8 ms·

The IPv6 mess (2002)

93 points by lproven 3y ago

gjvc 3y ago
I despise pointless recency trolling on articles on this site, but I will note, somewhat sheepishly, this seems to have been written in or shortly after 2002, a solid twenty years ago... and how has the situation improved since then?
- OJFord 3y ago
  It is interesting or ironic that the article's not actually dated (afaict), given the insistence on/fairly unusual and specific style of dating everything that's referenced within. 'As of 2002.11' within the text is the only hint I noticed, which doesn't actually mean it was written in November 2002, but in practice probably does (at least that sentence).
  - veave 3y ago
    Last-Modified Sat, 02 Aug 2003 14:27:40 GMT
  - isp 3y ago
    archive.org has a snapshot from 2002-12-03, as further evidence that it was written on or around 2002-11. https://web.archive.org/web/20021203075817/https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021203075817/https://cr.yp.to/...
  - dgellow 3y ago
    Earliest version in the internet archive is from December 3 2002
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Old devices failed, new devices "just work" with IPv6, corporate environments are slow to change, until they're forced to. The "internet companies" have moved on to IPv6, but the "non-internet companies" are still stuck on ipv4 only (so google and cnn work, but your local steelworks is stuck on ipv4)
- dexen 3y ago
  >how has the situation improved since then? It is gradually becoming acceptable to dismiss IPv6 and suggest searching for a modern, practically minded alternative. Important first step in untangling the mess. Naturally opinions vary as to what exactly would constitute modern. Common complaint is the significant mixing of OSI layers, in particular application level concerns like significant baggage of encryption & authentication. And then there's my pet peeve of BSD Sockets API incompatibility which was introduced accidentally.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  There used to be a form response people would post in discussions about ending spam or similar. Something like Your proposed anti-spam measure wouldn't work because - [ ] it assumes mail administrators operate in good faith - [X] it assumes all systems can be upgraded in a timely manner - [ ] ... We could probably have the same for IPv6. The proposed method - [ ] for an alternative to IPv6 - [X] to avoid the transition to IPv6 - [ ] to allow us to keep using IPv4 indefinitely would not work because - [X] it would require replacing all the hardware and updating operating systems anyway - [ ] it does not expand the address space to the extent required - [ ] etc.
  - supertrope 3y ago
    Also NAT - [ ] is not a firewall - [ ] does not provide any additional privacy over IPV6 privacy extensions
  - hosteur 3y ago
    All relevant hardware and OS has been replaced since this was written.
- minimaul 3y ago
  Half of the big four ISPs in the UK provide IPv6 now (eg BT, Sky). Full dual stack or something like v4 CGNAT + native v6 is practical and works well where available. Big CDNs and content providers typically support v6 - eg Apple does, Netflix does, Google does, the big CDNs like Cloudfront, Fastly, Cloudflare do. Apple requires app store apps to function on IPv6 only networks since 2016. The holdbacks are smaller ISPs, ISPs with big legacy v4 allocations, and businesses. I see more pushback from MSPs etc on IPv6 (and practices like disabling it completely) than any other sector. edit: for an ISP that enables IPv6, the majority of their traffic will pretty much immediately be over it, as a result of the big CDNs and content providers supporting it. This reduces load on compatibility mechanisms like CGNAT, which is nice too.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > Apple requires app store apps to function on IPv6 only networks since 2016. Oooh, I think that's really big. That basically forces every app company to make sure their main domain at least has an AAAA record that goes somewhere. I think Apple could force IPv6 adoption alone by extending this policy... An iPhone update could change the behaviour to only connect to a new wifi network if there is working ipv6 connectivity. "new" would be defined as any network whose mac address is not currently in Apples geolocation database. That would mean anyone getting a new broadband connection or router would see it as not working unless it had IPv6. Perhaps you can have an override - eg. "Use this legacy network anyway this time (some apps may not work properly)".
    - ftth_finland 3y ago
      What would be the upside to Apple for this? Apple has a vested interest in IPv6 working on mobile, but benefits nothing from disabling IPv4.
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        If they can ensure most Apple devices have IPv6 connectivity, there are a bunch of device-to-device connectivity benefits. For example, they can do video calling without having to host expensive proxy/STUN/TURN servers. Peer-to-peer data distribution and storage starts to make sense. Peer to peer gaming stops requiring server infrastructure. It also means that typically all the other devices in a users home will be able to get IPv6 - so they can for example continue to remote control your Apple TV even if you walk a little out of wifi range. Sure - for any IPv6 feature they build, they will need IPv4/proxied fallback. But if they can make sure 90% of users use IPv6 and direct connections, then the money and user experience costs of having to run the fallback servers becomes manageable.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  > how has the situation improved since then? "Nobody will join your IPv6 network if it can't talk to Google, CNN, etc." IPv6 networks can now talk to Google and CNN, for instance.
