6 ms·

Haven't we saying this for years now ? Why has IPV6 adoption failed ?

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
They added features that weren't needed, and those new features break compatibility. IPv6 is the Python 3 of the network stack.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  In both cases the migration happened eventually. All my devices have and use v6, and I haven't had to touch Python 2.6 in years. Yes, there are still people stuck with v4 networks and 2.6-era codebases. These are legacy cases that are increasingly buried deep in the long tail of interoperability.
NegativeK 3y ago
Because it costs money to maintain both stacks, it costs money to replace the old ass devices/hardware that are IPv4 only (at some level -- there are plenty of situations where the end user can't spend any reasonable amount of money to replace the item because the manufacturers won't fix the problem), and it costs money to have employees spend time to get trained up in IPv6. I'd like IPv4 to die, but I've also worked at places where it would have a significant (non-internet) international impact if you suddenly shot it in the back of the head.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Dan J. Bernstein wrote about the reasons why, and it's quite enlightening. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
- lmm 3y ago
  No it isn't. That page sounds clever to the clueless but to anyone who actually understands that packet-switched networks won out over circuit-switched ones it's deeply stupid, to the point that I wonder if he wrote it as some kind of deep cover trolling.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    I suppose that you could argue that packet switching won out over circuit switching. I mean, except for the gigantic installed base of landline telephones (analog and ISDN) and the digital switches that support them on copper pairs, still extant and supported, VoIP is incrementally replacing those lines as the decades progress. (How many decades has it been now?) But you're comparing apples and oranges. What was the size of the established, installed base of network hosts using circuit-switched networks when packet switching started to compete? Did SRI International and other DARPA research institutions run IMPs that utilized circuit-switching to route network traffic? No, they started with packet switching. So essentially, as the Internet caught on, its style of packet switching "won" over landline telephones because it was a question of capability and supported features. IPv4 and IPv6 are the same protocol, essentially; you swap one out under the hood, and the upper and lower OSI layers don't even notice that anything's changed. Packet switching and circuit switching are two distinct techniques that are opposed to one another: if you wanted to swap one for the other, you'd be rebuilding your network from the ground up. So, apples and oranges: IPv6 is, by design, a replacement for IPv4, and djb is discussing the seemingly intractable issues faced by those who attempt to cleanly migrate.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Also, the article is old. It doesn't mention NAT64 which got rid of the big compatibility issue of IPv6 hosts not being able to talk to IPv4 servers. The other way, IPv4 to IPv6, will never happen and could never happen with larger address space. People talk about extending IPv4 address space but never explain how they would solve the compatibility. I thought of scheme where could put the original IPv4 address in option header on every NAT transition to make a variable length address. But that would require changing every router (and lots remove options when NAT), every program, and every protocol. All the stuff that needed to happen with IPv6, with the downside of keeping IPv4 allocations and NAT. It also mentions a lot of problems with IPv6 that have since been fixed. There is a valid complaint that IPv6 changed too many things so it took a long time to get replacements working.
thrashh 3y ago
I think one big reason why IPv6 won’t be a thing for a long time is because to the people involved decided to do away with NAT in IPv6. What a huge mistake. NAT is obviously a huge crutch but everyone uses it because it’s a dead-simple firewall and makes for dead-simple internal networks. There are NAT-inspired IPv6 analogues but they are not the same. If NAT with IPv6 was a thing, ISPs could have started shipping routers to customers (as they already do) with IPv6 turned on and we would have already been most of the way to IPv6. But no, they felt NAT was too hacky and did away with it on a matter of principle.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  The issue is not NAT as a firewall. Every routers shipped to customers also come with a firewall and replicating what NAT does by default is dead simple. That’s a red herring. The issue is that migrating to ipv6 meant changing equipments on the backbone and dealing with the change and no operator wanted to bear the cost. It’s getting better now that there is a dearth of ipv4 and people see an immediate benefit.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  You know what's more dead-simple than using NAT as a firewall? A basic firewall without NAT.
- chayleaf 3y ago
  NAT with IPv6 is a thing, it's trivial to do. I only have a single IPv6 address given to me by my VPN (ISP doesn't support IPv6) and IPv6 masquerading works perfectly fine.
ggm 3y ago
Has it? 35% and rising. 55% in the US, 75% in India, 30% in China. It hasn't worked out how we thought, sure. But "Failed" is really strong for something that 1/3 of the global Internet can (and does) use every day. There are more people on IPv6 now, than there are users in the entire US Internet market. https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN (replace last 2 chars with any ISO3166 code, or XA for the world)
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Yup, especially for cell phones. Pretty much any time in on Verizon or att in assigned an ipv6 addr
  - ggm 3y ago
    We all know people who go hard on IPv6 has failed. Well.. its true it didn't achieve what we hoped in the concept of IPv6 Transition So failure is in there. But it's a different kind of market failure to DECnet, or X.25, or Novell Netware. It's the kind of "fail" which means "didn't turn out as we expected" IPv6 has quirks which are a bummer. If we were able to fix the MTU problem by getting people to move to Jumbograms a lot of these go away, because they stem from fragmentation. So it's true, the design of IPv6 end only fragmentation distinct from V4 on the path fragmentation, that was a failure in design. But if you avoid fragmentation (and QUIC does for instance) then the MTU problem isn't a big deal in the end. More packets is faster clock pacing! I wish people were a bit more pragmatic and a bit less dogmatic about things. Fix MTU. fix links. Fix what you can. Deploy IPv6 because it works. And, it reduces pressure on your CGN.
  - kiwijamo 3y ago
    In some countries there's zero IPv6 on mobile despite good progress being made on fixed line IPv6.
    - abwizz 3y ago
      interesting! i tend to regrad ipv6 as the "smartphones + india internet"
thedougd 3y ago
My employer's VPN has a bug that breaks ipv6. I've found that most web sites I visit are using IPv6.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

