4 ms·

How do you not break compatibility with IPv4 while also getting more bytes in the address?

• sambazi 3y ago
  country codes </s>
• speedgoose 3y ago
  Well again I’m not a network expert but perhaps we could look at the 240.0.0.0/4 reserved for future use block and add more address bytes in the payload or something. It’s not going to be elegant but IPv6 is kinda elegant and failed.
  • growse 3y ago
    This is the most hilarious "I don't understand anything about the problem, therefore I don't understand how it's hard" comment I've seen this week. > perhaps we could look at the 240.0.0.0/4 reserved for future use block What's the current rate of v4 address space consumption? How long will this block last? > and add more address bytes in the payload or something. This is, by definition, not backward compatible.
    • speedgoose 3y ago
      I may not have been clear enough in my suggestion. The idea would be to use this unused block as a special block. Not to fill it up with normal IPv4 allocations. See my suggestion as some kind of NAT-PT at scale. With a better marketing name and user experience. The problem is indeed hard because no one manage to find a solution at scale since 3 decades.
      • growse 3y ago
        > The problem is indeed hard because no one manage to find a solution at scale since 3 decades. The problem is hard because despite everyone's wishes, it's got nothing to do with technology. All migrations are about economics and incentives, IPv6's qualities as a design (it's a long, long way from perfect, but I'd argue that it's good enough) are irrelevant.
      • shawabawa3 3y ago
        No matter what change you make, or how you make it, if you are making more than 4B addresses routable then any existing IPv4 device will not be able to route some addresses, so you will have caused a split in the internet This is a fundamental and unresolvable problem with "making it backwards compatible"
        • speedgoose 3y ago
          Wouldn't NAT be an existing and well used solution to this problem?
          • superluserdo 3y ago
            NAT is the problem that IPv6 fixes. Think about the parent comment >if you are making more than 4B addresses routable then any existing IPv4 device will not be able to route some addresses, so you will have caused a split in the internet This has basically already happened. We've massively extended IPv4 by stuffing extra address bits into the router's port number, and it means that any two devices behind NATs can't directly route to each other.
            • speedgoose 3y ago
              NAT has been more successful than IPv6 at fixing the same issue, the shortage of IPv4 adresses, but without breaking compatibility (well at the cost of crazy hacks for weird protocols such as FTP). Not being able to route directly doesn’t seem to be a major issue to me. It for sure require more computing power in routers but also adds some safety and privacy by design.
              • Qwertious 3y ago
                NAT doesn't fix the issue, it works around it. It means that hosting a home server costs extra money to get a static IP.
              • growse 3y ago
                > Not being able to route directly doesn’t seem to be a major issue to me. Look at the bigger world around you. I am, right now, involved in a major cloud migration. Having overlapping, constrained RFC1918 space and also having to NAT everything is presenting an enormous set of constraints and risks. It adds literally zero benefit. Life would be infinitely easier, and we could provide so many more capabilities if everything could just have a routable IP address. Unfortunately, I'm not in charge of our addressing policy. NAT is an awful, short-sighted hack that causes many more problems than it solves.
• hkt 3y ago
  Maybe just don't? Let it be IPv4 with more bits, the software is already there so dual stacking isn't so bad, adoption might actually be quick if people didn't have to learn much to implement it.
  • superluserdo 3y ago
    >Let it be IPv4 with more bits Then it's not IPv4 and is not compatible with IPv4.
    • hkt 3y ago
      It'd be compatible (or trivially close) to most of the software that is required to make it work. Which is to say the cost of implementation would be low - not the case with ipv6.