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    And every other site. I don't even have a v4 address on my desktop. So why are we still dredging up this article when the problems have been solved?
tux3 3y ago
Google IPv6 stats (approaching 50%, ever so slowly): https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- gemstones 3y ago
  At the rate of 50% support every 20 years, I guess we can expect that ipv6 will be a suitable default in… 2043? Kidding, but also kinda not. We should make ipv7 which is just ipv6 but the extra bytes go in an expanded header, like the author suggests.
  - exitheone 3y ago
    Zooming in a bit will tell you that we got from 30% to >45% adoption in 3 years I think that's a pretty good trajectory all things considered.
    - mort96 3y ago
      In order to predict how bad the long tail will be though we should ideally look at the graphs broken down by network type. Does the increase just represent a switch from people using their residential ISP connection for everything to people using their cell connection more, or does it actually reflect residential connections moving from v4 to v6?
      - maccard 3y ago
        The only way to break the long tail is regulation or forced updates. If you're at 95% rollout, it's fairly likely the last 5% of holdouts won't do it willingly, so they need the stick.
        mort96 3y ago
        I would definitely support regulation here, especially regulation forcing ISPs to provide v6. That would at least take care of one large part of the problem.
isp 3y ago
(2002) Previous comments: - 2010: "The IPv6 Mess" (37 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236048 - 2022: "The IPv6 Mess (2002)" (68 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757361
- vesinisa 3y ago
  Thanks, I figured this had to be really old
  - lproven 3y ago
    Submitter here -- yeah, me too, but I couldn't obviously see a date, it was new to me, and I thought it made valid points. BTW I found it via a discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487
api 3y ago
If they’d simply added two or four bytes (IPs of 48 or 64 bits) by finding space in the V4 header we would have been done by the mid 2000s. But at this point we are at almost 50% of traffic, so why stop. I wonder if the disaster is partly due to the various standards boards of the time (late 90s) still acting like they had the kind of ability to do things in a coordinated manner they had when the net was just government and research institutions. The fact that it was now a giant unmanaged market hadn’t sunk in.
- irdc 3y ago
  There is no such space in the IPv4 header. And even if it were possible and you could specify an IPv4+, you’d run into the exact same problem: people would still insist on an IPv4 address to talk to whoever still is in the IPv4 world.
  - api 3y ago
    Extend the address space to the right. All V4 addresses become /32 prefixes in a /48 space. 48-bit addresses ending in .0.0 are semantically identical to 32-bit addresses and may in fact be sent as classical 32-bit addressed packets or converted to such in flight to support old devices. Use the IP options facility for additional address bits, or alternately use the identification field and deprecate fragmentation at the IP level which is often broken anyway and is obviated by path MTU discovery. Routers would still have to be updated, but only close to or at the edge for quite some time. Could have been done that way but water under the bridge.
    - lmm 3y ago
      If you'd got that standardised before CIDR then it might've worked, but there's no way to make it happen now; the IPv4 routing table is hopelessly fragmented and getting worse every day. New ISPs would be doomed to be forever second- or third-class citizens - there are no new class A or B blocks to hand out.
    - Dagger2 3y ago
      We already have v6 addresses that are semantically equivalent to v4 ones: ::ffff:a.b.c.d. You could put extra address bits into option headers instead of expanding the address fields, but... what do you do then? How do you make things work? No existing OS, software or hardware device knows how to use them, and you have to go around and update those in exactly the same way you have to on v6. None of what you've suggested here would have allowed us to finish in the mid 2000s.
IntelMiner 3y ago
It's bewildering to me the number of large American ISP's that just don't (or won't?) support IPv6 for one reason or another. I dumped CenturyLink about a year ago over it (among other things with their wretched fiber service) Of course those clowns proudly boasted about participating in "world IPv6 day" *12 years ago* but all their services and websites are still IPv4 only For all of Comcast's innumerable faults and absolutely parasitic rent-seeking, at least they offer IPv6. Even if it's "only" a /64
- mort96 3y ago
  What even is the advantage for an ISP to offer v6? Consumers aren't demanding it. Everything works on v4. And even if consumers were demanding it, most of those consumers don't have a choice in ISP company.
  - minimaul 3y ago
    It’s cheaper to do v6 & CGNAT v4 at scale than just CGNAT v4 or buying v4 addresses. Buying v4 addresses isn’t sustainable and drives the prices up long term. CGNAT v4 at scale requires hefty and expensive translation boxes that have to keep growing with traffic volume. Native v6 immediately takes the majority of your traffic - most of the big CDNs & content providers like Netflix support v6 already.
    - mort96 3y ago
      That's fair. So ISPs have a potential incentive to provide v6. I wonder why they're not then. Clearly it's not a very big incentive.
      - minimaul 3y ago
