← Back to context

Comment by nwellinghoff

4 days ago

I said this in a previous post and was shot down hard. I think you are right. Every time I look at a ipv6 address my brain goes “fack this”.

18 comments

nwellinghoff

Reply
mike_d  4 days ago

IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems.

IPv6 was designed by political process. Go around the room to each engineer and solve for their pet peeve to in turn rally enough support to move the proposal forward. As a bunch of computer people realized how hard politics were they swore never to do it again and made the address size so laughably large that it was "solved" once and for all.

I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago.

My personal preference would have been to open up class E space (240-255.*) and claw back the 6 /8s Amazon is hoarding, be smarter about allocations going forward, and make fees logarithmic based on the number of addresses you hold.

  • throw0101c  4 days ago

    > IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems.

    IPv4 was not designed as such, but as an academic exercise. It was an experiment. An experiment that "escape the lab". This is per Vint Cerf:

    * https://www.pcmag.com/news/north-america-exhausts-ipv4-addre...

    And if you think there wasn't politics in iPv4 you're dead wrong:

    * https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes

    > IPv6 was designed by political process.

    Only if by "political process" you mean a bunch of people got together (physically and virtually) and debated the options and chose what they thought was best. The criteria for choosing IPng were documented:

    * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726

    There were a number of proposals, and three finalists, with SIPP being chosen:

    * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752

    > I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago.

    The primary reason for IPng was >32 bits of address space. The only way to make them shorter is to have fewer bits, which completely defeats the purpose of the endeavour.

    There was no way to move from 32-bits to >32-bits without every network stack of every device element (host, gateway, firewall, application, etc) getting new code. Anything that changed the type and size of sockaddr->sa_family (plus things like new DNS resource record types: A is 32-bit only; see addrinfo->ai_family) would require new code.

    • mike_d  4 days ago

      This is a lot of basically sharpshooting, but I will address your last point:

      > There was no way to move from 32-bits to >32-bits without every network stack of every device element (host, gateway, firewall, application, etc) getting new code. Anything that changed the type and size of sockaddr->sa_family (plus things like new DNS resource record types: A is 32-bit only; see addrinfo->ai_family) would require new code.

      That is simply not true. We had one bit left (the reserved/"evil" bit) in IPv4 headers that could have been used to flag that the first N bytes of the payload were an additional IPv4.1 header indicating additional routing information. Packets would continue to transit existing networks and "4.1" capable boxes at edges could read the additional information to make further routing decisions inside of a network. It would have effectively used IPv4 as the core transport network and each connected network (think ASN) having a handful of routed /32s.

      Overlay networks are widely deployed and have very minor technical issues.

      But that would have only addressed the numbering exhaustion issues. Engineers often get caught in the "well if I am changing this code anyway" trap.

      8 replies →

  • shawabawa3  4 days ago

    Imo they should have just clawed 1 or 2 bits out of the ipv4 header for additional routing and called it good enough

    • immibis  4 days ago

      This would require new software and new ASICs on all hosts and routers and wouldn't be compatible with the old system. If you're going to cause all those things, might as well add 96 new bits instead of just 2 new bits, so you won't have the same problem again soon.

  • immibis  4 days ago

    IPv6 is literally just IPv4 + longer addresses + really minor tweaks (like no checksum) + things you don't have to use (like SLAAC). Is that not what you wanted? What did you want?

    And what's wrong with a newer version of a thing solving all the problems people had with it...?

    There are more people than IPv4 addresses, so the pigeonhole principle says you can't give every person an IPv4 address, never mind when you add servers as well. Expanding the address space by 6% does absolute nothing to solve anything and I'm confused about why you think it would.

WarOnPrivacy  4 days ago

> Every time I look at a [long] ipv6 address my brain goes “fack this”.

I do get that but I also get 'There are so many I could have all I wanted ... or I could if any of our fiber ISPs would support it, that is'

  • hdgvhicv  4 days ago

    I finally clicked when I worked out it was 2^64 subnets . You have a common prefix of you /48, which isn’t much longer than an ipv4 address - especially as it seems everything is 2001::/16, which means you basically have to remember a 32 bit network prefix just like 12.45.67.8/32.

    That becomes 2001:0c2d:4308::/48 instead

    After that you just need to remember the subnet number and the host number. If you remember 12.45.67.8 maps to 192.168.13.7 you might have

    2001:0c2d:4308:13::7

    So subnet “13” and host “7”

    It’s not much different to remebering 12.45.67.8>192.168.13.7