5 ms·

Does anything support IPv6? The product management of IPv6 is terrible. They could have turned 10.20.30.40 (IPv4) into 10.20.30.40.50.60 (IPv6) where 0.0.

by dheera 4y ago

Does anything support IPv6? The product management of IPv6 is terrible. They could have turned 10.20.30.40 (IPv4) into 10.20.30.40.50.60 (IPv6) where 0.0.1.2.3.4 just translates into 1.2.3.4 and everyone would be using it already. But instead they chose fe04::fa23::://::23::::!!/45:234a::23ff And guess who uses it? Nobody. When I need DNS I know 8.8.8.8 just works. What is the IPv6 Google DNS? Hell if I can remember.

HWR_14 4y ago
UTF-8 took over entirely for backwards compatibility reasons
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  UTF-16 is a PITA if you're working outside the BMP. At that point you're dealing with variable size codepoints anyway and may as well use a more compact encoding.
- p1mrx 4y ago
  Text files are variable length; IP addresses are fixed length.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  There can be no "backwards compatibility" for an IPv4 successor because of the pigeonhole principle. UTF-8 is popular on modern computers with an 8-bit byte, conveniently leaving a whole bit free on the common ASCII text encoding and of course text is handled in sequences, so the multi-byte arrangement isn't inherently incompatible. However IPv4 doesn't have either a convenient spare bit which can be re-purposed, nor an interpretation where you just get to string more addresses together and that's fine. Your IPv4 packets contain exactly one 32-bit IPv4 source and one 32-bit IPv4 destination.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    IPv4 packets and processing code have exactly one 32-bit IPv4 source/destination and would not work. That's not how I interpreted the request. I took the point as "IPv6 as a standard should have been designed to take an IPv4 address and convert it reliably to a specified IPv6 address, which we would set up to route to the same location." That is, old software that requested an IPv4 address could have it translated by the OS into an IPv6 packet before transmission deterministically, people with memorized IPv4 address could use them in the future, etc.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      > That's not how I interpreted the request. I took the point as "IPv6 as a standard should have been designed to take an IPv4 address and convert it reliably to a specified IPv6 address, which we would set up to route to the same location." That is, old software that requested an IPv4 address could have it translated by the OS into an IPv6 packet before transmission deterministically It appears you are asking for the "IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses", which are of the form ::ffff:x:y, where xy is the 32-bit IPv4 address (there's even a special text format for these addresses, you can use ::ffff:a.b.c.d instead of having to convert the IPv4 address to hexadecimal). The only difference from what you are asking is that these addresses are routed through the IPv4 network; they allow applications written with only IPv6 in mind to still work with IPv4 networks. Or you might be thinking of something like SIIT (Stateless IP/ICMP Translation), which uses addresses of the form ::ffff:0:x:y (which can also use the same kind of special text format as above).
chungy 4y ago
48-bit is probably not enough; 64-bit was even considered in early IPv6 drafts and it was discarded because it wasn't quite convenient enough for all the routing magic that was intended to happen. The syntax change of addresses: makes it easy for parsers to determine the difference between a v4 and v6 address. It basically hasn't affected adoption (do you think 6 octets would have changed that?)
TimWolla 4y ago
> When I need DNS I know 8.8.8.8 just works. I've never had the need to know the IP address of a DNS resolver from the top of my head. Either the IP address of a working DNS resolver is provided by DHCP or I just install a local caching resolver that recurses itself (e.g. unbound).
- dheera 4y ago
  My home LAN DNS resolver: 10.10.10.1 The external DNS I use now: 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 My alma mater's DNS servers: 18.70.0.160 18.71.0.151 18.72.0.3 DNS servers for work: [redacted] I've had to manually configure DNS about 5 billion times, these numbers just roll off the tip of my tongue. I work with lots of embedded devices, manual configuration is often necessary.
  - GabeIsko 4y ago