        At small ISP scales, the cost of CGNAT isn't too high. Larger ISPs tend to be longer lived and often have large pools of v4 allocations that they didn't pay market rates for, so are happy to sweat long term.
_tk_ 3y ago
I love me some good old DJ Bernstein records.
Canada 3y ago
Until I saw the 20 year old dates in the post I could have mistaken this for something written yesterday.
- lproven 3y ago
  Yes, that's part of what struck me, which is why I submitted it.
multicast 3y ago
I did not realize at first sight that this is an old article. It was standardized in the 90s and supported by most interfaces since the early 2000s but does not seem to be working properly as of today in terms of adoption. A big problem today regarding Ipv6 is the still missing auto configuration on most devices and router sided problems like don't sending out router advertisements with the prefix. Then there are other problems like no default gateway set. Technical skilled people are able to get Ipv6 running on their pc, but not the average guy. Problems get much bigger on mobile which represents most of the worlds population digital presence. If everything properly configured Ipv6 works over ones own network normally as on a pc. But good luck with mobile data. Changing APN settings on android to Ipv6 does often not work / not supported by the ISP.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  Almost half the world is using IPv6, according to Google's traffic statistics. In some countries it's 60%, 70%+ and I'm sure includes plenty of average guys.
  - multicast 3y ago
    Good point but there is still half of the worlds population missing which is due to missing auto configuration / proper support by the ISP. And I would guess that these numbers represent connections from home networks and not from people on the go using mobile data.
  - trustingtrust 3y ago
    This is mobile phones dominating that number. Almost every 4G / 5G phone right now uses a dual stack IPv4/6 connection. This is not necessarily problematic but home broadband is still lagging by a lot. I sometimes never get a prefix assigned. I have to redial PPPoE as IPv6 link uses IPv4 session. It's not plug and play for home broadband unless you use their modem router combo which has other issues.
    - multicast 3y ago
      That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I thought it is just the other way around.
rvba 3y ago
I never understood why they couldnt just double it from a.b.c.d to a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h. Or even make it 256^16. Then set the system that it changes to 256^32 in year 2100.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  > I never understood why they couldnt just double it from a.b.c.d to a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h. What do you mean "just"? There's no "just" anything in this regard. IP is a binary protocol. Its meaning is deeply burned into millions of pieces of networking hardware. The source address in IPv4 is 4 octets starting at octet 12. The destination ddress is 4 octets starting at octet 16. You can't extend anything without forcing an adjustment in everything that follows, and literally redesigning hardware because there's physical parts of chips that are 32 bits wide. So "just doubling" doesn't really help anything, you still need to readjust everything in existence. > Or even make it 256^16. Then set the system that it changes to 256^32 in year 2100. I don't understand what does that mean
  - rvba 3y ago
    Telephone numbers used to be short. Say 4 numbers - from 0000 to 9999. Then it was extended to 6 numbers so 000 000 to 999 999. Why couldnt do the old IP address space just be extended to have more octets? 16 octets instead of 4? Obviously the old stuff wouldnt work but translation (when needed - similar to NAT) would be relatively easy. Sinct you dont seem to grasp it: Old adress 1.2.3.4 New: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16 IP6 is unreadable for humans. Having 8 or 16 or whatever amount of octets would be easier to read or explain on the phone. Hardware had to be changed for IP6 as well so why do you even talk about hardware? And one could do some magic by trunctuating new address to old to make old software work.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      > Why couldnt do the old IP address space just be extended to have more octets? 16 octets instead of 4? That's exactly what they did. IPv6 is precisely 16 octets. I think you're getting hung up on the hex representation, but that's all it is, a representation. Nothing stops you from writing an IPv6 address as 16 sets of numbers from 0 to 255. In fact, IPv6 has the :: shortcut, which stands for "fill in all zeroes here". So, one of Google's addresses is 2607:f8b0:4004:c08::71. This is short for 2607:f8b0:4004:0c08:0000:0000:0000:0071. Which you could also write as: 38.7.248.176.64.4.12.8.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113
upofadown 3y ago
>You find that you can't reach the CNN servers or the Google servers... Both have IPv6 addresses.
- rekoil 3y ago
  The article was written over 10 years ago, things have probably changed a bit since then.
  - slim 3y ago
    20 years
shubhamjain 3y ago
I do wonder if things would have been fine if had just added another octet. We would still have had enough addresses to not need more for the forseeable future. Some may disagree, but a trillion addresses are fine for human population which is going plateau soon. I am not a network engineer, but I believe it would have been far easier to make the two versions interoperable. The number of addresses possible with IPv6 are too much for its own good. The ranges are absurdly long and far apart. Add to the difficulty to communicate and understand an address filled with hex-codes. I think IPv6 solved more problems than that were actually needed.
