5 ms·

"Hard" for many is "unfamiliar." IPv4 plus NAT and all that ugliness is the devil we know. I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficu

by api 2y ago

"Hard" for many is "unfamiliar." IPv4 plus NAT and all that ugliness is the devil we know. I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficulty in typing them is a major reason for lack of adoption. Very seemingly small UX annoyances can have a large effect.

knorker 2y ago
> "Hard" for many is "unfamiliar." IPv4 plus NAT and all that ugliness is the devil we know. Indeed. I meant that if evaluating the two de novo, IPv4+NAT is harder.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  I agree that NAT sucks but IPv6 having two different ways of assigning addresses (SLAAC and DHCPv6) with one of them being practically optional (Android doesn't do DHCPv6 for address assignment) does make IPv6 harder than it needs to be. Then there are crimes against network protocols like NAT66 that are borderline necessary in some situations because terrible ISPs have decided to dynamically alter IPv6 prefixes so they can charge extra for a static prefix. I still think NAT makes everything harder than it should be, but I get why some people struggle with IPv6 if their ISP is particularly terrible.
  - api 2y ago
    The sin of IPv6 was trying to do too much. They should have extended address sizes, period. SLAAC and most of the other extensions were a mistake. Everyone should bomb Android bug reports with complaints about lack of DHCPv6 until they fix it. Then people can de-facto deprecate SLAAC. AFAIK Android is the only major offender here. Some corporate networks already don't do SLAAC if they don't need Android to work on them.
    - raron 2y ago
      In that case ISPs would give you a single /126 and ask more money for extra devices, eg. /124 for a "family plan".
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I don't generally care for Android but I'm glad they chose not to support DHCPv6. It's a nice forcing function to make network admins actually learn how SLAAC works and why they should almost certainly prefer it to DHCP.
kstrauser 2y ago
Maybe a long time ago, but just about everything I've used recently supports mDNS for LAN hostnames. If I add a computer named "foo" to the LAN, it's almost certain I can run "ping foo" on another computer 3 seconds later.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  that's not mDNS that's just dhcp+dns and it's something ipv6 actually breaks, which is part of the problem. DHCPv6 is optional, so local devices don't necessarily ever register their hostname nor do they necessarily ever consider your local DNS server.
  - amaccuish 2y ago
    >that's not mDNS that's just dhcp+dns Actually mDNS does exactly what they said just fine. You’re confusing it with the ability of a DHCP server to make updates in DNS on behalf of clients. There is more than one way to skin the cat. Both achieve the same affect, just differently. > nor do they necessarily ever consider your local DNS server. Hardcoded DNS servers are just as equally a thing with IPv4.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      That's right. I'm specifically talking about mDNS, not DHCP+DNS. It works out of the box nearly all the time that I've tried it.
    - kllrnohj 2y ago
      mDNS would work just fine but the given command ('ping foo') wouldn't be using mDNS. That's just standard name resolution. `ping foo.local` would potentially use mDNS if you have a ping that does such a thing, but that's restricted to `.local` specifically. Rather, most routers add DHCP hostname requests to the local DNS routes. That doesn't require mDNS, nor would you want to replace it with mDNS as mDNS is more limited & flakier.
      - 2y ago
kllrnohj 2y ago
> I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficulty in typing them is a major reason for lack of adoption. Possibly, but I think it's also that some aspects of IPv6 are just badly designed, and subsequent updates only fixed some of the issues. SLAAC, for example, is godawful stupid. And while DHCPv6 exists to fix some of that, critical aspects of the protocol, like prefix delegation, are manually configured. This is beyond idiotic and makes things like subnets massively more difficult than they have any right to be. SLAAC and PD combine to create the worst sin of all - flakiness. It's hard to figure out why IPv6 isn't working because everything is telling you it is (it "auto configured" a valid IP despite not having any actual route to anywhere else, so helpful! /s). If IPv6 was literally just "IPv4 but 128-bit addresses instead of 32-bit ones" it almost certainly would have been adopted en masse by now. But it isn't, it made things more fragile and harder to configure for no goddamn reason. And of course you then have ISPs doing silly stuff, like my ISP only gives me a /64 so I literally can't use IPv6 on my network since I want VLAN isolation. 18446744073709551615 possible addresses are given to me yet dividing that up into 3-5 subnets is completely impossible. Fucking stupid protocol.
- api 2y ago
  Why is delegating smaller addresses impossible? Kernels will totally take /72, /88, /96, etc. without issue... or at least any OS I've ever used will.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    It breaks SLAAC so routers won't do it. Or if they do, it's non-standard and they won't easily let you do it. /64 is the smallest PD by spec ( RFC 5375 )
    - api 2y ago
      You can do it with DHCPv6, but of course there's Android. Android aside, it works fine. The core of V6 -- longer IPs -- is great. SLAAC and /64 being the smallest need to be deprecated. It's asinine. Really absolutely everything but longer IPs should be deprecated and was a mistake.
lowercased 2y ago
> I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficulty in typing them is a major reason for lack of adoption. Very seemingly small UX annoyances can have a large effect. I've been convinced of this since around 2000. Every network utility dealing with IPv4 had... dotted quad addresses. You could remember them, you could read them, you could speak them to someone else. Brainwise, we can remember 3-5 things - segments, digits, etc. Remembering more is harder for the average person. Having the 6 be literally dotted sextant(?) - 5.73.192.168.0.4 for example - would have been much much much easier to transition in to, and would have given us 64k x 4 billion addresses. Yes, it's not the near infinity we have with IPv6, where apparently every molecule in the universe can have multiple IP addresses or whatever the max number is. But it would have been much much easier to transition. 27 years later we're not transitioned from ipv4, and we've got another 27 years of dotted quad baked in to daily usage everywhere.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  That would have required exactly as much work to transition, plus require computers to get good at 48-bit math. ("Why are the top 2 bytes always 0xFF?" "I don't know, grandson, but I'm sure it seemed like a great idea before Y248.")
  - lowercased 2y ago
    I'd imagine many countries would claim a top spot or two, and transition all canadian addresses to, say, 7.0.0.0.0.0. Big companies would probably get some of their own. Legacy/default stuff would have leading 0.0, sure, but... so what? No, it wouldn't have taken 'exactly as much work to transition'. See another reply. In 2024, I'm still reading about BGP/routing table issues, and hardware having problems keeping up with IPv6 networking - it's just too large. How was this supposed to work in 1999? A smaller stepped transition from 4 billion addresses to... 64k of those would have been an easier transition step, and the ease - mental, UI, training, testing, security, etc would have given everyone involved the confidence and positive feedback to tackle a next stage to IPv6 (eventually).
- yrro 2y ago

