11 ms·

I guess the big companies are not really keen to move to IPv6, since they control large swaths of IPv4 territory anyway. And only they would have the power to i

by tacker2000 4y ago

I guess the big companies are not really keen to move to IPv6, since they control large swaths of IPv4 territory anyway. And only they would have the power to initiate a move, so i guess we are stuck in somewhat of a limbo here…?

b112 4y ago
I think they're waiting for ipv8, as I am, which is really just an extra octlet at the start of the IPv4 block. ipv6 is windows me. Skip over it. Wait for ipv8. edit: Oh! We could make ivp8 just 16bit instead of an octlet!
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  haha, oh man you had me going there for a second.
  - b112 4y ago
    I've been thinking, we really just need lots and lots and lots of IP addresses, far more than we realise right now. ipv8? Should probably be ipv32 or some such. An example ; when we start throwing smart nano on the grass, to see how each blade of grass is doing on your lawn. Well, each nano is going to need an IP address, and so will all in the neighbourhood. And that's just the grass. What about when some scientist wants to track sand dispersal patterns, on a beach, after a hurricane? And wants to have each grain of sand tagged with its own nano hitchhiker? Just think of the IP addresses we'll need then! And even medicine. What if we want to interally tag each cell in our bodies with nano? What if we want to bioengineer our body, so that each cell has its own IP address? And can report health/condition? No, we need more, more more IP addresses! So many more.
    - lbotos 4y ago
      I mean, IPv6 is a lot of addresses: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/IPv6-addresses-how-many-is-that-in-numbers https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/IPv6-addresses-how...
      - zo1 4y ago
        This part really drives it home: "[...] assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths."
    - jacobyoder 4y ago
      > What if we want to interally tag each cell in our bodies with nano? There will need to be multiple addresses for all the nano-services running inside each of those nanobots. Solution: install a k8s cluster with each nano...
      - tacker2000 4y ago
        Yes or install a main router/access point for each human that sub-adresses all nanobots. Or do you want them exposed to the broader internet?
    - tacker2000 4y ago
      Well, IPv6 has 128 bits, so 3,4 x 10^38 adresses. Surface area of the Earth: 5,1 x 10^14 m2. Maybe adressing grass blades could be possible with IPv6.
      - dx034 4y ago
        I never got why they had to make it that large. I doubt we'll ever want to have that many devices with their unique ip. So why not have a simpler system that makes switching easier? Even one octlet more in ipv4 would've sufficed for a very long time, two would've probably been enough forever.
        b112 4y ago
        Two reasons I think. The first is, they were working on this before the Internet was widely used. Back in dialup days, pre-2000, the draft presented in 1998, working on it in 1995 and before surely. Compared to today's scope and size, this was nascent/early style change, in something which was constantly changing. They didn't see any contention likely at the time. Why not have all the universities, government departments, and research bodies switch? This was an entirely different landscape compared to today. So in their eyes, why not make change? It wasn't a big deal, hell back in the early 90s, people were using token ring adapters/networking still in many offices!! The second thing is, NAT wasn't a thing back then. The computational power was a limiter for large scale usage. An RFC for NAT came out in 98 I think, and Linux had ipmasq, but that was brand new in the early 90s. Basically, ipv6 was crafted before anyone had any idea we'd be where we are today. In fact, the worry about address space exhaustion in the early 90s was due to a lack of NAT, or even the idea that it could be deployed everywhere at scale. Where would all the compute power for NAT at scale come from?! So basically, it was crafted with a different viewpoint.
        BizarroLand 4y ago
        I wonder how much electricity NAT is consuming globally? That would be a good BS level graduate thesis paper for someone interested.
      - 4y ago
    - nrdgrrrl 4y ago
    - vlan0 4y ago
      Society will collapse before we ever have a need for more IPs than what’s in v6.
    - SonOfLilit 4y ago
      https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/
    - rzz3 4y ago
      I think the sand and the grass can use NAT :)
- Macha 4y ago
  Once you make any change, even just "add another octet", you're into the chicken and egg problem IPv6 faced until recent years forced the hands of some ISPs. Given that IPv6 now has something like 20% adoption, there's little point starting over with something people view as simpler because of smaller changes to the written representation of addresses.