- matthews2 3y ago
  > for human population which is going plateau soon It's not an address per person any more, but an address per IoT device or connected sensor, which might continue to grow even if population doesn't.
  - shubhamjain 3y ago
    Even with IPv6 we are not abandoning NAT. There are good reasons to have a single point of access / control. Do we really see billions of devices connected independently to the internet?
    - rekoil 3y ago
      Yes. And we are abandoning NAT, we're just not abandoning firewalls.
      - skissane 3y ago
        NAT still exists for IPv6. There is NAT66 and there is NPTv6. While no doubt there is less need for it than with IPv4, there are valid use cases for both.
        rekoil 3y ago
        Yeah I meant in general. Of course I know there are use cases for NAT that are valid regardless of IP version in use.
voidmain 3y ago
Assign 2^96 addresses to each IPv4 address. The original address is now a.b.c.d.0 and there are lots more a.b.c.d.x. When sending a packet over an IPv4 link, translate packets with .0 destinations to v4 packets and embed others in a special v4 protocol. When receiving a packet do the reverse. Now you need a v4/.0 address only if you are directly connected to a v4 peer, and an upgrade is useful even for a single computer behind a NAT. I came up with this idea in like 5 minutes so I'm sure it is flawed. But i think that if we had a realistic design we could have been done with the transition in early 00s.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  It's actually not that flawed, you've more or less invented 6to4. Every v4 address has an associated v6 network (basically 32.2.a.b.c.d.*), and you can send packets to that network by crafting packets that use protocol 41 ("6in4"). It only gives 2^80 addresses per v4 address but that should be enough for anybody. But uh... it doesn't seem to have helped as much as you're thinking. Also, you didn't address how v4-only devices or software would talk these bigger addresses (how can you fit >32 bits into a sockaddr_in struct?). That's one of the big difficulties of v6 deployment and it won't go away no matter how you design v6.
  - voidmain 3y ago
    The key point is that all v6 addresses are owned by v4 addresses and therefore tunnelable, and that tunneling support is mandatory. There is no external prereq to having an individual device be able to open connections to v6 addresses, and only support at the router (with a public address) is needed to receive connections from any v6 address. There is no way around upgrading end devices. But the problem with v6 adoption isn't the number of end devices from before 1995. Basically the adoption plan could have been: 1. Get end OSs to have v6 support. They gain the ability to make outgoing connections to v6 addresses right away. There's no reason, from the beginning, for this not to be enabled by default with zero configuration from the beginning. 2. Get NAT routers at the edge to have v6 support. Gains the ability to publish services from inside without awkward port forwarding etc (and increases the benefit of 1) 3. Slowly make v4 addresses expensive so that consumers make do with less than a /32. They need v6 capable endpoints but can communicate as clients with anyone, and as servers with anyone who has adopted v6 4. Eventually v4 addresses are so expensive, and the number of machines running browsers that don't support v6 so small, that small time web sites stop taking a /32 etc. it doesn't really matter when the network backbones upgrade, it just saves a few bytes on the wire and they internalize the cost of that This just doesn't seem like what happened in our timeline.
pif 3y ago
> The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space. That is THE problem. Those designers failed to see the huge chicken-and-egg issue. They chose to make it impossible to establish IPv6 without the active participation of people, and they did expect people to actively change their setup to join the IPv6 club before IPv6 being fully established... just for the sake of the cause... which is laughable if we want to be kind and the definition of sheer idiocy if we want to be honest. People will move towards a target when the reward is ready to pick; otherwise, apart from a few enthusiasts, inertia will prevail. I wish this debacle would be used as an example of how (not to try) to motivate people for serious stuff, like global warming.
Havoc 3y ago
That all sounds alarmingly acrimonious which does not bode well for solutions and coordination
magicalhippo 3y ago
At home I run NAT for IPv4, and I got a /56 IPv6 prefix (dynamic but lets ignore that for now). Inside, clients run dual stack. How viable is it these days to flip this around, and run IPv6-only on the clients with NAT64 for external IPv4 access? Obviously this precludes the use of IPv4-only devices, lets say I'd be fine with that.
- minimaul 3y ago
  Reasonably practical - this is similar conceptually to what a lot of v6 mobile networks do with eg 464xlat et al.
pm2222 3y ago
The core network stack is going to be dual stack any way during at least the transition phrase, OSes like linux should allow v4/v6 communication.
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 - Aug 2023 (134 comments)
gwbas1c 3y ago
IPv6 is like Fusion: Fusion was the energy of the future. Fusion is the energy of the future. Fusion will always be the energy of the future! IPv6 was the protocol of the future. IPv6 is the protocol of the future. IPv6 will always be the protocol of the future!
- Dagger2 3y ago
  2.3 billion people are already using IPv6. It's not ubiquitous, but it seems to be here and working just fine.

