4 ms·

> Which means what is really necessary is a new IP protocol that will somehow, SOMEHOW (don't ask me how, I don't effing know) speak seamlessly to IPV4 and IPV6

> Which means what is really necessary is a new IP protocol that will somehow, SOMEHOW (don't ask me how, I don't effing know) speak seamlessly to IPV4 and IPV6 You don't know how, and nobody knows how, because it's not possible to do. v4 simply does not support addresses longer than 32 bits. If it did, we wouldn't need v6 in the first place. Choosing not to do something that's impossible isn't hubris. Hubris is criticizing the people who knew what they were doing without realizing how little of the problem domain you yourself understand.

lproven 3y ago
> You don't know how, and nobody knows how, because it's not possible to do. I think you misunderstood the comment, but at first reading, I did too. But on consideration, I do not think @AtlasBarfed meant that this hypothetical IPv12 or whatever (7 through to 10 are taken) would be able to talk to both in one protocol. It's well established that no seamless extension of the IPv4 4-octet address space was possible. I know, a lot of people still don't get that, but honestly, to the majority of people working in tech today, all this stuff is black magic that just happens. Either they learn, or they don't and can be ignored. That's OK. We have to live with that and move on. The real, the big question here is: was there some single obvious thing that IPv6 failed to do or failed to include that has made its uptake so slow? It's taken some 30 years to reach approximately half the IP market. That is not just "not good" - that's terrible. What IMHO apenwarr's blog post was trying to get at was the complexity of connection schemes needed, and how a new protocol with an integral way of of constructing virtual networks, connected over the public internet into cohesive wholes via some form of built-in redirection or mapping layer, would have made it a far more compelling offering. I have seen others saying this, but I can't find any links any more. I welcome other pointers to articles not merely pointing out problems -- there are lots of those -- but proposing solutions.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  Based on "speak seamlessly to IPV4 and IPV6", I don't think I did. At the very least it would need to speak seamlessly to v4, which as you say is obviously not possible for any address length bigger than 32 bits. > The real, the big question here is: was there some single obvious thing that IPv6 failed to do or failed to include that has made its uptake so slow? It's taken some 30 years to reach approximately half the IP market. That is not just "not good" - that's terrible. Is it terrible though? Obviously it would be nice if it were faster, but what's the expected deployment time for something like v6? There are about 30 billion network devices, arranged in hundreds of millions of separate networks managed by as many separate people. Noone has authoritative control over all of them. There's no hard deadline for v6 deployment (we saw with Y2K how much a deadline helps). Network effects work against it, and that's unavoidable because of v4's 32-bit limits. I don't think humanity has ever tackled a migration project of this scope and scale before. So how can you know that it's going terribly? I don't think there's an obvious thing we missed either, at least not in the set of things which work and are actually possible to do. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and their suggestions are basically either: not possible ("just get everyone to switch over all at once"), broken ("just pad v4 with some zeros"), or something v6 already did (frequently NAT64 or 6to4 but described in weird terms). Either there's a big conspiracy to keep the obvious thing a secret, or it doesn't exist. > I welcome other pointers to articles not merely pointing out problems -- there are lots of those -- but proposing solutions. Sigh... yes please. But solutions are hard, especially to unsolvable problems. Making a clickbaity article that points out the problems and says "somebody should have solved them" is easy, and as you can see from the response to this article and djb's each time they're posted, that's all people are interested in anyway.
  - lproven 3y ago
    Hmmmm. I am not a network engineer (any more, thank the hypothetical deities) so I have no skin in this game. But in the 1990s, I moved networks from IPX/SPX, or NetBEUI, or AppleTalk, or DECnet, and almost any combinations thereof, to IP. I added IP on top of existing networks. I migrated systems from 10base-2 to 10base-T to 100base-T. I stitched together WANs. Then I moved IP networks from static to DHCP, from no name resolution to DNS to WINS, and so on. I am not a total rookie to this stuff. So when you say > I don't think humanity has ever tackled a migration project of this scope and scale before. I have to disagree. The IP rollout itself was bigger, and yet, it happened much, much faster. We moved the networked world from a dozen protocols to IP, then we totally re-architected how IP worked, from static networks to `hosts` files to name resolution to dynamic IPs and dynamic name resolution. Then we rejigged it all again for a world of proxies and gateways, and firewalls, and NAT. You make out like this is some vast super-hard thing, but in fact, the world of networking is way older than many people in the modern IP-only world realise, and we've rebuilt it over and over and over again repeatedly. When a new technology comes along that offer compelling advantages, then the world moves to it, not in one smooth operation but incrementally and piecemeal, but it happens. It hasn't happened to IPv6 and my argument, and much more importantly the arguments of the Avery Pennarun here and of Dan Bernstein, are that it hasn't happened because IPv6 isn't good enough. It's good but it only fixes 1 problem and that one, while big and important, is not the whole problem and it's not even the most important problem because there are workarounds for simple IP address starvation, and the workarounds are _good_ workarounds with their own advantages, and some of those advantages are compelling. The world has, overall and on average, decided that IPv4 is good enough to mean it's not worth the pain of moving. It's better to fix what it already has. It is the same issue as Plan 9 vs Unix. Plan 9 is better by almost every objective measure, but Unix is good enough, so the world decided to stay with Unix rather than the pain of moving. For me, what is an interesting question here is "could we fix Plan 9 to make it worth moving to?" The Plan 9 people don't care, though. Similarly, although it's not my area, it's an interesting line of questioning to ask "what is wrong with IPv6 that the world didn't move to it, and can we fix that?" But when someone proposes it, the IPv6 proponents treat it as heresy, not as a simple, relevant question. That in itself is interesting too, IMHO.
    - 3y ago

