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I am so surprised by the hate for IPv6 in this thread. I have been deploying IPv6 for more than ten years and it really improve many situations (beside larger

• orangeboats 3y ago
  >I am so surprised by the hate for IPv6 in this thread. I find that HN views IPv6 noticeably more harshly than many other communities I have been a part of (e.g. networking subreddits and gaming communities). I am curious of the reason behind this.
  • iknowstuff 3y ago
    Developers who don’t care to learn how/why things work, have gone by without it, and are upset that they gotta learn more now because it works differently.
    • orangeboats 3y ago
      I just hope that people won't repeat the same "I wish IPv6 were just IPv4 with extra octets" viewpoint again... The use of hex is very helpful when you're calculating subnets. You want a /48 prefix? Just take the first 3 hextets. /56? First 3 and a half hextets. /64? First 4 hextets.
      • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
        This is an excellent point because entire tools exist with ipv4 to calculate subnets and unless you do base math all the time you’re usually using them to figure out stuff like CIDR overlaps
      • wut42 3y ago
        The thread posted yesterday about Czech Republic's IPv4 deprecation plans had at least a comment about IPv4 with extras octets. I am pretty sure that even once IPv4 will be fully dead and replaced by v6, people will still rant about that.
      • tolien 3y ago
        > I just hope that people won't repeat the same "I wish IPv6 were just IPv4 with extra octets" viewpoint again... The new Godwin's Law, any discussion about IPv6 will inevitably lead to someone suggesting IPv4 with extra octets.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
      I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The UX of IPv6 is still decidedly inferior. Typing a curl command etc or in general manually typing and remembering IPs is decidedly more difficult with IPv6 vs IPv4. I think IPv6 needs either a killer command line tool or aliasing scheme to overcome that stigma.
      • neilalexander 3y ago
        The aliasing scheme is called DNS.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
          Clearly that is not sufficient enough for a variety of reasons else we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
          • neilalexander 3y ago
            If "IPv6 addresses are harder to type or remember" is the worst thing that happens during the transition to IPv6 then I'd call the whole thing an unquestionable success, given that there were numerous far more important things that could have gone wrong or ended up worse but didn't. DNS exists to solve the problem of people not having to remember or type IP addresses. This is true regardless of whether you are talking about IPv4 or IPv6.
          • harshreality 3y ago
            What problem is not solved by various DNS and local-addressing options, but is solvable by some other aliasing scheme that isn't DNS under another name, and can you outline how a better aliasing scheme would work? Background and current options, as I'm aware of them: "IPv6 addresses are too difficult" objectors don't seem to want a solution to the ease-of-use problem that leverages aliases, because DNS is that. They want the ease of typing in IPv4 addresses without any overhead of setting up alias mappings or trusting local hosts' ideas of their own names. That's not possible, in general, with an addressing scheme that's 4x as big. The standard representation has tried to improve things with hex instead of decimal and collapsing the longest run of 0-fields. It could have used a higher base than 16 [1], but that would slow visual spot-recognition of an address. It could have dispensed with all the ':' chars, but that would prevent collapsing addresses and make chunking more difficult. DNS as an aliasing scheme has many administrative forms. It can be configured per-machine with /etc/hosts (copied around manually, or with scripted or configuration management tools); on a trusted local network with mdns and ip autoassignment, if the network is trustworthy enough; or manually with a full-fledged DNS server, either private or public. More complex network environments leverage tooling to make DNS as painless as possible. The mappings still have to be configured and managed somewhere, even if that's separately per host via what hostname they each think they have. It's also possible to assign stable, short local addresses that can be remembered and typed easily roughly on par with v4 addresses (10.0.x.1 vs fc00::x:1, which becomes shorter than IPv4 for x==0). [1] See RFC 1924. Who wouldn't love to use addresses in the form of "4)+k&C#VzJ4br>0wv%Yp" ?
    • danesparza 3y ago
      I'll bite: Can you please point me to a resource that explains it clearly, with examples?
  • commandersaki 3y ago
    My reason: IPv6 failed to fulfill its original objective.
    • apearson 3y ago
      Which is?
      • commandersaki 3y ago
        Literally the one job it had, to prevent address depletion on the Internet. Just to be clear, we're talking about the Internet here, and not some IPv6 island.
