Comment by reincarnate0x14

5 days ago

I've been of the opinion this is one of those "the art advances one funeral at a time." A lot of people are married to IPv4 and its arcane warts and really, really do not want to deal with IPv6 even though most of the core concepts are almost exactly the same thing, except better. I can't imagine anyone who dealt with V4 multicast ever wanting to go back, and I bet they've memory-holed parts of V4 that simply can't be used anymore and so have been turned off for decades(RIP to RIP). Has anyone seen the automated address assignment in V4 ever work? The usual hint it even exists is that if you see one of those addresses it means something is messed up in your Windows host or the DHCP server died.

People complain about dual stacks and all that but with a modicum of planning it is minimal extra effort. Anything made in the last decade has V4/V6 support and unless you're messing with low level network code, it's often difficult to even know which way you're being routed. Network devices pretty much all support using groups of names or addresses and not hard coded dotted-quad config statements now, and have for a while. And that was good practice on V4 networks too.

Part of it is probably that remembering various V4 magic is easy enough to do but feels complicated enough to be an accomplishment. In V6, there is no point in doing most of that because the protocol has so much more automation of addressing schemes. But if you like those addressing schemes, V6 can do them even better. You can do all sorts of crazy address translation on either the network or host id portion, like giving an internal network a ULA that is magically translated to a public network prefix without any stateful tracking unless that is desirable.

I feel there is some analog to DNS in that regard, people who have gotten used to DNS don't give a damn about host IP addresses but some people seem to really like the idea of a fixed address statement. People also seem to be stuck on the idea that NAT creates some kind of security when that's really the stateful tracking that is required for many-to-few translations (thus making firewalls a common place to implement it), not the translation itself. Similar to certificates/pki versus shared keys, yes, one is more upfront effort but that's because it's solving the problem of the Sisyphean task that is the other.

edit: This all reminded me that we lived with dual stacks before, in the IP and IPX days, or DECnet, and that GE Ether-whatever, and those had less in common. IPX mostly died with Netware but it had a number of advantages that wouldn't be bolted on top of IP for years, some of which are present in IPv6. I rather liked IPX and had history gone differently that it used 48-bit addressing would be causing us to discuss whether or not EUID was a mistake or not :)

13 comments

reincarnate0x14

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AtlasBarfed  5 days ago

Ipv6 was a protocol engineered in isolation from the social / political environment it had to be adopted in.

A successor to ipv4 wasnt a technical issue. duh, use longer addresses. The problem was social.

It's a miracle it was used at all

What's annoying about ipv6 discussions is that the ipv6 people are incredibly condescending when the problems of its adoption were engineered by them.

  • kalleboo  5 days ago

    Exactly. IPv6 was developed in the ivory towers where it was still assumed that everyone wanted to be a full participant of the internet.

    But the social/political environment was that everyone just wants to be a passive consumer, paying monthly fees to centralized hosts to spoon-feed them content through an algorithm. For that, everyone being stuck behind IPv4 CG-NAT and not being able to host anything without being gatekept by the cloud providers is actually a feature and not a bug.

    • dmantis  5 days ago

      We've seen only the world where everything has been adopted to IPv4. p2p technologies strive even under it, but they could really shine with the ability to connect directly between devices. Imagine BitTorrent on steroids, where you don't have peers with assigned IPv4 and seedboxes and everybody else. Torrents are generally faster than usual channels to download things, but with ipv6 it would be far faster than now.

      Cloudless cameras streaming to your phone without Chinese vendor clouds, e2e encrypted emails running on your phone without snooping by marketing people and three-leter agencies, content distribution network without vendor lock-ins. The possibilities are impressive if we have a way to do it without TURN servers that cost money and create a technical and legal bottlenecks.

      We can't say nobody wants that world because we've never tried it in the first place. I definitely would like to see that.

    • icedchai  5 days ago

      Don't you think everyone should have the option to be a full participant? Being locked behind cloud providers and multiple layers of NAT with IPv4 means that can never happen, even if consumers want it to.