    People don't use 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1 (cloudflare) for external dns? It also resolves http/s requests, so it's usually my go to external endpoint for testing and troubleshooting. google.com is still my go to for domain resolution troubleshooting.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Lots of folks end up with a few memorized, very-useful internal and external IP addresses, if they work on networks or datacenters much.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    They can do that with IPv6 too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615231 (the last paragraph in particular).
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  When you have an unreliable ISP it helps to have something easy to ping and run traceroute on.
lsbehe 4y ago
IPv6 isn't 6 bytes It's 16 bytes. With your example it would be 10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.90.100.110.120.130.140.150.160 Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser. DNS is an unfortunate case but generally you don't have to do it constantly at least.
- dheera 4y ago
  > Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser. On the contrary, I do that all the time, when DNS servers/clients haven't updated caches yet, when I need to update routing tables, configure servers, routers, load balancers, and if I can't remember an IPv6 and have a demo coming up in 10 minutes with no transparency on when DNS servers will update, I'm going back to punching IPv4 addresses in my browser for the screenshare because the IPv4 addresses of ALL the machines I control on a day-to-day basis roll off the tip of my tongue. My personal website, my cloud instances for my day job, my side project cloud instances, ALL of their IPv4 are in my head. I'm a walking IPv4 DNS server, I can't do that for IPv6 and all the double-colon-ffef nonsense.
  - megous 4y ago
    Or just edit /etc/hosts Or use mDNS. If your whatever machine on IPv6 network is named abc just open abc.local in the browser. Done.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    The double colon is a place where IPv6 addresses are easier to memorize than IPv4 addresses. Double colon just means "fill with zeroes". You don't have to remember how many zeroes to fill in. You don't have to type in a long string of zeroes. You just need to remember the prefix and suffix. If you are assigning all the IPv6 IPs by hand like you might in a private network, the suffix can be as short as you wish: prefix:: is your Device 0, prefix::1 is your Device 1, prefix::2 is your Device 2, prefix::f is your Device 15, and so forth. At that point you only have to memorize your prefix, which is just your subnet. If the subnet you are assigned is 2001:db8:: for instance you just need to remember that 2001:db:: as your prefix and add whatever device number you need after it. Sure, it's unlikely to have a prefix exactly that short, but sometimes you can luck out with a lot of zeroes. Private networking today (Unique Local Addresses) is fd00::/8 where you are expected to pick a 40-bit random string to make it a /48. That's just three groups to memorize for your entire private network: fd01:2345:6789::. ::ffef from that perspective implies you are accessing Device 65,519. If you are trying to remember that many devices you may have other problems. On the flipside, if you are assigning your own IPv6 suffixes anyway you can also use school kid "1337" "calculator" hacks in hex like setting up a key servers to be ::beef or ::dead or ::dead:beef or ::feed or ::8008. Potentially way more memorable "words" than numbers just between 0 and 255.
m348e912 4y ago
I came to a similar conclusion. Something like 0000:0000:0010:0020:0030:0040 or (::0010:0020:0030:0040) probably wouldn't be the most elegant solution but it would have been a nice bridge between ipv4 and ipv6. However, the IPv4 systems would have to understand and talk IPv6 to properly communicate.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Those addresses exist, and nobody uses them. Specifically ::10.20.30.40 is for a system that speaks both, and ::ffff:10.20.30.40 is for a system that only speaks IPv4. You don't even have to convert to hex.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    Interesting. So if I pinged ::ffff:10.20.30.40 from an IPv6-only machine, what address would 10.20.30.40 see the ping coming from?
    - dheera 4y ago
      Hurricane Electric, I think. It's sketch AF. /s
      - m348e912 4y ago
        >>This won't do anything from your IPv6 only machine, those are IPv4 addresses. Yup you are correct. (At least for me). I just tried it from my ipv6-only vhost. [www@localhost ~]$ ping6 ::ffff:8.8.8.8 connect: Network is unreachable
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      This won't do anything from your IPv6 only machine, those are IPv4 addresses.