lproven 3y ago

> You don't know how, and nobody knows how, because it's not possible to do. I think you misunderstood the comment, but at first reading, I did too. But on consideration, I do not think @AtlasBarfed meant that this hypothetical IPv12 or whatever (7 through to 10 are taken) would be able to talk to both in one protocol. It's well established that no seamless extension of the IPv4 4-octet address space was possible. I know, a lot of people still don't get that, but honestly, to the majority of people working in tech today, all this stuff is black magic that just happens. Either they learn, or they don't and can be ignored. That's OK. We have to live with that and move on. The real, the big question here is: was there some single obvious thing that IPv6 failed to do or failed to include that has made its uptake so slow? It's taken some 30 years to reach approximately half the IP market. That is not just "not good" - that's terrible. What IMHO apenwarr's blog post was trying to get at was the complexity of connection schemes needed, and how a new protocol with an integral way of of constructing virtual networks, connected over the public internet into cohesive wholes via some form of built-in redirection or mapping layer, would have made it a far more compelling offering. I have seen others saying this, but I can't find any links any more. I welcome other pointers to articles not merely pointing out problems -- there are lots of those -- but proposing solutions.

Dagger2 3y ago
Based on "speak seamlessly to IPV4 and IPV6", I don't think I did. At the very least it would need to speak seamlessly to v4, which as you say is obviously not possible for any address length bigger than 32 bits. > The real, the big question here is: was there some single obvious thing that IPv6 failed to do or failed to include that has made its uptake so slow? It's taken some 30 years to reach approximately half the IP market. That is not just "not good" - that's terrible. Is it terrible though? Obviously it would be nice if it were faster, but what's the expected deployment time for something like v6? There are about 30 billion network devices, arranged in hundreds of millions of separate networks managed by as many separate people. Noone has authoritative control over all of them. There's no hard deadline for v6 deployment (we saw with Y2K how much a deadline helps). Network effects work against it, and that's unavoidable because of v4's 32-bit limits. I don't think humanity has ever tackled a migration project of this scope and scale before. So how can you know that it's going terribly? I don't think there's an obvious thing we missed either, at least not in the set of things which work and are actually possible to do. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and their suggestions are basically either: not possible ("just get everyone to switch over all at once"), broken ("just pad v4 with some zeros"), or something v6 already did (frequently NAT64 or 6to4 but described in weird terms). Either there's a big conspiracy to keep the obvious thing a secret, or it doesn't exist. > I welcome other pointers to articles not merely pointing out problems -- there are lots of those -- but proposing solutions. Sigh... yes please. But solutions are hard, especially to unsolvable problems. Making a clickbaity article that points out the problems and says "somebody should have solved them" is easy, and as you can see from the response to this article and djb's each time they're posted, that's all people are interested in anyway.
- lproven 3y ago
  Hmmmm. I am not a network engineer (any more, thank the hypothetical deities) so I have no skin in this game. But in the 1990s, I moved networks from IPX/SPX, or NetBEUI, or AppleTalk, or DECnet, and almost any combinations thereof, to IP. I added IP on top of existing networks. I migrated systems from 10base-2 to 10base-T to 100base-T. I stitched together WANs. Then I moved IP networks from static to DHCP, from no name resolution to DNS to WINS, and so on. I am not a total rookie to this stuff. So when you say > I don't think humanity has ever tackled a migration project of this scope and scale before. I have to disagree. The IP rollout itself was bigger, and yet, it happened much, much faster. We moved the networked world from a dozen protocols to IP, then we totally re-architected how IP worked, from static networks to `hosts` files to name resolution to dynamic IPs and dynamic name resolution. Then we rejigged it all again for a world of proxies and gateways, and firewalls, and NAT. You make out like this is some vast super-hard thing, but in fact, the world of networking is way older than many people in the modern IP-only world realise, and we've rebuilt it over and over and over again repeatedly. When a new technology comes along that offer compelling advantages, then the world moves to it, not in one smooth operation but incrementally and piecemeal, but it happens. It hasn't happened to IPv6 and my argument, and much more importantly the arguments of the Avery Pennarun here and of Dan Bernstein, are that it hasn't happened because IPv6 isn't good enough. It's good but it only fixes 1 problem and that one, while big and important, is not the whole problem and it's not even the most important problem because there are workarounds for simple IP address starvation, and the workarounds are _good_ workarounds with their own advantages, and some of those advantages are compelling. The world has, overall and on average, decided that IPv4 is good enough to mean it's not worth the pain of moving. It's better to fix what it already has. It is the same issue as Plan 9 vs Unix. Plan 9 is better by almost every objective measure, but Unix is good enough, so the world decided to stay with Unix rather than the pain of moving. For me, what is an interesting question here is "could we fix Plan 9 to make it worth moving to?" The Plan 9 people don't care, though. Similarly, although it's not my area, it's an interesting line of questioning to ask "what is wrong with IPv6 that the world didn't move to it, and can we fix that?" But when someone proposes it, the IPv6 proponents treat it as heresy, not as a simple, relevant question. That in itself is interesting too, IMHO.
  - 3y ago