes, and use the platform support as much as possible. Finally, you can literally just turn on IPv6. Everything will work just fine. IPv6 has private addresses, you can do all the dumb stuff from IPv4 in v6. Unsurprisingly though, most major vendors don't want to spend a lot of energy supporting those hacks.
- Dagger2 5y ago
  It's not that different to v4. Broadcast domains are an L2 concept and still exist (although L3 broadcast doesn't; there's just multicast). IPsec isn't really built in, it was just developed for v6 initially. It uses the exact same address-family-agnostic socket and name resolution APIs as v4 does, so for most functionality the same code handles both. You don't need to rearchitect your network either, because v6 fundamentally works in exactly the same way v4 does. All you need to do is deploy a v6 /64 everywhere you have a v4 /24 (or /22 or whatever). There's really not much that's different between them at all... and making v6 64 bits wouldn't have helped either, because that would have the same compatibility issues that v6 does while also not being big enough. It'd be pretty silly to go through all this to deploy a new L3 protocol, only to then have to do it again because we didn't make it big enough the first time.

by spc476 5y ago

Spivak 5y ago

I think because the only thing IPv6 really has going for it is the larger address space and the bigger number in the name. That’s not nothing but if IPv6 had been literally just IPv4 but with 8 octets then adoption would have been a lot faster. And it doesn’t help that IPv6rs want to change the internet architecture as well so even if you port you still run into the flame war that is IPv6 NAT that was only begrudgingly was implemented in Linux in 2012. You can’t upgrade to IPv6 you have to port your code to IPv6. There’s no concept of broadcast domains, IPSec built in for some reason — sorry WireGuard. And because IPv6 is fundamentally different it’s not enough to just be like okay all my shit is IPv6 capable turn it on, you also have to rearchitect your network since everyone builds their network with the concept of public and private addresses and IPv6 is/was openly hostile to it. TLDR IPv6 made it really god damn hard to just turn it on. Would it have been so bad to just support the way of the IPv4 world for compatibility and then say “hey there’s this cool new thing that’s better” which is an easier sell once you’re already using IPv6.

Plasmoid 5y ago
> IPv4 but with 8 octets then adoption would have been a lot faster. > You can’t upgrade to IPv6 you have to port your code to IPv6. There is no physical way to increase the address space without requiring code changes. People having making the same complaint for 20 years and it's even more hollow now then it was then. 99% of the time, you will use your OS standard library functions and completely ignore the networking underneath. Literally, all the libraries will transparently handle IPv4 or IPv6 with no problem. If you're in the 1% of software that has coding in some implicit assumption of field size for IPv4 then you are the 2020 equivalent of the Y2K problem. Grow your field sizes, fix your regexes, and use the platform support as much as possible. Finally, you can literally just turn on IPv6. Everything will work just fine. IPv6 has private addresses, you can do all the dumb stuff from IPv4 in v6. Unsurprisingly though, most major vendors don't want to spend a lot of energy supporting those hacks.
Dagger2 5y ago
It's not that different to v4. Broadcast domains are an L2 concept and still exist (although L3 broadcast doesn't; there's just multicast). IPsec isn't really built in, it was just developed for v6 initially. It uses the exact same address-family-agnostic socket and name resolution APIs as v4 does, so for most functionality the same code handles both. You don't need to rearchitect your network either, because v6 fundamentally works in exactly the same way v4 does. All you need to do is deploy a v6 /64 everywhere you have a v4 /24 (or /22 or whatever). There's really not much that's different between them at all... and making v6 64 bits wouldn't have helped either, because that would have the same compatibility issues that v6 does while also not being big enough. It'd be pretty silly to go through all this to deploy a new L3 protocol, only to then have to do it again because we didn't make it big enough the first time.