93 points by lproven 3y ago

gjvc 3y ago

I despise pointless recency trolling on articles on this site, but I will note, somewhat sheepishly, this seems to have been written in or shortly after 2002, a solid twenty years ago... and how has the situation improved since then?

OJFord 3y ago
It is interesting or ironic that the article's not actually dated (afaict), given the insistence on/fairly unusual and specific style of dating everything that's referenced within. 'As of 2002.11' within the text is the only hint I noticed, which doesn't actually mean it was written in November 2002, but in practice probably does (at least that sentence).
- veave 3y ago
  Last-Modified Sat, 02 Aug 2003 14:27:40 GMT
- isp 3y ago
  archive.org has a snapshot from 2002-12-03, as further evidence that it was written on or around 2002-11. https://web.archive.org/web/20021203075817/https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021203075817/https://cr.yp.to/...
- dgellow 3y ago
  Earliest version in the internet archive is from December 3 2002
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Old devices failed, new devices "just work" with IPv6, corporate environments are slow to change, until they're forced to. The "internet companies" have moved on to IPv6, but the "non-internet companies" are still stuck on ipv4 only (so google and cnn work, but your local steelworks is stuck on ipv4)
dexen 3y ago
>how has the situation improved since then? It is gradually becoming acceptable to dismiss IPv6 and suggest searching for a modern, practically minded alternative. Important first step in untangling the mess. Naturally opinions vary as to what exactly would constitute modern. Common complaint is the significant mixing of OSI layers, in particular application level concerns like significant baggage of encryption & authentication. And then there's my pet peeve of BSD Sockets API incompatibility which was introduced accidentally.
Symbiote 3y ago
There used to be a form response people would post in discussions about ending spam or similar. Something like Your proposed anti-spam measure wouldn't work because - [ ] it assumes mail administrators operate in good faith - [X] it assumes all systems can be upgraded in a timely manner - [ ] ... We could probably have the same for IPv6. The proposed method - [ ] for an alternative to IPv6 - [X] to avoid the transition to IPv6 - [ ] to allow us to keep using IPv4 indefinitely would not work because - [X] it would require replacing all the hardware and updating operating systems anyway - [ ] it does not expand the address space to the extent required - [ ] etc.
- supertrope 3y ago
  Also NAT - [ ] is not a firewall - [ ] does not provide any additional privacy over IPV6 privacy extensions
- hosteur 3y ago
  All relevant hardware and OS has been replaced since this was written.
minimaul 3y ago
Half of the big four ISPs in the UK provide IPv6 now (eg BT, Sky). Full dual stack or something like v4 CGNAT + native v6 is practical and works well where available. Big CDNs and content providers typically support v6 - eg Apple does, Netflix does, Google does, the big CDNs like Cloudfront, Fastly, Cloudflare do. Apple requires app store apps to function on IPv6 only networks since 2016. The holdbacks are smaller ISPs, ISPs with big legacy v4 allocations, and businesses. I see more pushback from MSPs etc on IPv6 (and practices like disabling it completely) than any other sector. edit: for an ISP that enables IPv6, the majority of their traffic will pretty much immediately be over it, as a result of the big CDNs and content providers supporting it. This reduces load on compatibility mechanisms like CGNAT, which is nice too.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > Apple requires app store apps to function on IPv6 only networks since 2016. Oooh, I think that's really big. That basically forces every app company to make sure their main domain at least has an AAAA record that goes somewhere. I think Apple could force IPv6 adoption alone by extending this policy... An iPhone update could change the behaviour to only connect to a new wifi network if there is working ipv6 connectivity. "new" would be defined as any network whose mac address is not currently in Apples geolocation database. That would mean anyone getting a new broadband connection or router would see it as not working unless it had IPv6. Perhaps you can have an override - eg. "Use this legacy network anyway this time (some apps may not work properly)".
  - ftth_finland 3y ago
    What would be the upside to Apple for this? Apple has a vested interest in IPv6 working on mobile, but benefits nothing from disabling IPv4.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      If they can ensure most Apple devices have IPv6 connectivity, there are a bunch of device-to-device connectivity benefits. For example, they can do video calling without having to host expensive proxy/STUN/TURN servers. Peer-to-peer data distribution and storage starts to make sense. Peer to peer gaming stops requiring server infrastructure. It also means that typically all the other devices in a users home will be able to get IPv6 - so they can for example continue to remote control your Apple TV even if you walk a little out of wifi range. Sure - for any IPv6 feature they build, they will need IPv4/proxied fallback. But if they can make sure 90% of users use IPv6 and direct connections, then the money and user experience costs of having to run the fallback servers becomes manageable.
p1mrx 3y ago
> how has the situation improved since then? "Nobody will join your IPv6 network if it can't talk to Google, CNN, etc." IPv6 networks can now talk to Google and CNN, for instance.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  And every other site. I don't even have a v4 address on my desktop. So why are we still dredging up this article when the problems have been solved?

