24 ms·

I'd really just rather get IPv6 working everywhere and not have to deal with NAT. Some more addresses just drags out the problem by reducing incentives to switc

• gmuslera 2y ago
  This. It will break a lot of existing applications, devices, firewalls, and have conflicts with companies that are somewhat already using them in a public or private environments. And if we want to do it anyway despite all the trouble, it will only push forward the problem a few months or years. In the other hand, IPv6 is already used by nearly half of internet, and probably most installed infrastructure supports it. And it have a lot of advantages over IPv4, starting with not having to use NAT.
• TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
  If IPv6 would be created with a little bit more care for backward compatibility, it could have been years since last server stopped using IPv4. The whole IPv6 fiasco is self inflicted.
  • loeg 2y ago
    Yes, yes, but at this point those mistakes have been litigated sufficiently and complaining about them doesn't help solve any of the remaining problems.
    • b112 2y ago
      Sure it does. We can just move to ipv8, 5 octlets instead of 4. We can give 2.x.x.x.x to 10. to earth, maybe 100 to 110 for moon, mars, etc. 1.x.x.x.x will be for legacy stuff. If anything is trying to route to only 4 octlets, routers add a 1. in front of it. Bam, legacy solved. edit: I realised people don't see the big picture here. Step 1) We collectively engineer and deploy ipv8, along with RFCs explaining how future expansion works 2) We put all sorts of preparatory work, conversation into the eventual expansion into 6 octlets, from 5. We'll need that once we colonize multiple systems. 3) The RFC will state that "new planetary systems get space on 5th oclet, 1.200.x.x.x.x to 1.250.x.x.x.x. 4) As systems grow to need more than an ipv4 range, we transition them to their own 6th oclet. It's easy for them, because they can retain legacy 5th octlet headers. 5) We then collectively freeze our brains, so that in the future, once interplanetary, faster than light communication exists, we are thawed to deal with the 5 to 6 oclet transition! And we all become immortal. But no, that's fine, think small, stay non-immortal with your ipv6 Flanders!
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • ynik 2y ago
        > If anything is trying to route to only 4 octlets, routers add a 1. in front of it. Bam, legacy solved. Only for unidirectional UDP. How do you think the other side would be able to respond if it's unaware of the 5th octlet? Basically every protocol in existence requires two-way communication and there's no backward compatible way of providing that.
        • b112 2y ago
          I covered that. Edge routers transition 1.x.x.x.x to x.x.x.x as a default, and x.x.x.x to 1.x.x.x.x. This is an interim change, so that ipv4 can communicate to ipv4 forever. Legacy systems can be supported on ipv4 only, relegating them (just as they are now!) to not having access to that new address space.
          • growse 2y ago
            You realise that this idea of "embedding a smaller, old address space inside a newer bigger one" has existed in IPv6 for a pretty long time now?
            • b112 2y ago
              A car and a motorcycle both travel on roads, but they are still not the same. - Henry Perkins
          • tiberious726 2y ago
            You mean this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addres...
      • humanfromearth9 2y ago
        1.x.x.x.x -> why not 0.x.x.x.x to represent x.x.x.x ?
  • rcxdude 2y ago
    What kind of backward compatibility are you imagining? If you say "with ipv4 addresses", how are you imagining that would work?
    • TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
      Keep the structure and services around IP protocol (DNS, DHCP, NAT), just with more bits for address. Do not try to reinvent the wheel and add unnecessary breaking bell and whistles which nobody asked for.
      • jcranmer 2y ago
        All of these things already exist for IPv6, although I don't know how much DHCPv6 is deployed in practice.
        • baq 2y ago
          It should be deployed everywhere where IPv6 is deployed and there's an IT department if only for logging/audit.
          • kccqzy 2y ago
            Stateful DHCPv6 does not get deployed because IPv6 purists at Google refuse to implement them on Android. And I in fact agree with them. And DHCPv6 isn't needed for logging/audit: the router always has an association of MAC addresses and IPv6 addresses even if hosts assign their own addresses with SLAAC.
            • bigstrat2003 2y ago
              > Stateful DHCPv6 does not get deployed because IPv6 purists at Google refuse to implement them on Android. Which is absolutely ridiculous. Google should not be trying to dictate to their customers how to run infrastructure. If someone wants to use stateful DHCPv6 for their Android devices, that is their right and Google has no business standing in their way.
  • icedchai 2y ago
    Can you describe how you'd make it more backwards compatible? I often see comments like this, yet nobody can work around the fact that you're limited by 32-bit source and destination headers in V4.
    • jedberg 2y ago
      It's pretty simple. If IPv6 headers were split into two parts, where the first part was the same as IPv4, and the second part had the rest of the bits, so you had say 8 octets instead of 4. The rest of the header would look like data to an IPv4 router. So your IPv6 address would be 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8. The header would have 5.6.7.8 as the IPv4 destination. When it got there, that router would unpack the rest of it and send it off to 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8. If that host had to talk to an IPv4 host, it would just use the IPv4 headers. Then IPv6 traffic could pass over IPv4 networks without any changes. The only constraint would be that each IPv6 network would have to have an IPv4 "gateway" address. Old IPv4 hosts wouldn't be able to talk to IPv6 endpoints, but at least this way the user could upgrade their own stack without having to wait for their ISP, and every network in between, to also upgrade. It's pretty much carrier grade NAT but from client to client without ISP support being necessary, which is the biggest bottleneck right now.
      • andrewshadura 2y ago
        This has been proposed many times already, and it actually wouldn't work.
        • jedberg 2y ago
          Why not?
