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>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.

>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]

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]