tux3 3y ago

Google IPv6 stats (approaching 50%, ever so slowly): https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

gemstones 3y ago
At the rate of 50% support every 20 years, I guess we can expect that ipv6 will be a suitable default in… 2043? Kidding, but also kinda not. We should make ipv7 which is just ipv6 but the extra bytes go in an expanded header, like the author suggests.
- exitheone 3y ago
  Zooming in a bit will tell you that we got from 30% to >45% adoption in 3 years I think that's a pretty good trajectory all things considered.
  - mort96 3y ago
    In order to predict how bad the long tail will be though we should ideally look at the graphs broken down by network type. Does the increase just represent a switch from people using their residential ISP connection for everything to people using their cell connection more, or does it actually reflect residential connections moving from v4 to v6?
    - maccard 3y ago
      The only way to break the long tail is regulation or forced updates. If you're at 95% rollout, it's fairly likely the last 5% of holdouts won't do it willingly, so they need the stick.
      - mort96 3y ago
        I would definitely support regulation here, especially regulation forcing ISPs to provide v6. That would at least take care of one large part of the problem.

isp 3y ago

(2002) Previous comments: - 2010: "The IPv6 Mess" (37 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236048 - 2022: "The IPv6 Mess (2002)" (68 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29757361

vesinisa 3y ago
Thanks, I figured this had to be really old
- lproven 3y ago
  Submitter here -- yeah, me too, but I couldn't obviously see a date, it was new to me, and I thought it made valid points. BTW I found it via a discussion about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487

api 3y ago

If they’d simply added two or four bytes (IPs of 48 or 64 bits) by finding space in the V4 header we would have been done by the mid 2000s. But at this point we are at almost 50% of traffic, so why stop. I wonder if the disaster is partly due to the various standards boards of the time (late 90s) still acting like they had the kind of ability to do things in a coordinated manner they had when the net was just government and research institutions. The fact that it was now a giant unmanaged market hadn’t sunk in.

irdc 3y ago
There is no such space in the IPv4 header. And even if it were possible and you could specify an IPv4+, you’d run into the exact same problem: people would still insist on an IPv4 address to talk to whoever still is in the IPv4 world.
- api 3y ago
  Extend the address space to the right. All V4 addresses become /32 prefixes in a /48 space. 48-bit addresses ending in .0.0 are semantically identical to 32-bit addresses and may in fact be sent as classical 32-bit addressed packets or converted to such in flight to support old devices. Use the IP options facility for additional address bits, or alternately use the identification field and deprecate fragmentation at the IP level which is often broken anyway and is obviated by path MTU discovery. Routers would still have to be updated, but only close to or at the edge for quite some time. Could have been done that way but water under the bridge.
  - lmm 3y ago
    If you'd got that standardised before CIDR then it might've worked, but there's no way to make it happen now; the IPv4 routing table is hopelessly fragmented and getting worse every day. New ISPs would be doomed to be forever second- or third-class citizens - there are no new class A or B blocks to hand out.
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    We already have v6 addresses that are semantically equivalent to v4 ones: ::ffff:a.b.c.d. You could put extra address bits into option headers instead of expanding the address fields, but... what do you do then? How do you make things work? No existing OS, software or hardware device knows how to use them, and you have to go around and update those in exactly the same way you have to on v6. None of what you've suggested here would have allowed us to finish in the mid 2000s.

IntelMiner 3y ago

It's bewildering to me the number of large American ISP's that just don't (or won't?) support IPv6 for one reason or another. I dumped CenturyLink about a year ago over it (among other things with their wretched fiber service) Of course those clowns proudly boasted about participating in "world IPv6 day" *12 years ago* but all their services and websites are still IPv4 only For all of Comcast's innumerable faults and absolutely parasitic rent-seeking, at least they offer IPv6. Even if it's "only" a /64

mort96 3y ago
What even is the advantage for an ISP to offer v6? Consumers aren't demanding it. Everything works on v4. And even if consumers were demanding it, most of those consumers don't have a choice in ISP company.
- minimaul 3y ago
  It’s cheaper to do v6 & CGNAT v4 at scale than just CGNAT v4 or buying v4 addresses. Buying v4 addresses isn’t sustainable and drives the prices up long term. CGNAT v4 at scale requires hefty and expensive translation boxes that have to keep growing with traffic volume. Native v6 immediately takes the majority of your traffic - most of the big CDNs & content providers like Netflix support v6 already.
  - mort96 3y ago
    That's fair. So ISPs have a potential incentive to provide v6. I wonder why they're not then. Clearly it's not a very big incentive.
    - minimaul 3y ago
      At small ISP scales, the cost of CGNAT isn't too high. Larger ISPs tend to be longer lived and often have large pools of v4 allocations that they didn't pay market rates for, so are happy to sweat long term.