          • ianburrell 2y ago
            Because the IPv4 host can't talk to new protocol hosts. IPv4 hosts can only do 32-bit addresses and don't know about the wrapping. If they did, they would be new protocol hosts. I had idea of putting the internal address for NAT in options so could be addresses directly. But too many boxes would need to be changed, and lots of unchanged boxes remove options. Plus, all the IPv4 applications wouldn't know what to do with stack of addresses. It would devolve to NAT.
  • Macha 2y ago
    Earlier IP migrations were done when the internet was run by universities and government bodies who felt the need to migrate to a newer standard because there was a newer standard. IPv6 took longer because the internet is now run by companies that need to see a return on investment, and as long as IPv4 was working fine for their customers, didn't see a benefit to it. It's why IPv6 adoption only started taking off when the answer to "Our projected customer growth this year is 200,000, can we have 200,000 more IPv4 addresses please?" became "No".
  • api 2y ago
    It was created by people who were used to the Internet being an ultra high trust relatively close knit community of universities, research, government, and industry. Upgrades across the net had happened before just fine. This one should be no problem. This was around 1996, which is when the vertical growth phase took off. Too late.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    This was deliberate: the idea was that IPng wouldn't get adopted, or even traction in the IETF, if it didn't provide additional functionality/fix perceived problems beyond just address space exhaustion. Remember also that NAT wasn't really a thing at that time. It might have existed but wasn't widely used like happened subsequently. Source: was there.
    • JoshTriplett 2y ago
      I can certainly understand that perspective. But from today's perspective, it seems like IPv6 adoption was slowed by ideological arguments like "people should use SLAAC, not DHCP". By all means introduce a new means of obtaining addresses, but let it live or (preferably) die on its own merits, rather than attaching it and a dozen other albatrosses around IPv6's neck. If IPv6 had started from day one by saying "just add an IPv6 block to your DHCP server and let any client that understands IPv6 get an IPv6 address", that would have been an easier sell.
• tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  This. IPV4 is a mess.....and its extremely frustrating just how unsupported ipv6 is. IPV6 is one of those things where if isp,'s just switched over to it, I'd have so less nightmares caused by cgnat and that bullshit like how expensive static IP's are. Many its because I'm not working at a ISP or a teir 1 backbone but forcing the transition to ipv6 seems like overall it would be less of a clusterfuck than our current ipv4 stuff. I know their is stuff going to break, anytime changes are made at this scale it often has some hickups....but dear god I really hate how static IP's are so expensive, and how expensive a small IP block is. Also IPV6 is just an excuse to get fiber everywhere.....I hate how slow many services are.
  • mike_d 2y ago
    People hail CGNAT and IPv6 as the savior but don't realize you still need v4 addresses to make it work. CGNAT at scale functions by assigning a range of ports on a shared v4 address to a downstream customer. You can normally get between a 1:8 and 1:32 "compression ratio." We still need to free up additional IPv4 to keep the internet growing. Don't let the "just switch to v6" crowd fool you, both solutions need to addressed in parallel.
    • viraptor 2y ago
      That's a really confusing comment. Cgnat is almost universally criticised. IPv6 doesn't need ipv4 addresses. Cgnat and IPv6 are not related.
      • mardifoufs 2y ago
        Maybe they meant NAT64? Not sure though
      • mike_d 2y ago
        IPv6 depends on IPv4 addressing if you have downstream devices that need to reach the entire internet. If you go to ARIN they have an explicit policy of allocating IPv4 blocks to facilitate IPv6 deployment. CGNAT is a term that broadly used to refer to carrier-scale solutions to deal with issues with number exhaustion and dual-stack deployments. What most people think "CGNAT" is, is actually NAT44. https://nfware.com/blog/why-cgnat https://nfware.com/blog/why-cgnat
• api 2y ago
  I am absolutely convinced that the main thing holding V6 back is not even that it’s a full shift rather than an incremental upgrade. It’s that the addresses are too long to easily remember or type and the text representation is unwieldy and aesthetically ugly. Anyone who has ever done net stuff for a living knows that you type or copy paste addresses constantly. Whenever I say this to V6 evangelists they say “we’ll use DNS” which is “tell me you’ve never been a net admin without telling me.” I’d love for V6 to get traction but I think something needs to be done about the usability issues before it will happen. Even little details like the fact that in no terminal does double clicking on a V6 address properly select it is a huge problem. Yeah you might be able to change that but that custom config won’t be there on the next machine, etc. Even seemingly simple usability problems are death to adoption.
  • jauer 2y ago
    I’m a NetEng for a large (>1M servers, >100 POPs) network that is IPv6-only internally. It’s not hard to remember IPv6 addresses for DNS servers assuming your addressing plan reserved the right subnets for anycasted services. Remembering IP addresses stops being a thing pretty quickly. If anything the challenge shifts to remembering airport codes. If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation. I think it’s more that small and medium organizations just don’t have any incentive to change (and plenty of incentive to not take the risk of change) leading to the numbers we see at https://ipv6-in-real.life/ https://ipv6-in-real.life/
    • michaelt 2y ago
      > If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation. Automation is all very well once the network link is up and working so you can reach the automation But the reality is you put someone who knows what they're doing in front of a machine where the network connection isn't working, the first things they're going to be doing is ifconfig and ping 8.8.8.8 - which they'll be doing from memory, because you can't google anything when your network connection isn't working. The fact that IPv6 will deprecate both ifconfig and 8.8.8.8 to me seems emblematic of why the adoption has been going so badly.
• vaylian 2y ago
  github.com reachable via IPv6 when?
  • eqvinox 2y ago
    When you set up NAT64... ... :-( ... goes to cry in a corner
• ta1243 2y ago
  I'd rather deal with NAT than have multiple IPv6 address ranges on my network, even if I could stop using ipv4