12 ms·

It's not equally difficult, because they decided to change a lot of other things, including some key details. Not saying all those changes were bad, but at lea

It's not equally difficult, because they decided to change a lot of other things, including some key details. Not saying all those changes were bad, but at least for me it also makes thinking about IPv6 when using it much more foreign than if it had been just a larger address space.

sph 2y ago
IPv6 isn't difficult to implement, and complexity is not the reason we're still stuck in IPv4 land. We are stuck here because the Internet runs on devices no one cares enough/has enough budget to update.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  At this point it's not so much the basic devices, it's very rare to have hardware still around that doesn't support ipv6, it's more the configuration of the networks themselves, as any given network needs to have its own set of decisions made on address allocation, etc to actuallly support it. And, since it's used by fewer people and there always needs to be a fallback to ipv4, for most networks the if ipv6 is broken it's not an emergency like ipv4 being broken, heck it might not even be noticed. Which is a self-perpetuating cycle as people will stay away from ipv6, especially committing 100% to it, while there's still frequent breakages. (This does point to the fact that maybe ipv6 and the associated implementations should have been designed with a view to a dual-stack mode which is basically "flip a switch and it'll mirror your ipv4 setup so you don't have to think about it until you locally need more address space", but I don't know if that's something that would have actually been feasible. But a lot of the complaining about ipv6 is because it was designed to operate fairly differently from ipv4 in a few keys ways which are not necessarily always better and add friction to the migration process)
  - sph 2y ago
    > flip a switch and it'll mirror your ipv4 setup so you don't have to think about it until you locally need more address space If you think about it, that is what dual-stack is. You don't have to do anything unless you want more address space. The issue is that often locally one doesn't need more address space, but the Internet as a whole does.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      No, it's not really the same thing: with dual-stack you do need to think about your IPv6 configuration quite deeply, you can't just copy and paste what you're doing in IPv4, even if what you're doing in IPv4 could work just fine with essentially a fixed prefix on all your own addresses. (that said, I'm sure there's subtlety to this which makes it not so easy to implement as a standard. But AFAIK it wasn't even really a goal of IPv6)

sph 2y ago

IPv6 isn't difficult to implement, and complexity is not the reason we're still stuck in IPv4 land. We are stuck here because the Internet runs on devices no one cares enough/has enough budget to update.

rcxdude 2y ago
At this point it's not so much the basic devices, it's very rare to have hardware still around that doesn't support ipv6, it's more the configuration of the networks themselves, as any given network needs to have its own set of decisions made on address allocation, etc to actuallly support it. And, since it's used by fewer people and there always needs to be a fallback to ipv4, for most networks the if ipv6 is broken it's not an emergency like ipv4 being broken, heck it might not even be noticed. Which is a self-perpetuating cycle as people will stay away from ipv6, especially committing 100% to it, while there's still frequent breakages. (This does point to the fact that maybe ipv6 and the associated implementations should have been designed with a view to a dual-stack mode which is basically "flip a switch and it'll mirror your ipv4 setup so you don't have to think about it until you locally need more address space", but I don't know if that's something that would have actually been feasible. But a lot of the complaining about ipv6 is because it was designed to operate fairly differently from ipv4 in a few keys ways which are not necessarily always better and add friction to the migration process)
- sph 2y ago
  > flip a switch and it'll mirror your ipv4 setup so you don't have to think about it until you locally need more address space If you think about it, that is what dual-stack is. You don't have to do anything unless you want more address space. The issue is that often locally one doesn't need more address space, but the Internet as a whole does.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    No, it's not really the same thing: with dual-stack you do need to think about your IPv6 configuration quite deeply, you can't just copy and paste what you're doing in IPv4, even if what you're doing in IPv4 could work just fine with essentially a fixed prefix on all your own addresses. (that said, I'm sure there's subtlety to this which makes it not so easy to implement as a standard. But AFAIK it wasn't even really a goal of IPv6)