They added features that weren't needed, and those new features break compatibility. IPv6 is the Python 3 of the network stack.

kmeisthax 3y ago
In both cases the migration happened eventually. All my devices have and use v6, and I haven't had to touch Python 2.6 in years. Yes, there are still people stuck with v4 networks and 2.6-era codebases. These are legacy cases that are increasingly buried deep in the long tail of interoperability.

NegativeK 3y ago

Because it costs money to maintain both stacks, it costs money to replace the old ass devices/hardware that are IPv4 only (at some level -- there are plenty of situations where the end user can't spend any reasonable amount of money to replace the item because the manufacturers won't fix the problem), and it costs money to have employees spend time to get trained up in IPv6. I'd like IPv4 to die, but I've also worked at places where it would have a significant (non-internet) international impact if you suddenly shot it in the back of the head.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Dan J. Bernstein wrote about the reasons why, and it's quite enlightening. https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

lmm 3y ago
No it isn't. That page sounds clever to the clueless but to anyone who actually understands that packet-switched networks won out over circuit-switched ones it's deeply stupid, to the point that I wonder if he wrote it as some kind of deep cover trolling.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I suppose that you could argue that packet switching won out over circuit switching. I mean, except for the gigantic installed base of landline telephones (analog and ISDN) and the digital switches that support them on copper pairs, still extant and supported, VoIP is incrementally replacing those lines as the decades progress. (How many decades has it been now?) But you're comparing apples and oranges. What was the size of the established, installed base of network hosts using circuit-switched networks when packet switching started to compete? Did SRI International and other DARPA research institutions run IMPs that utilized circuit-switching to route network traffic? No, they started with packet switching. So essentially, as the Internet caught on, its style of packet switching "won" over landline telephones because it was a question of capability and supported features. IPv4 and IPv6 are the same protocol, essentially; you swap one out under the hood, and the upper and lower OSI layers don't even notice that anything's changed. Packet switching and circuit switching are two distinct techniques that are opposed to one another: if you wanted to swap one for the other, you'd be rebuilding your network from the ground up. So, apples and oranges: IPv6 is, by design, a replacement for IPv4, and djb is discussing the seemingly intractable issues faced by those who attempt to cleanly migrate.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Also, the article is old. It doesn't mention NAT64 which got rid of the big compatibility issue of IPv6 hosts not being able to talk to IPv4 servers. The other way, IPv4 to IPv6, will never happen and could never happen with larger address space. People talk about extending IPv4 address space but never explain how they would solve the compatibility. I thought of scheme where could put the original IPv4 address in option header on every NAT transition to make a variable length address. But that would require changing every router (and lots remove options when NAT), every program, and every protocol. All the stuff that needed to happen with IPv6, with the downside of keeping IPv4 allocations and NAT. It also mentions a lot of problems with IPv6 that have since been fixed. There is a valid complaint that IPv6 changed too many things so it took a long time to get replacements working.