  - b112 4y ago
    It's easy to start with. Phase one has us use something in tcp headers, maybe something in the reserved area, to set a number. It's OK for that to just be maybe 1 to 4 even, or something small depending upon bit size requirements. Since old systems won't use that reserved header space to determine anything, they'll ignore it. And new systems will exclusively use unroutable address space, like 240 being discussed here, for routing. So old systems will drop the 240/ address space, but new systems will route it, as it will be 2.240.x.x.x. So only compliant systems will see the new address space ; the rest won't. It won't help old systems, but it will mean new systems only using old address space, can speak to old systems, without breaking them. Everyone loves sensible change, so unlike ipv6, ipv8 will only take 20 years! (What's ipv6 been out for, 25 years and not adopted yet?)
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Rather than changing TCP, we could just make web browsers query SRV records to see what port to connect to. Then you could host 65535 websites on the same IP address, without requiring any software in the middle to check Host/ALPN/SNI. (The web is moving to UDP anyway with HTTP/3. Not saying the web is the only important part of the Internet, but it's a big one.) IPv6 is kind of over the major adoption hurdle of rewriting all software to understand it. Nearly all software understands it. I'm not sure anyone really has the appetite for that again.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        People like to make fun of ipv6 adoption rates but I'm pretty sure we'll all be dead and dust before srv becomes much more than a niche curiosity. It has similar chicken and egg problems but much less financial motivation behind it.
- ewpatton 4y ago
  I have occasionally wondered about this, specifically from a human factors point of view. I recall an exercise a professor conducted in my intro to psych course as an undergraduate. Try to remember and recall this sequence of numbers: 1...7...7...6...1...8...1...2...1...8...6...5...1...9...1...8...1...9...4...5 And then try to remember and recall this sequence: 1776...1812...1865...1918...1945 Pretty much everyone finds the latter easier even though they are effectively equivalent. This was done as a demonstration of Miller's 7+-2 model of working memory. I sometimes wonder if the reason IPv4 continues to stick around and IPv6 hasn't gotten the uptake we need is because the former fits into the memory models needed by the end users (developers) whereas a space of 2^128 instead of 2^32 starts pushing the boundary of what a human operator can easily keep in memory.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I mean, those numbers would be significant to an American with some grasp of history. That doesn't seem like the same thing as memorizing 5 random 4 digit numbers. I agree though that IPv6 has some human factor problems. You can actually use IPv4 addresses in it like ::10.0.0.1 - that's valid IPv6 if you wanted to use it on your own networks at least.
    - ewpatton 4y ago
      Sure, this was a class at an American university, the context of those particular numbers is important as an example, but the exercise likely transfers to other relevant dates in other countries. At the core of it though is that arguably there are IPs (numbers) in any org that might be worth committing to memory because systems can and do fail, and for humans it seems to me that encoding IPv4 is inherently easier than encoding IPv6. My (untested) hypothesis is that this may be at least somewhat of a contributing factor to the slowness of IPv6 adoption (IMO the other more prevalent one being the market factors re. IPv4 scarcity). I just thought it was an interesting parallel to share.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Interesting reference I'm not sure though how many people actually keep IP addresses in their memory. Even with IPv4 I usually copy paste the entire address unless I'm sure only one of the octets have changed. I wonder if others do the same.
- dx034 4y ago
  Honestly, if IPV6 had been v4 but with 2 extra octlets, I believe we would be at close to 100% adoption. And also wouldn't run out of ips anytime soon.
  - kaliszad 4y ago
    They haven't done many of the changes for fun but because it makes some things work better i.e. using multicast instead of a broadcast in many places compared to IPv4. Enabling and making autoconfiguration a lot more integral. Making the smallest standard prefix /64 (with P2P being /127) - eliminating basically all thinking about how many hosts can I fit in a subnet. There are things with MTU and fragmenting that are partially more complicated but in a sense also simpler than IPv4.