bioemerl 4y ago
Amen. I had the thankful joy of looking into how DCHP works for a local ipv6 network. It doesn't. Android literally just ignores it. So, want to set a static IP? Can't do it because half the devices people have just flat out refused to support it. That means ipv6 doesn't even support all the features of V4, and you have less control of your network when you use it. Have a server you want with a known IP address? You can't do it. Not as far as I could see. The solution? Have server itself runs a program to update your DNS to the right address. It's so silly and convoluted. I'm sure there are reasons for it, but it's not something I was prone to adopt after looking into it
- megous 4y ago
  That's just Android's problem. (and not all of Android, Huawei devices seem to work with DHCPv6).
- dboreham 4y ago
  IPv6 was designed to not need DHCP. That design was based on 1990's assumptions about privacy, unfortunately.
  - megous 4y ago
    And assumptions about assignement of IPv6 addresse in the wild. You will not subnet /64 without DHCPv6, even though you might need to.
- xibo9 4y ago
  DHCPv6 works just fine with everything else I have on my network. Blame Android developers for being pigheaded.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  SLAAC IPv6 addresses are static IPs; they're directly derived from MAC addresses. Clients will usually receive additional IP addresses as part of the privacy extensions, but static IPs are enabled by default unless you're rotating the address space for some obscure reason. Both IP addresses will work, though for server purposes you obviously use the static addresses. Basically, you have a static IP unless you have some kind of DHCP server telling you what address you should use instead. Even if your external IP changes, the "internal" part of your IP will remain exactly the same, despite being a routable device. Maybe some shitty ISPs do this to extort customers into paying extra for static ranges? From the stories I've heard, I believe that some kind of American ISPs shuffles around ranges every week. Either way, this is the same problem IPv4 suffers from: your external IP is often not static.
megous 4y ago
IPv6 is a different protocol from IPv4 so it's probably for the best that the addresses are not easily confusable. And hexadecimal addresses are actually saner when dealing with classless addressing. The three-dot notation of IPv4 addresses is really a relict of the past which you'll notice each time you'll deal with anything other than /8 /16 and /24
dboreham 4y ago
I suspect you believe that IPv6 is just "IPv4 with bigger addresses", and furthermore that "IPv4 addresses are a subset of IPv6 addresses". It isn't that and they aren't. Low IPv6 adoption has nothing to do with dotted decimal address notation, and everything to do with IPv4 remaining good enough thanks to user acceptance of NAT and the concentration of power in today's network in the hands of a small number of large companies. And : 2001:4860:4860::8888
- dheera 4y ago
  > IPv4 remaining good enough I agree with this, > Low IPv6 adoption has nothing to do with dotted decimal address notation But disagree with this. A LOT of the time some equipment of mine supports IPv6, but I continue to access it by IPv4 because I can remember the damn address. So I continue to use IPv4 a lot of the time, IPv6 kinda just sits there and rots, rarely used because the addresses and notation are unwieldy. I'm also bad at memorizing hex compared to decimal. Many times I can relate an IPv4 address to some important numbers in my life, friends' birthdays, past zipcodes, digits of pi I've memorized, holidays, musical melodies, etc. so they tend to be easier to remember.
  - xibo9 4y ago
    Yeah this is why we have DNS. Why memorize huge integers when DNS is available?
    - dheera 4y ago
      When is DNS always available? I often update an A record and nobody except the heavens knows when the DNS server caches will update, when my clients will invalidate, often it's more reliable to just punch in the IPv4 off the top of my head when DNS is so unreliable about providing lighting-fast updates. And then there are the DNS-poisoning Wi-Fi hotspots, I connect to some hotspot, go to http://myfoo.com/ http://myfoo.com/, get some stupid hotel login page, I just go "fuck it" and punch in the IPv4 instead and I'm in business.
      - 4y ago
p1mrx 4y ago
Your argument might carry more weight if you used a real IPv6 address instead of a caricature.
xibo9 4y ago
Nobody? Apparently you are unaware of: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html A healthy amount of traffic that is ever increasing.
fomine3 4y ago
We need FAQ for this

