5 ms·

There is still plenty of IPv4 space available, it's just very badly distributed, for instance, due to early limits in Cisco's IOS, Chevron acquired an insane 2

by dublin 5y ago

There is still plenty of IPv4 space available, it's just very badly distributed, for instance, due to early limits in Cisco's IOS, Chevron acquired an insane 26 Class B address blocks when connecting to the net back in the early 90s! With CIDR, we can easily reuse the many unused addrs like those, but the pain of readdressing has their owners sitting on them, raising prices and making them even more reluctant to turn loose of any for fear they won't be able to get them back... And, let's face it, IPv6 addressing is so fundamentally horked-up that it's practically only usable by propellerheads in the cloud backend: First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used; and second, even most people reading this, tech people in a tech forum, struggle to really grasp the inane IPv6 address shortening rules! Like X.400 mail addresses, they work technically, but are unusable in practice. (For those of you fortunate enough not to remember, the best way to get and transfer someone's X.400 address, even within the X.400 network, was to have them mail someone through an internet gateway and use whatever it said. Marshall Rose devoted an entire chapter to ranting about this in his Internet Mail book...)

cameronh90 5y ago
Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with. Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine.
- ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
  > Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with. Assuming it's configured correctly. Most devices are not. > Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine. Why would you ever want publicly routable addresses on devices inside your home? If Ipv6 was simply a 64-bit quad improvement on IPv4 it would be fine. However, the only valid use cases I can think of are mostly to the benefit of end users. What possible need could anyone have for more address space than the non-routable private address blocks already afforded by IPv4? Throw in the insecure-by-default and frequent misconfiguration out-of-the-box and you have the current flaming security dumpster fire that is IPv6.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    > Assuming it's configured correctly. Most devices are not. Aren't they? I've never seen a home user fight with IPv6 > Why would you ever want publicly routable addresses on devices inside your home? Because that's how the internet is supposed to work. It's what protocols are designed for. IPv4's shortcomings have led to many stupid security issues (SIP ALG, FTP ALG, all the other ALGs, all allowing anyone website to punch a hole straight through consumer firewalls). I don't know what insecure-by-default devices you use, but all routers I've seen come with a firewall enabled by default set to deny all incoming traffic. If you don't want that for some reason, feel free to NAT66 your network into your own chosen ULA. IPv6 is no more of a flaming security dumpster fire than IPv4.
zozbot234 5y ago
> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used How so? The network-prefix portion of IPv6 is 64 bits, which is a pretty conservative extension of ipv4. Everything after that is under the control of end users, so nothing's stopping them from manually assigning simple ::1, ::2 etc. values for the host identifier part - or whatever addressing scheme happens to be most convenient for any given application.
buttocks 5y ago
> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used; and second, even most people reading this, tech people in a tech forum, struggle to really grasp the inane IPv6 address shortening rules! I have been using IPv6 for at least twelve years and I will agree that at first - maybe the first six months or year - I found these things confusing. But I think your assertion is based on lack of familiarity. Fundamentally, IPv6 works well, and just needs some open-minded people to spend time with it.
xnyanta 5y ago
> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used; and second, even most people reading this, tech people in a tech forum, struggle to really grasp the inane IPv6 address shortening rules! Ever heard of DNS?
- vel0city 5y ago
  I don't know about everyone else, but when I want to go to Hacker News I go to https://209.216.230.240 https://209.216.230.240 and ignore the security warnings of mismatched name. Way easier to remember than news.ycombinator.com, its five fewer characters!
  - Bluecobra 5y ago
    I am a little ashamed to admit this, but I can't remember the URL for Hacker News and always have to search for it in Google if I am on a device that doesn't have it bookmarked. Somehow I still remember other long URL's like http://altavista.digital.com http://altavista.digital.com though.
    - mrlonglong 5y ago
      Why not just bookmark the URL?

by dublin 5y ago

cameronh90 5y ago

Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with. Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine.

ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
> Remembering and hand manipulating IPv6 addresses is not something end users need to deal with. Assuming it's configured correctly. Most devices are not. > Like everyone else on my ISP, I have a publicly routeable v6 subnet at home and v6 addresses on my phones. I couldn't tell you what they are, but they work just fine. Why would you ever want publicly routable addresses on devices inside your home? If Ipv6 was simply a 64-bit quad improvement on IPv4 it would be fine. However, the only valid use cases I can think of are mostly to the benefit of end users. What possible need could anyone have for more address space than the non-routable private address blocks already afforded by IPv4? Throw in the insecure-by-default and frequent misconfiguration out-of-the-box and you have the current flaming security dumpster fire that is IPv6.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  > Assuming it's configured correctly. Most devices are not. Aren't they? I've never seen a home user fight with IPv6 > Why would you ever want publicly routable addresses on devices inside your home? Because that's how the internet is supposed to work. It's what protocols are designed for. IPv4's shortcomings have led to many stupid security issues (SIP ALG, FTP ALG, all the other ALGs, all allowing anyone website to punch a hole straight through consumer firewalls). I don't know what insecure-by-default devices you use, but all routers I've seen come with a firewall enabled by default set to deny all incoming traffic. If you don't want that for some reason, feel free to NAT66 your network into your own chosen ULA. IPv6 is no more of a flaming security dumpster fire than IPv4.

zozbot234 5y ago

> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used How so? The network-prefix portion of IPv6 is 64 bits, which is a pretty conservative extension of ipv4. Everything after that is under the control of end users, so nothing's stopping them from manually assigning simple ::1, ::2 etc. values for the host identifier part - or whatever addressing scheme happens to be most convenient for any given application.

buttocks 5y ago

> First, the addresses are too damn long and unwieldy to really be used; and second, even most people reading this, tech people in a tech forum, struggle to really grasp the inane IPv6 address shortening rules! I have been using IPv6 for at least twelve years and I will agree that at first - maybe the first six months or year - I found these things confusing. But I think your assertion is based on lack of familiarity. Fundamentally, IPv6 works well, and just needs some open-minded people to spend time with it.

xnyanta 5y ago

vel0city 5y ago
I don't know about everyone else, but when I want to go to Hacker News I go to https://209.216.230.240 https://209.216.230.240 and ignore the security warnings of mismatched name. Way easier to remember than news.ycombinator.com, its five fewer characters!
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  I am a little ashamed to admit this, but I can't remember the URL for Hacker News and always have to search for it in Google if I am on a device that doesn't have it bookmarked. Somehow I still remember other long URL's like http://altavista.digital.com http://altavista.digital.com though.
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    Why not just bookmark the URL?