knorker 4y ago
Amazon and Verizon definitely don't have as many IPs as they want or need. Other clouds too. And CGNAT is expensive. No. There are some legacy allocations, but at least my experience is than nobody has enough.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
It doesn't look stuck to me. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- tacker2000 4y ago
  Thank you thats very interesting! Why does India have such a large adoption rate? Because the got newer hardware to start with I guess?
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Seems like that's mostly mobile users[1], even in the US the mobile carriers are all IPv6, unlike most residential ISPs... 1: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/india-to-have-1-bn-smartphone-users-by-2026-deloitte-study-323519-2022-02-22 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/india-to-have-...
  - EwanToo 4y ago
    Simply because India has huge amounts of mobile devices, and the Indian ISPs didn't get assigned many IPv4 gold rush days when anyone could get an addresses by asking. Instead they've aggressively rolled out IPv6 and carrier grade NAT where needed
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    We had some customers in india that required ipv6 support bc some indian isps are apparently ipv6 only!
  - dx034 4y ago
    The question is why China is so low. They must have close to a billion mobile devices only at any time. Other countries aggressively use ipv6 for those, I'm surprised China doesn't. Or Google just doesn't see the real traffic in China?
- cm2187 4y ago
  only 40% adoption after 25 years, that's stuck to me.
wmf 4y ago
AWS has the best IPv6 support of any cloud. It came 15 years late but they finally caught up.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  There's still lots of brokenness in GCP IPV6 world... I really wish cloud providers would just emulate a bare metal network cable that I can send any kind of packets over... Then I could update to IPv7 whenever I damn well please!
  - wmf 4y ago
    Emulating L2 Ethernet is more complex than the VPC they have now. VPC is also forcing apps to become more robust and scalable.
zhfliz 4y ago
Azure is really supporting use of IPv6. you can get IPv6 addresses from Azure for the same cheap price you can get IPv4 addresses for! not ridiculous at all.
- dx034 4y ago
  Hetzner is actually good there. They now charge you separately for ipv4 but give ipv6 for free. And when they changed it, they reduced server prices by the ipv4 price. So you could actually save money switching. It tends to be 5% or less, but seeing it a separate line item might make people think if they really need ipv4.
kelp 4y ago
The thing about IPv6 is it has significant switching costs but almost no benefit to end users. The exception, I guess, is network providers who are struggling with a shortage of v4 addresses. We've been trying to get people to switch since the late 90s/early 00s. And it's only now making progress because IPv4 address have an actual cost which keeps increasing. But I think IPv6 is huge example of second system syndrome. Instead of just solving the obvious and most important problem of IP address exhaustion, we piled on a whole bunch of other requirements, greatly expanding the scope, increasing switching cost, and dragging out the migration for literal decades. Here we are 20+ years later with only 40% adoption of IPv6... And I can see the temptation to bundle in all those other changes, since this might be the big opportunity to get them out there. But seems like we could have come up with a simpler and easier to switch to alternative that would have solved the acute issue much faster. Instead we're here muddling through.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  If memory serves me right, one of the biggest selling points for IPv6 to end users (at the time) was it's "built in" support for IPsec (ESP and AH are standard extensions in the protocol). These days I'm not sure how beneficial something like this would be, Wireguard outperforms it AFAIK.
  - wmf 4y ago
    That whole thing was kind of a lie since you can't force hosts to implement IPSec and IPSec was immediately backported to IPv4 anyway.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  As soon as adoption starts hitting 80%, lazy sysadmins won't bother setting up ipv4 support, and suddenly the ipv4 internet will get less useful, and things will snowball to IPv6 (in public at least - I'm sure internal company LAN's will remain IPv4 behind a proxy for decades more). To get from 40%to 80% just requires a few ISP's to make it the default on their routers, which they have an incentive to do as soon as they run out of IP's and CGNAT starts to get expensive to run. Enabling IPv6 immediately halves the load on the CGNAT boxes because all the CDN traffic immediately uses IPv6.