by dheera 4y ago

HWR_14 4y ago

UTF-8 took over entirely for backwards compatibility reasons

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
UTF-16 is a PITA if you're working outside the BMP. At that point you're dealing with variable size codepoints anyway and may as well use a more compact encoding.
p1mrx 4y ago
Text files are variable length; IP addresses are fixed length.
tialaramex 4y ago
There can be no "backwards compatibility" for an IPv4 successor because of the pigeonhole principle. UTF-8 is popular on modern computers with an 8-bit byte, conveniently leaving a whole bit free on the common ASCII text encoding and of course text is handled in sequences, so the multi-byte arrangement isn't inherently incompatible. However IPv4 doesn't have either a convenient spare bit which can be re-purposed, nor an interpretation where you just get to string more addresses together and that's fine. Your IPv4 packets contain exactly one 32-bit IPv4 source and one 32-bit IPv4 destination.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  IPv4 packets and processing code have exactly one 32-bit IPv4 source/destination and would not work. That's not how I interpreted the request. I took the point as "IPv6 as a standard should have been designed to take an IPv4 address and convert it reliably to a specified IPv6 address, which we would set up to route to the same location." That is, old software that requested an IPv4 address could have it translated by the OS into an IPv6 packet before transmission deterministically, people with memorized IPv4 address could use them in the future, etc.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > That's not how I interpreted the request. I took the point as "IPv6 as a standard should have been designed to take an IPv4 address and convert it reliably to a specified IPv6 address, which we would set up to route to the same location." That is, old software that requested an IPv4 address could have it translated by the OS into an IPv6 packet before transmission deterministically It appears you are asking for the "IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses", which are of the form ::ffff:x:y, where xy is the 32-bit IPv4 address (there's even a special text format for these addresses, you can use ::ffff:a.b.c.d instead of having to convert the IPv4 address to hexadecimal). The only difference from what you are asking is that these addresses are routed through the IPv4 network; they allow applications written with only IPv6 in mind to still work with IPv4 networks. Or you might be thinking of something like SIIT (Stateless IP/ICMP Translation), which uses addresses of the form ::ffff:0:x:y (which can also use the same kind of special text format as above).

chungy 4y ago

48-bit is probably not enough; 64-bit was even considered in early IPv6 drafts and it was discarded because it wasn't quite convenient enough for all the routing magic that was intended to happen. The syntax change of addresses: makes it easy for parsers to determine the difference between a v4 and v6 address. It basically hasn't affected adoption (do you think 6 octets would have changed that?)

TimWolla 4y ago

> When I need DNS I know 8.8.8.8 just works. I've never had the need to know the IP address of a DNS resolver from the top of my head. Either the IP address of a working DNS resolver is provided by DHCP or I just install a local caching resolver that recurses itself (e.g. unbound).

dheera 4y ago
My home LAN DNS resolver: 10.10.10.1 The external DNS I use now: 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 My alma mater's DNS servers: 18.70.0.160 18.71.0.151 18.72.0.3 DNS servers for work: [redacted] I've had to manually configure DNS about 5 billion times, these numbers just roll off the tip of my tongue. I work with lots of embedded devices, manual configuration is often necessary.
- GabeIsko 4y ago
  People don't use 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1 (cloudflare) for external dns? It also resolves http/s requests, so it's usually my go to external endpoint for testing and troubleshooting. google.com is still my go to for domain resolution troubleshooting.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Lots of folks end up with a few memorized, very-useful internal and external IP addresses, if they work on networks or datacenters much.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  They can do that with IPv6 too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26615231 (the last paragraph in particular).
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
When you have an unreliable ISP it helps to have something easy to ping and run traceroute on.