      I was lucky enough to experience the 90's internet where static IP addresses were common. I had a /24 (legacy "class C" block) routed to my home, and still do.

    • throw0101a  4 days ago

      > Exactly. IPv6 was developed in the ivory towers where it was still assumed that everyone wanted to be a full participant of the internet.

      IPv6 was developed in the open on mailing lists that anyone could subscribe to:

          The criteria presented here were culled from several sources,
    including "IP Version 7" [1], "IESG Deliberations on Routing and
    Addressing" [2], "Towards the Future Internet Architecture" [3], the
    IPng Requirements BOF held at the Washington D.C. IETF Meeting in
    December of 1992, the IPng Working Group meeting at the Seattle IETF
    meeting in March 1994, the discussions held on the Big-Internet
    mailing list (big-internet-at-munnari.oz.au, send requests to join to
    big-internet-request-at-munnari.oz.au), discussions with the IPng Area
    Directors and Directorate, and the mailing lists devoted to the
    individual IPng efforts.

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

      Just like all current IETF discussions are in the open and free for all to participate. If you don't like the direction things are going in participate: as Gandhi did (not) say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

      One of the co-authors on that RFC worked at BBN: you know, the folks that actually built the first the routers (IMPs) that created the ARPA/Internet in the first place. I would hazard to guess they have know something about network operations.

      * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...

      > But the social/political environment was that everyone just wants to be a passive consumer, paying monthly fees to centralized hosts to spoon-feed them content through an algorithm.

      Disagree, especially with the hoops that users and developers have to jump through to deal with (CG-)NAT:

      > [Residential customers] don't care about engineering, but they sure do create support tickets about broken P2P applications, such as Xbox/PS gaming applications, broken VoIP in gaming lobbies, failure of SIP client to punch through etc. All these problems don't exist on native routed (and static) IPv6.

      * https://blog.ipspace.net/2025/03/response-end-to-end-connect...

    • hagbard_c  5 days ago

      Well, with such a description of the 'vices' of IPv6 vs the 'virtues' of IPv4 count me as one who considers himself in full support of the ivory towered greybeards who decided the 'net was meant to be more than a C&C network for sheeple. Once I got a /56 delegated by my IAP - which coincided with me digging down the last 60 metres of fibre conduit after which our farm finally got a real network connection instead of the wires-on-poles best-effort ADSL connection we had before that - I implemented IPv6 in nearly all - but not all - services. Not all of them, no, because IPv6 can make life harder than it needs to be. Internally some services still run IPv4 only and will probably remain doing so but everything which is meant to be reachable from outside can be reached through both IPv4 as well as IPv6. I recently started adding SIP services which might be the first instance of something which I'll end up going IPv6-only due to the problems caused by NATting the SIP control channels as well as the RTP media channels, something reminiscent of how FTP could make life difficult for those on the other side of firewalls and NAT routers. With IPv6 I do not need NAT so as long as the SIP clients support it I should be OK. Now that last bit, client support... yes, that might be a problem sometimes.

  • nulbyte  5 days ago

    The problem of IPv6 adoption in the US was largely engineered by major ISPs not caring while hardware manufacturers take their cues from major ISPs.

greenavocado  5 days ago

IPv4 link local addressing is awesome for direct PC to PC connectivity with no hassle

  • ironhaven  5 days ago

    Well you will be happy to hear that ipv6 has the same thing with the FFfe::/10 network just like 169.254.0.0/16 apipa range

    • goku12  4 days ago

      I get this strong feeling that most of the opposition against IPv6 stems from misconceptions.

  • reincarnate0x14  5 days ago

    So like plugging two laptops together? Honestly curious, I can't recall ever seeing anyone using it and the situations that it seems like it should be good for, like initial configuration of stuff coming out of the box, instead come with instructions for setting specific IPv4 addressing or use DHCP. Possibly a lack of some LLNMR equivalent at the time.