Comment by throw0101a
5 days ago
> Only the edge equipment would need to be IPv4+ aware.
"Only"? That's still the networking stack of every desktop, laptop, phone, printer, room presentation device, IoT thing-y. Also every firewall device. Then recompile every application to use the new data structures with more bits for addresses.
And let's not forget you have to update all the DNS code because A records are hardcoded to 32-bits, so you need a new record type, and a mechanism to deal with getting both long and short addresses in the reply (e.g., Happy Eyeballs). Then how do you deal with a service that only has a "IPv4+" address but application code that is only IPv4-plain?
Basically all the code and infrastructure that needed to be updated and deployed for IPv6 would have to be done for IPv4+.
But the desktop/laptop/phone/printer was the EASIEST thing to change in that 30 year history. And it would have been the easiest thing to demand a change req from a company for.
Yes: but the process would have been exactly the same whether for a hypothetical IPv4+ or the IPng/IPv6 that was decided on; pushing new code to every last corner of the IP universe.
How could it have been otherwise given the original network structures were all of fixed lengths of 32 bits?
The new code would have been vastly simpler. IPv6 is second system syndrome personified.
What we needed was the equivalent of ASCII->UTF8.
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And in 30 years, all of that has basically already happened and afoption is still absymal.
v6 has nearly 3 billion users. How is that abysmal?
We've never done something like the v4->v6 migration before, on this sort of scale. It's not clear what the par time for something like this is. Maybe 30 years is a normal amount of time for it to take?
HTTP->HTTPS was this kind of scale, and it was smooth because they changed as little as possible while also being very careful about default behaviors.
3 billion people sorta use ipv6, but not really, cause almost all of those also rely on ipv4 and no host can really go ipv6-only. Meanwhile, many sites are HTTPS-only.
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