lsbehe 4y ago

IPv6 isn't 6 bytes It's 16 bytes. With your example it would be 10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.90.100.110.120.130.140.150.160 Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser. DNS is an unfortunate case but generally you don't have to do it constantly at least.

dheera 4y ago
> Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser. On the contrary, I do that all the time, when DNS servers/clients haven't updated caches yet, when I need to update routing tables, configure servers, routers, load balancers, and if I can't remember an IPv6 and have a demo coming up in 10 minutes with no transparency on when DNS servers will update, I'm going back to punching IPv4 addresses in my browser for the screenshare because the IPv4 addresses of ALL the machines I control on a day-to-day basis roll off the tip of my tongue. My personal website, my cloud instances for my day job, my side project cloud instances, ALL of their IPv4 are in my head. I'm a walking IPv4 DNS server, I can't do that for IPv6 and all the double-colon-ffef nonsense.
- megous 4y ago
  Or just edit /etc/hosts Or use mDNS. If your whatever machine on IPv6 network is named abc just open abc.local in the browser. Done.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  The double colon is a place where IPv6 addresses are easier to memorize than IPv4 addresses. Double colon just means "fill with zeroes". You don't have to remember how many zeroes to fill in. You don't have to type in a long string of zeroes. You just need to remember the prefix and suffix. If you are assigning all the IPv6 IPs by hand like you might in a private network, the suffix can be as short as you wish: prefix:: is your Device 0, prefix::1 is your Device 1, prefix::2 is your Device 2, prefix::f is your Device 15, and so forth. At that point you only have to memorize your prefix, which is just your subnet. If the subnet you are assigned is 2001:db8:: for instance you just need to remember that 2001:db:: as your prefix and add whatever device number you need after it. Sure, it's unlikely to have a prefix exactly that short, but sometimes you can luck out with a lot of zeroes. Private networking today (Unique Local Addresses) is fd00::/8 where you are expected to pick a 40-bit random string to make it a /48. That's just three groups to memorize for your entire private network: fd01:2345:6789::. ::ffef from that perspective implies you are accessing Device 65,519. If you are trying to remember that many devices you may have other problems. On the flipside, if you are assigning your own IPv6 suffixes anyway you can also use school kid "1337" "calculator" hacks in hex like setting up a key servers to be ::beef or ::dead or ::dead:beef or ::feed or ::8008. Potentially way more memorable "words" than numbers just between 0 and 255.

m348e912 4y ago

I came to a similar conclusion. Something like 0000:0000:0010:0020:0030:0040 or (::0010:0020:0030:0040) probably wouldn't be the most elegant solution but it would have been a nice bridge between ipv4 and ipv6. However, the IPv4 systems would have to understand and talk IPv6 to properly communicate.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Those addresses exist, and nobody uses them. Specifically ::10.20.30.40 is for a system that speaks both, and ::ffff:10.20.30.40 is for a system that only speaks IPv4. You don't even have to convert to hex.
- m348e912 4y ago
  Interesting. So if I pinged ::ffff:10.20.30.40 from an IPv6-only machine, what address would 10.20.30.40 see the ping coming from?
  - dheera 4y ago
    Hurricane Electric, I think. It's sketch AF. /s
    - m348e912 4y ago
      >>This won't do anything from your IPv6 only machine, those are IPv4 addresses. Yup you are correct. (At least for me). I just tried it from my ipv6-only vhost. [www@localhost ~]$ ping6 ::ffff:8.8.8.8 connect: Network is unreachable
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    This won't do anything from your IPv6 only machine, those are IPv4 addresses.

