12 ms·

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alte

by mike_d 3y ago

IPv6 failed because they tried to boil the ocean. It was design by committee, where everyone got their pet feature thrown in to appease and gain consensus. Alternatively IPv4 is a mountain of small hacks, which is its biggest strength. We could have done a lot of good by adopting proposals to extend v4 like 0/8 and class D, but instead the decision was made to collectively drown the babies in the bathwater and insist on v6 at all costs.

ianburrell 3y ago
Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year. IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.
- mike_d 3y ago
  > Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. You are confusing hoarding demand for legitimate need. The Amazon's and Cloudflare's of the world were playing games to get large allocations, speculators were spinning up hundreds of legal entities to get allocations, tons of backroom deals to look the other way. Pretty much every use case today for IPv6 is environments where CGN would have worked just as well.
- schoen 3y ago
  We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4. While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/address, and also different levels of effort to make sure that almost all addresses that are allocated get put into use on the Internet. (I know $0.00/address isn't exactly the right way to describe what RIR allocations cost, but economically they've been more similar to the "beauty contest" than the "auction" allocation method.) In the final direct initial allocation phase, people learned that something (with substantial economic value that can likely be sold in the future, no less!) was very scarce, and was being given out nearly at no cost for almost the last time. It's not surprising that they would have jumped at the opportunity to get as much of it as they could qualify for, somewhat independent of what use they expected to make of it in the short term. Maybe especially when they were hearing how other people were jumping at that opportunity.
  - convolvatron 3y ago
    Or we could just remove the purely artificial scarcity and call it a day. The cost here is backbone table size, not endpoint addresses
  - fanf2 3y ago
    There are auctions for IPv4 space, though they did not really become a thing until after the RIRs ran out of IPv4 blocks. The price per address is about $50.
    - schoen 3y ago
      Yes, and hopefully we can use that kind of mechanism to allocate 240/4 in a way that achieves very high utilization.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal. - changed arp. Ok, new design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone? - prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think - fusing the end system identifier in the public address was a mistake, and I thought so at the time, and I guess it’s been mostly rectified. So what is so tragic here? ISPs just didn’t care for 20 years because the crunch was delayed. Now they do. So where did Steve screw up?
  - jandrese 3y ago
    Neighbor Discovery is basically ARP wearing a trenchcoat. The only people "hurt" by the change are the ones who were parsing the output of the arp command for whatever reason. IMHO the biggest problem is that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. There is no mechanism to inform anybody about which address you have configured for yourself, unlike IPv4's DHCP where a central server knows everyone's address and can do things like update DNS entries and configure security devices. Autoconfiguration also didn't include critical details like "Who provides DNS for the local network?" and "What's the NTP server?". There isn't even any way to authenticate that the Router Advertisement your machine receives is valid, although this problem is shared with DHCP. The committee seems to have put a lot of faith in anycast routing, which has never been a good idea outside of toy networks.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. Indeed. I thought I was being an idiot and just not understanding how this was supposed to work, until I learned that it just doesn't do a lot of important things. So when the day comes that I have to move my network to IPv6, I plan on continuing to use DHCP because I want the omitted functionality. Of course, I still might be being an idiot and not understanding. Getting a solid picture of how IPv6 is supposed to work is genuinely hard to do with any confidence.
      - 3y ago
vbezhenar 3y ago
IPv6 did not fail. It's used by a sizeable chunk of hosts, network owners made investitions in hardware, software and skills. It's not going anywhere, like it or not. Just like IPv4 will not go anywhere. They will coexist. I still don't understand why IPv6 is a thing. End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use CDNs and reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address among any number of hostnames. But it is a thing, so it's hard to imagine any other protocol to take over.
- nrabulinski 3y ago
  > End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use […] reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address So you want all computers to be behind at least a single layer of NAT. And you also want people to not only have to purchase a domain but also have to pay their NAT operator to add their domain to the reverse proxy
  - mike_d 3y ago
    Eyeball networks are vastly different from content networks. Even among the tinkerer "homelab" and HN crowds, it is rare to host content from the same connection/address you browse from.
    - growse 3y ago
      You're confusing cause and effect. They're very different precisely because of hacky nonsense like NAT.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall? You never want to have a policy where incoming connections/UDP streams are permitted by default to reach any random device on the network, regardless of whether that device has a routable IP or not. Now, CGNAT is a different beast and more worrisome from that point of view.
runjake 3y ago
I run a large multi-campus network. At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6. Looking at home ISPs accessing our services, it’s at least the majority of them coming in on IPv6. My guess is it’s a similar ratio as outgoing. IPv6 has issues but it hasn’t failed.
- tasbir49 3y ago
  Sadly, some ISPs have yet to adopt it. Bell Canada is notoriously slow on it, and shows no signs of starting.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6 One question I have about this statistic (and also about Google's IPv6 statistic) is, does traffic mean raw bytes? And in that case, is this just a reflection that like 75% of all internet traffic is just YouTube and Netflix due to video being a bandwidth hog? (I'm a huge proponent of IPv6 - I just wish we had more useful statistics!)
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    The GP's statistic is probably raw bytes, and yes, a significant chunk of that will be the big video streaming sites, which mostly have v6. That's still a useful statistic, because part of the cost of v4 is NAT and NAT capacity is measured in terms of number of packets. I guess you're thinking that the number of v4-only websites is much higher than the traffic numbers represent -- which is true but that's actually fine because v6-only clients can still reach those sites easily via NAT64, so having a lot of v4-only websites isn't blocking deployment of v6 or undeployment of v4. The only real problem it causes is that people use it as an excuse to not do v6... As for Google's stats, they're probably percentage of either connections or users as measured by their frontend load balancers.
- alerighi 3y ago
  Unfortunately in my country (Italy) our major provider (TIM) is not handing out IPv6 addresses to users. Other providers do, for the fact that nowadays IPv4 addresises are expensive and thus they no longer provide a public address. One of them (Iliad) is IPv6 only, and the IPv4 traffic is tunneled into IPv6 at the router level. I think the only way that we will move to IPv6 is a law (probably from the EU) that imposes to every provider to give its consumers an IPv6 address.
fulafel 3y ago
It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.
- mike_d 3y ago
  IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122043401/https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/06/world-ipv6-launch-anniversary-measuring-adoption-one-year-later.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210122043401/https://blogs.aka...
  - fulafel 3y ago
    Residential broadband has been getting v6 too. It saves money and provides added functionalityfor the same reasons as on mobile. And academic/research networks got there first long time ago. Corporate envirments seem the biggest holdout.
  - api 3y ago
    Residential broadband often has it too. The laggards are corporate networks and cloud where IT is ultra conservative and “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.” The only thing that will make corporate environments change is if something they need starts requiring it, and not a second before. Cloud is slowly getting it. Slowly. GitHub still doesn’t have it though, which makes pure v6 nodes annoying for a lot of use cases.
    - pknomad 3y ago
      I work for a federal space where IPv6 native is a mandate. As someone who's working on k8s, we often have to build and patch everything ourselves to support that mandate. Want to pull a helm chart from a github repo? Gotta either dual stack the node or run a reverse proxy to make that happen. I'd love to be at a point where everyone just dual stacked everything so that one day we can flip off the IPv4 switch.
throwaway154 3y ago
It really doesn't matter if your part of the ocean didn't make it to the boiling committee. The one thing that mattered was more address space. 4 billion addresses are not enough for the world. Anything else in ip6 is nice to have but falls off a cliff of importance and naval gazing that, if really of even nearly comparable significance, would be better directed to ipX or whatever's next. IP6 is already facilitating connectivity for billions. Globally. That's a pretty major thing, more so than renditions of doing it my way.