by api 2y ago

knorker 2y ago

> "Hard" for many is "unfamiliar." IPv4 plus NAT and all that ugliness is the devil we know. Indeed. I meant that if evaluating the two de novo, IPv4+NAT is harder.

jeroenhd 2y ago
I agree that NAT sucks but IPv6 having two different ways of assigning addresses (SLAAC and DHCPv6) with one of them being practically optional (Android doesn't do DHCPv6 for address assignment) does make IPv6 harder than it needs to be. Then there are crimes against network protocols like NAT66 that are borderline necessary in some situations because terrible ISPs have decided to dynamically alter IPv6 prefixes so they can charge extra for a static prefix. I still think NAT makes everything harder than it should be, but I get why some people struggle with IPv6 if their ISP is particularly terrible.
- api 2y ago
  The sin of IPv6 was trying to do too much. They should have extended address sizes, period. SLAAC and most of the other extensions were a mistake. Everyone should bomb Android bug reports with complaints about lack of DHCPv6 until they fix it. Then people can de-facto deprecate SLAAC. AFAIK Android is the only major offender here. Some corporate networks already don't do SLAAC if they don't need Android to work on them.
  - raron 2y ago
    In that case ISPs would give you a single /126 and ask more money for extra devices, eg. /124 for a "family plan".
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I don't generally care for Android but I'm glad they chose not to support DHCPv6. It's a nice forcing function to make network admins actually learn how SLAAC works and why they should almost certainly prefer it to DHCP.

kstrauser 2y ago

Maybe a long time ago, but just about everything I've used recently supports mDNS for LAN hostnames. If I add a computer named "foo" to the LAN, it's almost certain I can run "ping foo" on another computer 3 seconds later.

