4 ms·

It would be great if its true! Perhaps its really there and we're all just blind to it? Unlikely, but I'm willing to be surprised.

by eej71 2y ago

bluGill 2y ago
Unfortunately none of those people have explained how it could be done in enough detail that I could try it. Most walk away when pressed but a few press on telling me it is easy so shut up and do it .
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. I saw this done in Brazil for example. You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.*. Short number dials are assumed to be 0.*. Update OS and hardware. Then you allocate across the new digit much later as time goes on. The thing with phone infrastructure though is that it is centralized. So may happen in a reasonably coordinated rollout. Global internet is a lot more distributed so it would take a very long time. The open question is, would it take longer than IP6 has? Maybe not. Part of the reason I didn't care to use it early was because of the long addresses. If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    The IPv4 address field is fixed size. You can't simply add a digit and deal with it at the telephony company premises like you can with a phone number. You have to rev every piece of equipment and software that can ever touch a packet. At that point, why are you not also fixing other architectural flaws and ensuring that the address space is large enough to accommodate any future needs?
    - Alupis 2y ago
      > The IPv4 address field is fixed size. So? Make it bigger, call it IPv7, then enjoy. IPv6 has 128 bits for addresses, why can't IPv7 have 128 bits as well, but still use more familiar patterns/techniques borrowed from IPv4? IPv6 threw just about everything out the window... for what reason? Two decades of confusion and resistance... I think at this point in time, people are afraid to say "ya, we overthought the hell out of IPv6".
      - ianburrell 2y ago
        Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time. What more familiar techniques? How are they going to be worth the millions of man-hours to implement? How are they going to be so much better that people will abandon IPv6 and switch from IPv4? Could this be accomplished by changing part of IPv6? It is quite possible that you are using IPv6 to access Hacker News without knowing it.
        Alupis 2y ago
        > Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time. Uh, you mean like IPv6? IPv6 once was new, and it was radical at the time (still mostly is). IPv4 should have just been extended to a 128 bit address space, breaking changes implemented around that, and then everything else would have been easier to adopt. No relearning everything - just rationalizing about larger address space. > It is quite possible that you are using IPv6 to access Hacker News without knowing it. No I am not, because our IT Dept. disables IPv6 on all workstations and doesn't support them at our gateways. IPv6 was the culprit in a lot of networking issues that just magically "go away" when disabled... so, they disable. The decades and decades of knowledge built around IPv4 is immense. IPv6 asked everyone to forget almost all of it and start over. It's really not surprising IPv6 is still not well adopted...
        bauruine 2y ago
        >IPv6 was the culprit in a lot of networking issues that just magically "go away" when disabled... so, they disable Why do you think your IPv7 will magically just work? There will be problems with it and IT departements will still disable it.
    - thwarted 2y ago
      One interesting thing about this idea is that, from a higher level, that's exactly how IPv6 works; the "leading zero" is the IP protocol version field. If that leading zero, er IPv4, is there, the fields of the IP packet are interpreted using IPv4 semantics. If the version field is IPv6, then the IP packet is interpreted using IPv6 semantics. This is how you configure telephone dial plans. Earlier dialed numbers influence the interpretation of later numbers. You dial a 1, an area code is expected next. You dial 9, you get an outline line. Dial plans are a pretty decent setup and allow scoped dialing, but are limited in their extensibility (you can't have a local number start with 1). In IP, the IP protocol version field influences the interpretation of later fields, logically similar to dial plans.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    If you had to deal with a hundred million different kinds of dialing software, that method wouldn't work out so well. > If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly. For local addresses, you can use fec0::zzzz. Do you need to memorize or hand-type global addresses very often?
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      > that method wouldn't work out so well How well did IPv6 turn out by that criteria? > memorize or hand-type We read things many more times than we type them. Yes, gibberish at 4x the length is substantially harder to deal with. I do write addresses occasionally and with IP4 it is at least possible, if not desirable.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > How well did IPv6 turn out by that criteria? About the same. So it's good we made it big for the future. > Yes, gibberish at 4x the length is substantially harder to deal with. I find copying and pasting to be pretty easy, and if you're looking at your own machines you can organize them all with the last 4 characters. I don't have to compare random internet servers very often.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.* How do you do that? I have read the IPv4 protocol spec, there isn't any space to put that byte can still be IPv4. That is what I mean when nobody has proposed anything that I can implement: I have read the spec and it doesn't allow room for what you want to do. Sure conceptually you can describe any number of ideas - but they are not IPv4 and no existing computer or router will work with it - so we may as well go with IPv6 which many smart people spent who understand the real problems of the internet have a lot of effort creating to solve existing problems to the best of their ability. Brazil didn't just add that leading 0. They planed this well in advance and forced everyone who connects to the phone system to update their systems to support it: you must apply a software update or buy new hardware; otherwise your phones stop working. Of course most of the software and hardware was controlled by the Brazil phone company (s?) and so they could ensure this was all done. I first found out about Brazil doing this from your comment - yet I can say the above with all confidence because those are things that have to happen behind the scenes to make it work. (I have no doubt people who actually know something about what Brazil did can tell you things I didn't think about)
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Well, you asked for a design and I gave one. Any change is ultimately going to require a software rollout. (I suppose you could squeeze a byte into an underused header in the short term.) The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world. Possibly—I'm not strongly arguing for either, besides the fact that v6 didn't solve any problems I was having besides the world running out of addresses. It's a lot harder to grok at a glance though. Also, a smaller change wouldn't break existing networks, just like the existence of v6 didn't break v4. (This is basically the Python 2 to 3 transition argument in global form.)
      - bluGill 2y ago
        so we did what you proposed. Ipv6 is simpler than ipv4. You can handwave details different but they all suffe, from the same problem of rollout.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    > Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. Phone number lengths are defined by ITU E.164: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 They can be up to 15 digits long: so as long as the format change that goes from length x to length x+1 doesn't break that limit, then no changes to code or equipment needs to be done. The routing just needs to be tweaked so that when a number is read the signal is sent to the correct destination. This is different from IPv4 where the digit length needed to be changed. It would be like if telephones went from 15 digits to 20+ digits: all the telephone gear would have to be changed to deal with the larger numbers.
kemotep 2y ago
Well I don’t see how you could do it without upgrading equipment and software to support it. And then to start using the new ip scheme. Which starts to sound an awful lot like an IPV6 migration.