by mike_d 3y ago

ianburrell 3y ago

Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year. IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.

mike_d 3y ago
> Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. You are confusing hoarding demand for legitimate need. The Amazon's and Cloudflare's of the world were playing games to get large allocations, speculators were spinning up hundreds of legal entities to get allocations, tons of backroom deals to look the other way. Pretty much every use case today for IPv6 is environments where CGN would have worked just as well.
schoen 3y ago
We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4. While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/address, and also different levels of effort to make sure that almost all addresses that are allocated get put into use on the Internet. (I know $0.00/address isn't exactly the right way to describe what RIR allocations cost, but economically they've been more similar to the "beauty contest" than the "auction" allocation method.) In the final direct initial allocation phase, people learned that something (with substantial economic value that can likely be sold in the future, no less!) was very scarce, and was being given out nearly at no cost for almost the last time. It's not surprising that they would have jumped at the opportunity to get as much of it as they could qualify for, somewhat independent of what use they expected to make of it in the short term. Maybe especially when they were hearing how other people were jumping at that opportunity.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  Or we could just remove the purely artificial scarcity and call it a day. The cost here is backbone table size, not endpoint addresses
- fanf2 3y ago
  There are auctions for IPv4 space, though they did not really become a thing until after the RIRs ran out of IPv4 blocks. The price per address is about $50.
  - schoen 3y ago
    Yes, and hopefully we can use that kind of mechanism to allocate 240/4 in a way that achieves very high utilization.
convolvatron 3y ago
I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal. - changed arp. Ok, new design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone? - prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think - fusing the end system identifier in the public address was a mistake, and I thought so at the time, and I guess it’s been mostly rectified. So what is so tragic here? ISPs just didn’t care for 20 years because the crunch was delayed. Now they do. So where did Steve screw up?
- jandrese 3y ago
  Neighbor Discovery is basically ARP wearing a trenchcoat. The only people "hurt" by the change are the ones who were parsing the output of the arp command for whatever reason. IMHO the biggest problem is that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. There is no mechanism to inform anybody about which address you have configured for yourself, unlike IPv4's DHCP where a central server knows everyone's address and can do things like update DNS entries and configure security devices. Autoconfiguration also didn't include critical details like "Who provides DNS for the local network?" and "What's the NTP server?". There isn't even any way to authenticate that the Router Advertisement your machine receives is valid, although this problem is shared with DHCP. The committee seems to have put a lot of faith in anycast routing, which has never been a good idea outside of toy networks.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. Indeed. I thought I was being an idiot and just not understanding how this was supposed to work, until I learned that it just doesn't do a lot of important things. So when the day comes that I have to move my network to IPv6, I plan on continuing to use DHCP because I want the omitted functionality. Of course, I still might be being an idiot and not understanding. Getting a solid picture of how IPv6 is supposed to work is genuinely hard to do with any confidence.
    - 3y ago