b112 4y ago

I think they're waiting for ipv8, as I am, which is really just an extra octlet at the start of the IPv4 block. ipv6 is windows me. Skip over it. Wait for ipv8. edit: Oh! We could make ivp8 just 16bit instead of an octlet!

wollsmoth 4y ago
haha, oh man you had me going there for a second.
- b112 4y ago
  I've been thinking, we really just need lots and lots and lots of IP addresses, far more than we realise right now. ipv8? Should probably be ipv32 or some such. An example ; when we start throwing smart nano on the grass, to see how each blade of grass is doing on your lawn. Well, each nano is going to need an IP address, and so will all in the neighbourhood. And that's just the grass. What about when some scientist wants to track sand dispersal patterns, on a beach, after a hurricane? And wants to have each grain of sand tagged with its own nano hitchhiker? Just think of the IP addresses we'll need then! And even medicine. What if we want to interally tag each cell in our bodies with nano? What if we want to bioengineer our body, so that each cell has its own IP address? And can report health/condition? No, we need more, more more IP addresses! So many more.
  - lbotos 4y ago
    I mean, IPv6 is a lot of addresses: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/IPv6-addresses-how-many-is-that-in-numbers https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/IPv6-addresses-how...
    - zo1 4y ago
      This part really drives it home: "[...] assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths."
  - jacobyoder 4y ago
    > What if we want to interally tag each cell in our bodies with nano? There will need to be multiple addresses for all the nano-services running inside each of those nanobots. Solution: install a k8s cluster with each nano...
    - tacker2000 4y ago
      Yes or install a main router/access point for each human that sub-adresses all nanobots. Or do you want them exposed to the broader internet?
  - tacker2000 4y ago
    Well, IPv6 has 128 bits, so 3,4 x 10^38 adresses. Surface area of the Earth: 5,1 x 10^14 m2. Maybe adressing grass blades could be possible with IPv6.
    - dx034 4y ago
      I never got why they had to make it that large. I doubt we'll ever want to have that many devices with their unique ip. So why not have a simpler system that makes switching easier? Even one octlet more in ipv4 would've sufficed for a very long time, two would've probably been enough forever.
      - b112 4y ago
        Two reasons I think. The first is, they were working on this before the Internet was widely used. Back in dialup days, pre-2000, the draft presented in 1998, working on it in 1995 and before surely. Compared to today's scope and size, this was nascent/early style change, in something which was constantly changing. They didn't see any contention likely at the time. Why not have all the universities, government departments, and research bodies switch? This was an entirely different landscape compared to today. So in their eyes, why not make change? It wasn't a big deal, hell back in the early 90s, people were using token ring adapters/networking still in many offices!! The second thing is, NAT wasn't a thing back then. The computational power was a limiter for large scale usage. An RFC for NAT came out in 98 I think, and Linux had ipmasq, but that was brand new in the early 90s. Basically, ipv6 was crafted before anyone had any idea we'd be where we are today. In fact, the worry about address space exhaustion in the early 90s was due to a lack of NAT, or even the idea that it could be deployed everywhere at scale. Where would all the compute power for NAT at scale come from?! So basically, it was crafted with a different viewpoint.
        BizarroLand 4y ago
        I wonder how much electricity NAT is consuming globally? That would be a good BS level graduate thesis paper for someone interested.
    - 4y ago
  - nrdgrrrl 4y ago
  - vlan0 4y ago
    Society will collapse before we ever have a need for more IPs than what’s in v6.
  - SonOfLilit 4y ago
    https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/
  - rzz3 4y ago
    I think the sand and the grass can use NAT :)
Macha 4y ago
Once you make any change, even just "add another octet", you're into the chicken and egg problem IPv6 faced until recent years forced the hands of some ISPs. Given that IPv6 now has something like 20% adoption, there's little point starting over with something people view as simpler because of smaller changes to the written representation of addresses.
- b112 4y ago