kllrnohj 2y ago
that's not mDNS that's just dhcp+dns and it's something ipv6 actually breaks, which is part of the problem. DHCPv6 is optional, so local devices don't necessarily ever register their hostname nor do they necessarily ever consider your local DNS server.
- amaccuish 2y ago
  >that's not mDNS that's just dhcp+dns Actually mDNS does exactly what they said just fine. You’re confusing it with the ability of a DHCP server to make updates in DNS on behalf of clients. There is more than one way to skin the cat. Both achieve the same affect, just differently. > nor do they necessarily ever consider your local DNS server. Hardcoded DNS servers are just as equally a thing with IPv4.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    That's right. I'm specifically talking about mDNS, not DHCP+DNS. It works out of the box nearly all the time that I've tried it.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    mDNS would work just fine but the given command ('ping foo') wouldn't be using mDNS. That's just standard name resolution. `ping foo.local` would potentially use mDNS if you have a ping that does such a thing, but that's restricted to `.local` specifically. Rather, most routers add DHCP hostname requests to the local DNS routes. That doesn't require mDNS, nor would you want to replace it with mDNS as mDNS is more limited & flakier.
    - 2y ago

kllrnohj 2y ago

> I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficulty in typing them is a major reason for lack of adoption. Possibly, but I think it's also that some aspects of IPv6 are just badly designed, and subsequent updates only fixed some of the issues. SLAAC, for example, is godawful stupid. And while DHCPv6 exists to fix some of that, critical aspects of the protocol, like prefix delegation, are manually configured. This is beyond idiotic and makes things like subnets massively more difficult than they have any right to be. SLAAC and PD combine to create the worst sin of all - flakiness. It's hard to figure out why IPv6 isn't working because everything is telling you it is (it "auto configured" a valid IP despite not having any actual route to anywhere else, so helpful! /s). If IPv6 was literally just "IPv4 but 128-bit addresses instead of 32-bit ones" it almost certainly would have been adopted en masse by now. But it isn't, it made things more fragile and harder to configure for no goddamn reason. And of course you then have ISPs doing silly stuff, like my ISP only gives me a /64 so I literally can't use IPv6 on my network since I want VLAN isolation. 18446744073709551615 possible addresses are given to me yet dividing that up into 3-5 subnets is completely impossible. Fucking stupid protocol.

api 2y ago
Why is delegating smaller addresses impossible? Kernels will totally take /72, /88, /96, etc. without issue... or at least any OS I've ever used will.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  It breaks SLAAC so routers won't do it. Or if they do, it's non-standard and they won't easily let you do it. /64 is the smallest PD by spec ( RFC 5375 )
  - api 2y ago
    You can do it with DHCPv6, but of course there's Android. Android aside, it works fine. The core of V6 -- longer IPs -- is great. SLAAC and /64 being the smallest need to be deprecated. It's asinine. Really absolutely everything but longer IPs should be deprecated and was a mistake.

lowercased 2y ago

> I'm also convinced that the length of IPv6 addresses and the difficulty in typing them is a major reason for lack of adoption. Very seemingly small UX annoyances can have a large effect. I've been convinced of this since around 2000. Every network utility dealing with IPv4 had... dotted quad addresses. You could remember them, you could read them, you could speak them to someone else. Brainwise, we can remember 3-5 things - segments, digits, etc. Remembering more is harder for the average person. Having the 6 be literally dotted sextant(?) - 5.73.192.168.0.4 for example - would have been much much much easier to transition in to, and would have given us 64k x 4 billion addresses. Yes, it's not the near infinity we have with IPv6, where apparently every molecule in the universe can have multiple IP addresses or whatever the max number is. But it would have been much much easier to transition. 27 years later we're not transitioned from ipv4, and we've got another 27 years of dotted quad baked in to daily usage everywhere.

kstrauser 2y ago
That would have required exactly as much work to transition, plus require computers to get good at 48-bit math. ("Why are the top 2 bytes always 0xFF?" "I don't know, grandson, but I'm sure it seemed like a great idea before Y248.")
- lowercased 2y ago
  I'd imagine many countries would claim a top spot or two, and transition all canadian addresses to, say, 7.0.0.0.0.0. Big companies would probably get some of their own. Legacy/default stuff would have leading 0.0, sure, but... so what? No, it wouldn't have taken 'exactly as much work to transition'. See another reply. In 2024, I'm still reading about BGP/routing table issues, and hardware having problems keeping up with IPv6 networking - it's just too large. How was this supposed to work in 1999? A smaller stepped transition from 4 billion addresses to... 64k of those would have been an easier transition step, and the ease - mental, UI, training, testing, security, etc would have given everyone involved the confidence and positive feedback to tackle a next stage to IPv6 (eventually).
yrro 2y ago