_tk_ 3y ago

I love me some good old DJ Bernstein records.

Canada 3y ago

Until I saw the 20 year old dates in the post I could have mistaken this for something written yesterday.

lproven 3y ago
Yes, that's part of what struck me, which is why I submitted it.

multicast 3y ago

I did not realize at first sight that this is an old article. It was standardized in the 90s and supported by most interfaces since the early 2000s but does not seem to be working properly as of today in terms of adoption. A big problem today regarding Ipv6 is the still missing auto configuration on most devices and router sided problems like don't sending out router advertisements with the prefix. Then there are other problems like no default gateway set. Technical skilled people are able to get Ipv6 running on their pc, but not the average guy. Problems get much bigger on mobile which represents most of the worlds population digital presence. If everything properly configured Ipv6 works over ones own network normally as on a pc. But good luck with mobile data. Changing APN settings on android to Ipv6 does often not work / not supported by the ISP.

Symbiote 3y ago
Almost half the world is using IPv6, according to Google's traffic statistics. In some countries it's 60%, 70%+ and I'm sure includes plenty of average guys.
- multicast 3y ago
  Good point but there is still half of the worlds population missing which is due to missing auto configuration / proper support by the ISP. And I would guess that these numbers represent connections from home networks and not from people on the go using mobile data.
- trustingtrust 3y ago
  This is mobile phones dominating that number. Almost every 4G / 5G phone right now uses a dual stack IPv4/6 connection. This is not necessarily problematic but home broadband is still lagging by a lot. I sometimes never get a prefix assigned. I have to redial PPPoE as IPv6 link uses IPv4 session. It's not plug and play for home broadband unless you use their modem router combo which has other issues.
  - multicast 3y ago
    That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I thought it is just the other way around.

rvba 3y ago

I never understood why they couldnt just double it from a.b.c.d to a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h. Or even make it 256^16. Then set the system that it changes to 256^32 in year 2100.

dale_glass 3y ago
> I never understood why they couldnt just double it from a.b.c.d to a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h. What do you mean "just"? There's no "just" anything in this regard. IP is a binary protocol. Its meaning is deeply burned into millions of pieces of networking hardware. The source address in IPv4 is 4 octets starting at octet 12. The destination ddress is 4 octets starting at octet 16. You can't extend anything without forcing an adjustment in everything that follows, and literally redesigning hardware because there's physical parts of chips that are 32 bits wide. So "just doubling" doesn't really help anything, you still need to readjust everything in existence. > Or even make it 256^16. Then set the system that it changes to 256^32 in year 2100. I don't understand what does that mean
- rvba 3y ago
  Telephone numbers used to be short. Say 4 numbers - from 0000 to 9999. Then it was extended to 6 numbers so 000 000 to 999 999. Why couldnt do the old IP address space just be extended to have more octets? 16 octets instead of 4? Obviously the old stuff wouldnt work but translation (when needed - similar to NAT) would be relatively easy. Sinct you dont seem to grasp it: Old adress 1.2.3.4 New: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16 IP6 is unreadable for humans. Having 8 or 16 or whatever amount of octets would be easier to read or explain on the phone. Hardware had to be changed for IP6 as well so why do you even talk about hardware? And one could do some magic by trunctuating new address to old to make old software work.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    > Why couldnt do the old IP address space just be extended to have more octets? 16 octets instead of 4? That's exactly what they did. IPv6 is precisely 16 octets. I think you're getting hung up on the hex representation, but that's all it is, a representation. Nothing stops you from writing an IPv6 address as 16 sets of numbers from 0 to 255. In fact, IPv6 has the :: shortcut, which stands for "fill in all zeroes here". So, one of Google's addresses is 2607:f8b0:4004:c08::71. This is short for 2607:f8b0:4004:0c08:0000:0000:0000:0071. Which you could also write as: 38.7.248.176.64.4.12.8.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113

upofadown 3y ago

>You find that you can't reach the CNN servers or the Google servers... Both have IPv6 addresses.

rekoil 3y ago
The article was written over 10 years ago, things have probably changed a bit since then.
- slim 3y ago
  20 years

shubhamjain 3y ago

I do wonder if things would have been fine if had just added another octet. We would still have had enough addresses to not need more for the forseeable future. Some may disagree, but a trillion addresses are fine for human population which is going plateau soon. I am not a network engineer, but I believe it would have been far easier to make the two versions interoperable. The number of addresses possible with IPv6 are too much for its own good. The ranges are absurdly long and far apart. Add to the difficulty to communicate and understand an address filled with hex-codes. I think IPv6 solved more problems than that were actually needed.