        • orangeboats 3y ago
          I don't get you. We are running dual stack for the time being, and indeed we cannot solve address depletion this way, but that doesn't mean we are doing it forever. At some point -- maybe when 60%, 70%, or 80%, or 90% of the Internet is running on IPv6 -- Internet services at a large scale will begin to deem IPv4 as a liability, and drop IPv4 support along with the addresses they are holding. I am not talking about a distant future either. We already have IPv6-only servers up and running, mine included, and we haven't even reached the 50% milestone. In a way, the existence of IPv6-only servers meant that IPv6 is _already_ preventing IPv4 address depletion, because those servers would otherwise have to compete for IPv4 addresses with the other servers too. Furthermore, I find "I hate IPv6 because it hasn't eliminated IPv4" a really weird opinion (it's not exactly what you said, but it is how I interpret your first few comments combined) because it's sort of recursive: hate IPv6 -> continues to use IPv4 -> IPv6 is unable to eliminate IPv4 -> hate IPv6??? Perhaps you can elaborate on it further, but I don't think it will be agreeable either way.
          • commandersaki 3y ago
            IPng was meant to avert the IPv4 address exhaustion crisis. IPv6 was chosen as the way forward. A transition group (ngtrans) was formed and instead of taking the time to consider how to integrate IPv6 into the existing landscape it decided to create a separate island. We now have a hodgepodge of transition plans and umpteen different transition mechanisms of which none make IPv6 first class. What do I mean by making IPv6 first class? Basically a transition plan/mechanism where IPv6 is interoperable with IPv4. This was one of the primary considerations at the time when IPng were still deciding, where other contenders at the time had a better transition plan story. Instead the IPng group chose the technology that didn't have any transition plan because they liked the shiny new features that were irrelevant to averting the address exhaustion situation. Their failure to address the transition back then is why we're in this IPv6 adoption bottleneck.
  • Macha 3y ago
    Networking communities understand the way it works and the improvements it's making. Gamers understand the consequences of not having it when they want to play with their friend but both are behind CGNAT and they can only play games with a server run by someone else and not any that use P2P multiplayer. HN users can afford the $2/month/server that AWS or whoever charges today and besides your standard SPA + REST API doesn't really care how many layers of NAT and proxies it's behind.
  • nottorp 3y ago
    Because a lot of us have non simple networks that are also not complex enough to warrant whatever the enterprise design commitee designed for ipv6.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• sylware 3y ago
  IPv6 will rid us from the abomination of domestic NAT. IPv6 will, finally, enabled the real internet: all p2p protocols will start to work seamlessly. I am thinking a super simple no-dns IP (audio|video) phone protocol listening only on tcp 1 port, new bittorrent like protocol for live streaming, etc. Since IPv6 has been almost everywhere in my country for years: enjoying ssh session everywhere (ipv6 mobile internet), without any domestic NAT to configure. But, still... steam... github... and some "rogue" (:P) smtp servers. That said for HN, where is the champagne?
  • Y_Y 3y ago
    Is it possible for me, or worse, a normal person, to claim or request an ipv6 address that they can keep and use like a phone number? I'm used to dynamic allocation for residential ipv4 addresses and never bothered to beg ARIN for some or rent since from an ISP. Having an address you could keep and bring with you would be great and avoid a lot of the difficulties of DNS.
    • Jhsto 3y ago
      Hurricane Electric gives out free ipv6 blocks that you can assign however you want. I get an ipv6 for my phone through Wireguard that way.
    • throw0101d 3y ago
      > Is it possible for me, or worse, a normal person, to claim or request an ipv6 address that they can keep and use like a phone number? Yes. You also have to get an ASN though, and an ISP which which will advertise both over BGP.
      • greyface- 3y ago
        You don't strictly need an ASN in order to request address space, at least with ARIN. It's possible to have your own IPs, and arrange for someone else to announce them on your behalf, or use them on your local network without routing them globally. (If you qualify for one, there's little downside to requesting it at the same time as your IPs, though)
• uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
  > I have to admit, there is a learning curve. But I want to encourage everybody involved in configuring computers to learn. This is probably most of it. My gripe is that there is essentially no realistic end to ipv4 in sight. So we as an industry carry the debt of securing, managing and troubleshooting parallel v4 and v6 networks for decades. If ipv4 had an EOL it'd make the transition so much better
  • ianburrell 3y ago
    We have reached the point where it is feasible to run all new networks on IPv6 and treat IPv4 as legacy protocol on the edges and special devices. NAT64 works well enough for most IPv4 access. IPv6 network greatly simplifies networking. IPv4 will never go away, but will be smaller part of the Internet.