thrashh 3y ago

I think one big reason why IPv6 won’t be a thing for a long time is because to the people involved decided to do away with NAT in IPv6. What a huge mistake. NAT is obviously a huge crutch but everyone uses it because it’s a dead-simple firewall and makes for dead-simple internal networks. There are NAT-inspired IPv6 analogues but they are not the same. If NAT with IPv6 was a thing, ISPs could have started shipping routers to customers (as they already do) with IPv6 turned on and we would have already been most of the way to IPv6. But no, they felt NAT was too hacky and did away with it on a matter of principle.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
The issue is not NAT as a firewall. Every routers shipped to customers also come with a firewall and replicating what NAT does by default is dead simple. That’s a red herring. The issue is that migrating to ipv6 meant changing equipments on the backbone and dealing with the change and no operator wanted to bear the cost. It’s getting better now that there is a dearth of ipv4 and people see an immediate benefit.
Dylan16807 3y ago
You know what's more dead-simple than using NAT as a firewall? A basic firewall without NAT.
chayleaf 3y ago
NAT with IPv6 is a thing, it's trivial to do. I only have a single IPv6 address given to me by my VPN (ISP doesn't support IPv6) and IPv6 masquerading works perfectly fine.

ggm 3y ago

Has it? 35% and rising. 55% in the US, 75% in India, 30% in China. It hasn't worked out how we thought, sure. But "Failed" is really strong for something that 1/3 of the global Internet can (and does) use every day. There are more people on IPv6 now, than there are users in the entire US Internet market. https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN (replace last 2 chars with any ISO3166 code, or XA for the world)

hughesjj 3y ago
Yup, especially for cell phones. Pretty much any time in on Verizon or att in assigned an ipv6 addr
- ggm 3y ago
  We all know people who go hard on IPv6 has failed. Well.. its true it didn't achieve what we hoped in the concept of IPv6 Transition So failure is in there. But it's a different kind of market failure to DECnet, or X.25, or Novell Netware. It's the kind of "fail" which means "didn't turn out as we expected" IPv6 has quirks which are a bummer. If we were able to fix the MTU problem by getting people to move to Jumbograms a lot of these go away, because they stem from fragmentation. So it's true, the design of IPv6 end only fragmentation distinct from V4 on the path fragmentation, that was a failure in design. But if you avoid fragmentation (and QUIC does for instance) then the MTU problem isn't a big deal in the end. More packets is faster clock pacing! I wish people were a bit more pragmatic and a bit less dogmatic about things. Fix MTU. fix links. Fix what you can. Deploy IPv6 because it works. And, it reduces pressure on your CGN.
- kiwijamo 3y ago
  In some countries there's zero IPv6 on mobile despite good progress being made on fixed line IPv6.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    interesting! i tend to regrad ipv6 as the "smartphones + india internet"

thedougd 3y ago

My employer's VPN has a bug that breaks ipv6. I've found that most web sites I visit are using IPv6.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]