matthews2 3y ago
> for human population which is going plateau soon It's not an address per person any more, but an address per IoT device or connected sensor, which might continue to grow even if population doesn't.
- shubhamjain 3y ago
  Even with IPv6 we are not abandoning NAT. There are good reasons to have a single point of access / control. Do we really see billions of devices connected independently to the internet?
  - rekoil 3y ago
    Yes. And we are abandoning NAT, we're just not abandoning firewalls.
    - skissane 3y ago
      NAT still exists for IPv6. There is NAT66 and there is NPTv6. While no doubt there is less need for it than with IPv4, there are valid use cases for both.
      - rekoil 3y ago
        Yeah I meant in general. Of course I know there are use cases for NAT that are valid regardless of IP version in use.

voidmain 3y ago

Assign 2^96 addresses to each IPv4 address. The original address is now a.b.c.d.0 and there are lots more a.b.c.d.x. When sending a packet over an IPv4 link, translate packets with .0 destinations to v4 packets and embed others in a special v4 protocol. When receiving a packet do the reverse. Now you need a v4/.0 address only if you are directly connected to a v4 peer, and an upgrade is useful even for a single computer behind a NAT. I came up with this idea in like 5 minutes so I'm sure it is flawed. But i think that if we had a realistic design we could have been done with the transition in early 00s.

Dagger2 3y ago
It's actually not that flawed, you've more or less invented 6to4. Every v4 address has an associated v6 network (basically 32.2.a.b.c.d.*), and you can send packets to that network by crafting packets that use protocol 41 ("6in4"). It only gives 2^80 addresses per v4 address but that should be enough for anybody. But uh... it doesn't seem to have helped as much as you're thinking. Also, you didn't address how v4-only devices or software would talk these bigger addresses (how can you fit >32 bits into a sockaddr_in struct?). That's one of the big difficulties of v6 deployment and it won't go away no matter how you design v6.
- voidmain 3y ago
  The key point is that all v6 addresses are owned by v4 addresses and therefore tunnelable, and that tunneling support is mandatory. There is no external prereq to having an individual device be able to open connections to v6 addresses, and only support at the router (with a public address) is needed to receive connections from any v6 address. There is no way around upgrading end devices. But the problem with v6 adoption isn't the number of end devices from before 1995. Basically the adoption plan could have been: 1. Get end OSs to have v6 support. They gain the ability to make outgoing connections to v6 addresses right away. There's no reason, from the beginning, for this not to be enabled by default with zero configuration from the beginning. 2. Get NAT routers at the edge to have v6 support. Gains the ability to publish services from inside without awkward port forwarding etc (and increases the benefit of 1) 3. Slowly make v4 addresses expensive so that consumers make do with less than a /32. They need v6 capable endpoints but can communicate as clients with anyone, and as servers with anyone who has adopted v6 4. Eventually v4 addresses are so expensive, and the number of machines running browsers that don't support v6 so small, that small time web sites stop taking a /32 etc. it doesn't really matter when the network backbones upgrade, it just saves a few bytes on the wire and they internalize the cost of that This just doesn't seem like what happened in our timeline.

pif 3y ago

> The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space. That is THE problem. Those designers failed to see the huge chicken-and-egg issue. They chose to make it impossible to establish IPv6 without the active participation of people, and they did expect people to actively change their setup to join the IPv6 club before IPv6 being fully established... just for the sake of the cause... which is laughable if we want to be kind and the definition of sheer idiocy if we want to be honest. People will move towards a target when the reward is ready to pick; otherwise, apart from a few enthusiasts, inertia will prevail. I wish this debacle would be used as an example of how (not to try) to motivate people for serious stuff, like global warming.

Havoc 3y ago

That all sounds alarmingly acrimonious which does not bode well for solutions and coordination

magicalhippo 3y ago

At home I run NAT for IPv4, and I got a /56 IPv6 prefix (dynamic but lets ignore that for now). Inside, clients run dual stack. How viable is it these days to flip this around, and run IPv6-only on the clients with NAT64 for external IPv4 access? Obviously this precludes the use of IPv4-only devices, lets say I'd be fine with that.

minimaul 3y ago
Reasonably practical - this is similar conceptually to what a lot of v6 mobile networks do with eg 464xlat et al.

pm2222 3y ago

The core network stack is going to be dual stack any way during at least the transition phrase, OSes like linux should allow v4/v6 communication.

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116487 - Aug 2023 (134 comments)

gwbas1c 3y ago

IPv6 is like Fusion: Fusion was the energy of the future. Fusion is the energy of the future. Fusion will always be the energy of the future! IPv6 was the protocol of the future. IPv6 is the protocol of the future. IPv6 will always be the protocol of the future!

Dagger2 3y ago
2.3 billion people are already using IPv6. It's not ubiquitous, but it seems to be here and working just fine.