  It's easy to start with. Phase one has us use something in tcp headers, maybe something in the reserved area, to set a number. It's OK for that to just be maybe 1 to 4 even, or something small depending upon bit size requirements. Since old systems won't use that reserved header space to determine anything, they'll ignore it. And new systems will exclusively use unroutable address space, like 240 being discussed here, for routing. So old systems will drop the 240/ address space, but new systems will route it, as it will be 2.240.x.x.x. So only compliant systems will see the new address space ; the rest won't. It won't help old systems, but it will mean new systems only using old address space, can speak to old systems, without breaking them. Everyone loves sensible change, so unlike ipv6, ipv8 will only take 20 years! (What's ipv6 been out for, 25 years and not adopted yet?)
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Rather than changing TCP, we could just make web browsers query SRV records to see what port to connect to. Then you could host 65535 websites on the same IP address, without requiring any software in the middle to check Host/ALPN/SNI. (The web is moving to UDP anyway with HTTP/3. Not saying the web is the only important part of the Internet, but it's a big one.) IPv6 is kind of over the major adoption hurdle of rewriting all software to understand it. Nearly all software understands it. I'm not sure anyone really has the appetite for that again.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      People like to make fun of ipv6 adoption rates but I'm pretty sure we'll all be dead and dust before srv becomes much more than a niche curiosity. It has similar chicken and egg problems but much less financial motivation behind it.
ewpatton 4y ago
I have occasionally wondered about this, specifically from a human factors point of view. I recall an exercise a professor conducted in my intro to psych course as an undergraduate. Try to remember and recall this sequence of numbers: 1...7...7...6...1...8...1...2...1...8...6...5...1...9...1...8...1...9...4...5 And then try to remember and recall this sequence: 1776...1812...1865...1918...1945 Pretty much everyone finds the latter easier even though they are effectively equivalent. This was done as a demonstration of Miller's 7+-2 model of working memory. I sometimes wonder if the reason IPv4 continues to stick around and IPv6 hasn't gotten the uptake we need is because the former fits into the memory models needed by the end users (developers) whereas a space of 2^128 instead of 2^32 starts pushing the boundary of what a human operator can easily keep in memory.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I mean, those numbers would be significant to an American with some grasp of history. That doesn't seem like the same thing as memorizing 5 random 4 digit numbers. I agree though that IPv6 has some human factor problems. You can actually use IPv4 addresses in it like ::10.0.0.1 - that's valid IPv6 if you wanted to use it on your own networks at least.
  - ewpatton 4y ago
    Sure, this was a class at an American university, the context of those particular numbers is important as an example, but the exercise likely transfers to other relevant dates in other countries. At the core of it though is that arguably there are IPs (numbers) in any org that might be worth committing to memory because systems can and do fail, and for humans it seems to me that encoding IPv4 is inherently easier than encoding IPv6. My (untested) hypothesis is that this may be at least somewhat of a contributing factor to the slowness of IPv6 adoption (IMO the other more prevalent one being the market factors re. IPv4 scarcity). I just thought it was an interesting parallel to share.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Interesting reference I'm not sure though how many people actually keep IP addresses in their memory. Even with IPv4 I usually copy paste the entire address unless I'm sure only one of the octets have changed. I wonder if others do the same.
dx034 4y ago
Honestly, if IPV6 had been v4 but with 2 extra octlets, I believe we would be at close to 100% adoption. And also wouldn't run out of ips anytime soon.
- kaliszad 4y ago
  They haven't done many of the changes for fun but because it makes some things work better i.e. using multicast instead of a broadcast in many places compared to IPv4. Enabling and making autoconfiguration a lot more integral. Making the smallest standard prefix /64 (with P2P being /127) - eliminating basically all thinking about how many hosts can I fit in a subnet. There are things with MTU and fragmenting that are partially more complicated but in a sense also simpler than IPv4.