It would be great if its true! Perhaps its really there and we're all just blind to it? Unlikely, but I'm willing to be surprised.

by eej71 2y ago

It would be great if its true! Perhaps its really there and we're all just blind to it? Unlikely, but I'm willing to be surprised.

bluGill 2y ago

Unfortunately none of those people have explained how it could be done in enough detail that I could try it. Most walk away when pressed but a few press on telling me it is easy so shut up and do it .

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. I saw this done in Brazil for example. You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.*. Short number dials are assumed to be 0.*. Update OS and hardware. Then you allocate across the new digit much later as time goes on. The thing with phone infrastructure though is that it is centralized. So may happen in a reasonably coordinated rollout. Global internet is a lot more distributed so it would take a very long time. The open question is, would it take longer than IP6 has? Maybe not. Part of the reason I didn't care to use it early was because of the long addresses. If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  The IPv4 address field is fixed size. You can't simply add a digit and deal with it at the telephony company premises like you can with a phone number. You have to rev every piece of equipment and software that can ever touch a packet. At that point, why are you not also fixing other architectural flaws and ensuring that the address space is large enough to accommodate any future needs?
  - Alupis 2y ago
    > The IPv4 address field is fixed size. So? Make it bigger, call it IPv7, then enjoy. IPv6 has 128 bits for addresses, why can't IPv7 have 128 bits as well, but still use more familiar patterns/techniques borrowed from IPv4? IPv6 threw just about everything out the window... for what reason? Two decades of confusion and resistance... I think at this point in time, people are afraid to say "ya, we overthought the hell out of IPv6".
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time. What more familiar techniques? How are they going to be worth the millions of man-hours to implement? How are they going to be so much better that people will abandon IPv6 and switch from IPv4? Could this be accomplished by changing part of IPv6? It is quite possible that you are using IPv6 to access Hacker News without knowing it.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        > Nothing in the world can work with IPv7. That means need to update all the software and replace all the hardware. This takes years of effort, and years of time. Uh, you mean like IPv6? IPv6 once was new, and it was radical at the time (still mostly is). IPv4 should have just been extended to a 128 bit address space, breaking changes implemented around that, and then everything else would have been easier to adopt. No relearning everything - just rationalizing about larger address space. > It is quite possible that you are using IPv6 to access Hacker News without knowing it. No I am not, because our IT Dept. disables IPv6 on all workstations and doesn't support them at our gateways. IPv6 was the culprit in a lot of networking issues that just magically "go away" when disabled... so, they disable. The decades and decades of knowledge built around IPv4 is immense. IPv6 asked everyone to forget almost all of it and start over. It's really not surprising IPv6 is still not well adopted...
        bauruine 2y ago
        >IPv6 was the culprit in a lot of networking issues that just magically "go away" when disabled... so, they disable Why do you think your IPv7 will magically just work? There will be problems with it and IT departements will still disable it.
  - thwarted 2y ago
    One interesting thing about this idea is that, from a higher level, that's exactly how IPv6 works; the "leading zero" is the IP protocol version field. If that leading zero, er IPv4, is there, the fields of the IP packet are interpreted using IPv4 semantics. If the version field is IPv6, then the IP packet is interpreted using IPv6 semantics. This is how you configure telephone dial plans. Earlier dialed numbers influence the interpretation of later numbers. You dial a 1, an area code is expected next. You dial 9, you get an outline line. Dial plans are a pretty decent setup and allow scoped dialing, but are limited in their extensibility (you can't have a local number start with 1). In IP, the IP protocol version field influences the interpretation of later fields, logically similar to dial plans.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  If you had to deal with a hundred million different kinds of dialing software, that method wouldn't work out so well. > If we could get a five byte address written in hex it would be somewhat user friendly. For local addresses, you can use fec0::zzzz. Do you need to memorize or hand-type global addresses very often?