    • patmorgan23 3y ago
      It will probably be 20-30 years before it goes away. But I think there will be a point where service providers that drop v4 support in their networks. At that point clients that need v4 connectivity can use 4-in-6 tunneling/VPNs. It will absolutely hang around in small private networks for 50 years (there's still some token ring networks out there)
  • Dagger2 3y ago
    Nobody is in a position to EOL v4. We'd need a planetary government for that, and we don't have one. It would be nice, but we have to work with what we've got and not what we wish we had. I run my desktop with no v4, so it's clearly possible to push handling for v4 out of your network. You could outsource it to somebody else even, for example by using one of the DNS servers listed on https://nat64.net/ https://nat64.net/.
    • uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
      We can EOL things insecure ciphers and old operating systems without much issue without a planetary government. The migration strategy for ipv4->ipv6 was just so horribly conceived that we'll be running both in parallel for decades. TBH I think it would have been better if ipv6 was named something else entirely. Running TCP and UDP in parallel doesn't raise any flags, but running two versions of the same protocol in parallel is strange.
• ijhuygft776 3y ago
  > I have been deploying IPv6 for more than ten years and it really improve many situations (beside larger addresses). for most people, it is transparent and doesn't improve anything... ipv6 could be disabled on their router and everything would be the same (I actually used to disable ipv6 at router level to avoid inadvertently leaking data on ipv6)
  • Dagger2 3y ago
    We spent a significant amount of effort designing v6's deployment strategy to make sure this would be the case -- that it could be deployed without disrupting existing network setups. It's supposed to work like this. Don't twist that effort into a reason to not deploy v6.
  • patmorgan23 3y ago
    IPv6 is after than v4. If you're running v4, you're probably running NAT44, that adds latency as the NAT box has to do a table lookup and rewrite the header. V6 it just passes the packet through.
• wharvle 3y ago
  Stuff on the Internet breaks if I enable IPv6 on my Google Fiber router (been that way since I first got Fiber years ago—though I think Amazon works with it enabled now, which it didn’t before). My T-Mobile connection issues an IPv6 address but fails online “is my IPv6 working?” tests. I enjoy it on my private networks but simply can’t rely on it on the Internet yet.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't hate IPv6, but I am putting off switching my network to it for as long as I can get away with. There's nothing I do that IPv6 makes better, and switching to it is a very large and painful task, so delaying that switch until it's required doesn't seem unreasonable.
  • ianburrell 3y ago
    You don’t have to switch your network to it, you just have to enable it. The system to decide between IPv4 and IPv6 works pretty well. I can’t tell if accessing HN over IPv6 cause doesn’t matter.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      I've been looking into keeping my network IPv4 in an IPv6 world, and it looks like there are a lot of sharp corners and kinks that make that problematic. In any case, considerations like that are part of why I'm putting off any serious effort or decisions until it's required.
      • Dagger2 3y ago
        The reason it's problematic is the same reason we need a new protocol in the first place: because the old one isn't enough. You've spent longer talking about not deploying v6 than you would have done deploying it. I said this before, but I suggest you sit down and turn v6 on for your network -- and *just* that, don't start gaming out how to disable v4 or deal with devices that don't support v6 or anything else, *just* do the basic enabling v6 on the network part. That way you'll see that you're seriously overthinking it. But you won't listen to me, because http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
        • JohnFen 3y ago
          > You've spent longer talking about not deploying v6 than you would have done deploying it. I guarantee that I haven't. > I suggest you sit down and turn v6 on for your network I did this a long while ago. I apologize for giving the impression that I haven't. But actually using IPv6 in any serious way takes more than just turning it on. It requires reconfiguring a nontrivial number of machines/devices, figuring out how to accommodate the many machines/devices that aren't able to use IPv6, and so forth. Now, I will admit that I'm still learning IPv6 stuff and as a result there are likely things that I'm overthinking. But responses like yours don't move that ball forward any. You're just scolding people for not being experts.