vbezhenar 3y ago

IPv6 did not fail. It's used by a sizeable chunk of hosts, network owners made investitions in hardware, software and skills. It's not going anywhere, like it or not. Just like IPv4 will not go anywhere. They will coexist. I still don't understand why IPv6 is a thing. End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use CDNs and reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address among any number of hostnames. But it is a thing, so it's hard to imagine any other protocol to take over.

nrabulinski 3y ago
> End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use […] reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address So you want all computers to be behind at least a single layer of NAT. And you also want people to not only have to purchase a domain but also have to pay their NAT operator to add their domain to the reverse proxy
- mike_d 3y ago
  Eyeball networks are vastly different from content networks. Even among the tinkerer "homelab" and HN crowds, it is rare to host content from the same connection/address you browse from.
  - growse 3y ago
    You're confusing cause and effect. They're very different precisely because of hacky nonsense like NAT.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall? You never want to have a policy where incoming connections/UDP streams are permitted by default to reach any random device on the network, regardless of whether that device has a routable IP or not. Now, CGNAT is a different beast and more worrisome from that point of view.

runjake 3y ago

I run a large multi-campus network. At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6. Looking at home ISPs accessing our services, it’s at least the majority of them coming in on IPv6. My guess is it’s a similar ratio as outgoing. IPv6 has issues but it hasn’t failed.

tasbir49 3y ago
Sadly, some ISPs have yet to adopt it. Bell Canada is notoriously slow on it, and shows no signs of starting.
kalleboo 3y ago
> At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6 One question I have about this statistic (and also about Google's IPv6 statistic) is, does traffic mean raw bytes? And in that case, is this just a reflection that like 75% of all internet traffic is just YouTube and Netflix due to video being a bandwidth hog? (I'm a huge proponent of IPv6 - I just wish we had more useful statistics!)
- Dagger2 3y ago
  The GP's statistic is probably raw bytes, and yes, a significant chunk of that will be the big video streaming sites, which mostly have v6. That's still a useful statistic, because part of the cost of v4 is NAT and NAT capacity is measured in terms of number of packets. I guess you're thinking that the number of v4-only websites is much higher than the traffic numbers represent -- which is true but that's actually fine because v6-only clients can still reach those sites easily via NAT64, so having a lot of v4-only websites isn't blocking deployment of v6 or undeployment of v4. The only real problem it causes is that people use it as an excuse to not do v6... As for Google's stats, they're probably percentage of either connections or users as measured by their frontend load balancers.
alerighi 3y ago
Unfortunately in my country (Italy) our major provider (TIM) is not handing out IPv6 addresses to users. Other providers do, for the fact that nowadays IPv4 addresises are expensive and thus they no longer provide a public address. One of them (Iliad) is IPv6 only, and the IPv4 traffic is tunneled into IPv6 at the router level. I think the only way that we will move to IPv6 is a law (probably from the EU) that imposes to every provider to give its consumers an IPv6 address.

fulafel 3y ago

It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.

mike_d 3y ago
IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122043401/https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/06/world-ipv6-launch-anniversary-measuring-adoption-one-year-later.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210122043401/https://blogs.aka...
- fulafel 3y ago
  Residential broadband has been getting v6 too. It saves money and provides added functionalityfor the same reasons as on mobile. And academic/research networks got there first long time ago. Corporate envirments seem the biggest holdout.
- api 3y ago
  Residential broadband often has it too. The laggards are corporate networks and cloud where IT is ultra conservative and “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.” The only thing that will make corporate environments change is if something they need starts requiring it, and not a second before. Cloud is slowly getting it. Slowly. GitHub still doesn’t have it though, which makes pure v6 nodes annoying for a lot of use cases.
  - pknomad 3y ago
    I work for a federal space where IPv6 native is a mandate. As someone who's working on k8s, we often have to build and patch everything ourselves to support that mandate. Want to pull a helm chart from a github repo? Gotta either dual stack the node or run a reverse proxy to make that happen. I'd love to be at a point where everyone just dual stacked everything so that one day we can flip off the IPv4 switch.

throwaway154 3y ago

It really doesn't matter if your part of the ocean didn't make it to the boiling committee. The one thing that mattered was more address space. 4 billion addresses are not enough for the world. Anything else in ip6 is nice to have but falls off a cliff of importance and naval gazing that, if really of even nearly comparable significance, would be better directed to ipX or whatever's next. IP6 is already facilitating connectivity for billions. Globally. That's a pretty major thing, more so than renditions of doing it my way.