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What I don’t understand is why coexistence was so important. TFA notes a lot of protocols were in use back then. Also what’s with all the problems? I’ve had RA
by junofan 6mo ago
What I don’t understand is why coexistence was so important. TFA notes a lot of protocols were in use back then.
Also what’s with all the problems? I’ve had RA packets leak across VLANs via firewall misconfigurations, some my fault and some not. I get that people designing internet protocols had a lot to think about, but why am I fighting stuff like this?
- Etheryte 6mo agoThe whole world can't migrate all of their hardware on a whim. There was a period of time when it was a very common quip to say that Amazon would have to buy every new IPv6 compatible router in the world for a year if they wanted to upgrade their infra. I don't know if the urban legend is true or not, but the fact that it sounded plausible is a good enough of an example.
- Hikikomori 6mo agoAnd packet forwarding was done in hardware pipelines, can't software update them to handle new protocols.
- eqvinox 6mo ago> What I don’t understand is why coexistence was so important. Military, corporate, tech... it isn't. (If your people like flag day migrations. It's… "a choice".) But if you have to explain to an end user why some things work and some don't, you're just f'd. And note "coexistence" here means that an end host can implement IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, without them interacting at all. Imagine if you had to choose between IPv4 and IPv6 on your devices, maybe something like "you need a 2nd network card". Can you imagine anyone switching to the less popular protocol?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 6mo agoThe article describes coexistence as both dual-stack and connectivity between single-stack IPv6 and single-stack IPv4 host. And that in the autor's opinion all the complexity is in the latter, not in the dual-stack You raise a good point that we also should't take dual- stack for granted. But I think the more precise question 'why not dual-stack as the only coexistence option' also seems like a good one, and one the article does not explore or even acknowledge
- eqvinox 6mo agoDual-stack was the only coexistence option for a long time, until NAT64 came around. There were a whole bunch of attempts at compatibility, e.g. with "::1.1.1.1" and "::ffff:1.1.1.1" as IPv6 addresses, they just didn't go anywhere. (Well, not quite, the latter is in POSIX and in socket libraries around the planet. Doesn't leave the host though. At least it's not supposed to. I have some horror stories…) NAT64 started happening because it solves real problems — large eyeball networks, particularly mobile phone networks, didn't want to pay for twice as large table sizes on their routers and twice the maintenance effort. So they made IPv6 end hosts capable of connecting to IPv4 systems. But this is 2010 era, IPv6 was ≈15 years old at that point!
- rswail 6mo agoBecause the internet was still a "network of networks". There were interconnections between DECNET and Novell et al networks and IP networks etc, let alone the push from telcos etc of the OSI models. IP hadn't "won" the networking space.