bioemerl 4y ago

Amen. I had the thankful joy of looking into how DCHP works for a local ipv6 network. It doesn't. Android literally just ignores it. So, want to set a static IP? Can't do it because half the devices people have just flat out refused to support it. That means ipv6 doesn't even support all the features of V4, and you have less control of your network when you use it. Have a server you want with a known IP address? You can't do it. Not as far as I could see. The solution? Have server itself runs a program to update your DNS to the right address. It's so silly and convoluted. I'm sure there are reasons for it, but it's not something I was prone to adopt after looking into it

megous 4y ago
That's just Android's problem. (and not all of Android, Huawei devices seem to work with DHCPv6).
dboreham 4y ago
IPv6 was designed to not need DHCP. That design was based on 1990's assumptions about privacy, unfortunately.
- megous 4y ago
  And assumptions about assignement of IPv6 addresse in the wild. You will not subnet /64 without DHCPv6, even though you might need to.
xibo9 4y ago
DHCPv6 works just fine with everything else I have on my network. Blame Android developers for being pigheaded.
jeroenhd 4y ago
SLAAC IPv6 addresses are static IPs; they're directly derived from MAC addresses. Clients will usually receive additional IP addresses as part of the privacy extensions, but static IPs are enabled by default unless you're rotating the address space for some obscure reason. Both IP addresses will work, though for server purposes you obviously use the static addresses. Basically, you have a static IP unless you have some kind of DHCP server telling you what address you should use instead. Even if your external IP changes, the "internal" part of your IP will remain exactly the same, despite being a routable device. Maybe some shitty ISPs do this to extort customers into paying extra for static ranges? From the stories I've heard, I believe that some kind of American ISPs shuffles around ranges every week. Either way, this is the same problem IPv4 suffers from: your external IP is often not static.

megous 4y ago

IPv6 is a different protocol from IPv4 so it's probably for the best that the addresses are not easily confusable. And hexadecimal addresses are actually saner when dealing with classless addressing. The three-dot notation of IPv4 addresses is really a relict of the past which you'll notice each time you'll deal with anything other than /8 /16 and /24

dboreham 4y ago

I suspect you believe that IPv6 is just "IPv4 with bigger addresses", and furthermore that "IPv4 addresses are a subset of IPv6 addresses". It isn't that and they aren't. Low IPv6 adoption has nothing to do with dotted decimal address notation, and everything to do with IPv4 remaining good enough thanks to user acceptance of NAT and the concentration of power in today's network in the hands of a small number of large companies. And : 2001:4860:4860::8888

dheera 4y ago
> IPv4 remaining good enough I agree with this, > Low IPv6 adoption has nothing to do with dotted decimal address notation But disagree with this. A LOT of the time some equipment of mine supports IPv6, but I continue to access it by IPv4 because I can remember the damn address. So I continue to use IPv4 a lot of the time, IPv6 kinda just sits there and rots, rarely used because the addresses and notation are unwieldy. I'm also bad at memorizing hex compared to decimal. Many times I can relate an IPv4 address to some important numbers in my life, friends' birthdays, past zipcodes, digits of pi I've memorized, holidays, musical melodies, etc. so they tend to be easier to remember.
- xibo9 4y ago
  Yeah this is why we have DNS. Why memorize huge integers when DNS is available?
  - dheera 4y ago
    When is DNS always available? I often update an A record and nobody except the heavens knows when the DNS server caches will update, when my clients will invalidate, often it's more reliable to just punch in the IPv4 off the top of my head when DNS is so unreliable about providing lighting-fast updates. And then there are the DNS-poisoning Wi-Fi hotspots, I connect to some hotspot, go to http://myfoo.com/ http://myfoo.com/, get some stupid hotel login page, I just go "fuck it" and punch in the IPv4 instead and I'm in business.
    - 4y ago

p1mrx 4y ago

Your argument might carry more weight if you used a real IPv6 address instead of a caricature.

xibo9 4y ago

Nobody? Apparently you are unaware of: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html A healthy amount of traffic that is ever increasing.

fomine3 4y ago

We need FAQ for this