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    > that method wouldn't work out so well How well did IPv6 turn out by that criteria? > memorize or hand-type We read things many more times than we type them. Yes, gibberish at 4x the length is substantially harder to deal with. I do write addresses occasionally and with IP4 it is at least possible, if not desirable.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > How well did IPv6 turn out by that criteria? About the same. So it's good we made it big for the future. > Yes, gibberish at 4x the length is substantially harder to deal with. I find copying and pasting to be pretty easy, and if you're looking at your own machines you can organize them all with the last 4 characters. I don't have to compare random internet servers very often.
- bluGill 2y ago
  > You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.* How do you do that? I have read the IPv4 protocol spec, there isn't any space to put that byte can still be IPv4. That is what I mean when nobody has proposed anything that I can implement: I have read the spec and it doesn't allow room for what you want to do. Sure conceptually you can describe any number of ideas - but they are not IPv4 and no existing computer or router will work with it - so we may as well go with IPv6 which many smart people spent who understand the real problems of the internet have a lot of effort creating to solve existing problems to the best of their ability. Brazil didn't just add that leading 0. They planed this well in advance and forced everyone who connects to the phone system to update their systems to support it: you must apply a software update or buy new hardware; otherwise your phones stop working. Of course most of the software and hardware was controlled by the Brazil phone company (s?) and so they could ensure this was all done. I first found out about Brazil doing this from your comment - yet I can say the above with all confidence because those are things that have to happen behind the scenes to make it work. (I have no doubt people who actually know something about what Brazil did can tell you things I didn't think about)
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Well, you asked for a design and I gave one. Any change is ultimately going to require a software rollout. (I suppose you could squeeze a byte into an underused header in the short term.) The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world. Possibly—I'm not strongly arguing for either, besides the fact that v6 didn't solve any problems I was having besides the world running out of addresses. It's a lot harder to grok at a glance though. Also, a smaller change wouldn't break existing networks, just like the existence of v6 didn't break v4. (This is basically the Python 2 to 3 transition argument in global form.)
    - bluGill 2y ago
      so we did what you proposed. Ipv6 is simpler than ipv4. You can handwave details different but they all suffe, from the same problem of rollout.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. Phone number lengths are defined by ITU E.164: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 They can be up to 15 digits long: so as long as the format change that goes from length x to length x+1 doesn't break that limit, then no changes to code or equipment needs to be done. The routing just needs to be tweaked so that when a number is read the signal is sent to the correct destination. This is different from IPv4 where the digit length needed to be changed. It would be like if telephones went from 15 digits to 20+ digits: all the telephone gear would have to be changed to deal with the larger numbers.

kemotep 2y ago

Well I don’t see how you could do it without upgrading equipment and software to support it. And then to start using the new ip scheme. Which starts to sound an awful lot like an IPV6 migration.