knorker 4y ago

Amazon and Verizon definitely don't have as many IPs as they want or need. Other clouds too. And CGNAT is expensive. No. There are some legacy allocations, but at least my experience is than nobody has enough.

TheDudeMan 4y ago

It doesn't look stuck to me. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

tacker2000 4y ago
Thank you thats very interesting! Why does India have such a large adoption rate? Because the got newer hardware to start with I guess?
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Seems like that's mostly mobile users[1], even in the US the mobile carriers are all IPv6, unlike most residential ISPs... 1: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/india-to-have-1-bn-smartphone-users-by-2026-deloitte-study-323519-2022-02-22 https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/india-to-have-...
- EwanToo 4y ago
  Simply because India has huge amounts of mobile devices, and the Indian ISPs didn't get assigned many IPv4 gold rush days when anyone could get an addresses by asking. Instead they've aggressively rolled out IPv6 and carrier grade NAT where needed
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  We had some customers in india that required ipv6 support bc some indian isps are apparently ipv6 only!
- dx034 4y ago
  The question is why China is so low. They must have close to a billion mobile devices only at any time. Other countries aggressively use ipv6 for those, I'm surprised China doesn't. Or Google just doesn't see the real traffic in China?
cm2187 4y ago
only 40% adoption after 25 years, that's stuck to me.

wmf 4y ago

AWS has the best IPv6 support of any cloud. It came 15 years late but they finally caught up.

londons_explore 4y ago
There's still lots of brokenness in GCP IPV6 world... I really wish cloud providers would just emulate a bare metal network cable that I can send any kind of packets over... Then I could update to IPv7 whenever I damn well please!
- wmf 4y ago
  Emulating L2 Ethernet is more complex than the VPC they have now. VPC is also forcing apps to become more robust and scalable.

zhfliz 4y ago

Azure is really supporting use of IPv6. you can get IPv6 addresses from Azure for the same cheap price you can get IPv4 addresses for! not ridiculous at all.

dx034 4y ago
Hetzner is actually good there. They now charge you separately for ipv4 but give ipv6 for free. And when they changed it, they reduced server prices by the ipv4 price. So you could actually save money switching. It tends to be 5% or less, but seeing it a separate line item might make people think if they really need ipv4.

kelp 4y ago

The thing about IPv6 is it has significant switching costs but almost no benefit to end users. The exception, I guess, is network providers who are struggling with a shortage of v4 addresses. We've been trying to get people to switch since the late 90s/early 00s. And it's only now making progress because IPv4 address have an actual cost which keeps increasing. But I think IPv6 is huge example of second system syndrome. Instead of just solving the obvious and most important problem of IP address exhaustion, we piled on a whole bunch of other requirements, greatly expanding the scope, increasing switching cost, and dragging out the migration for literal decades. Here we are 20+ years later with only 40% adoption of IPv6... And I can see the temptation to bundle in all those other changes, since this might be the big opportunity to get them out there. But seems like we could have come up with a simpler and easier to switch to alternative that would have solved the acute issue much faster. Instead we're here muddling through.

candiddevmike 4y ago
If memory serves me right, one of the biggest selling points for IPv6 to end users (at the time) was it's "built in" support for IPsec (ESP and AH are standard extensions in the protocol). These days I'm not sure how beneficial something like this would be, Wireguard outperforms it AFAIK.
- wmf 4y ago
  That whole thing was kind of a lie since you can't force hosts to implement IPSec and IPSec was immediately backported to IPv4 anyway.
londons_explore 4y ago
As soon as adoption starts hitting 80%, lazy sysadmins won't bother setting up ipv4 support, and suddenly the ipv4 internet will get less useful, and things will snowball to IPv6 (in public at least - I'm sure internal company LAN's will remain IPv4 behind a proxy for decades more). To get from 40%to 80% just requires a few ISP's to make it the default on their routers, which they have an incentive to do as soon as they run out of IP's and CGNAT starts to get expensive to run. Enabling IPv6 immediately halves the load on the CGNAT boxes because all the CDN traffic immediately uses IPv6.