Comment by morshu9001
5 days ago
They taught us, they also taught ipv4 in the old "separate address per host" way instead of jumping to NAT, but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift.
Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way.
> ... but I think ipv6 is inherently more complicated than ipv4 for the average use case. It's not just a thinking shift.
IPv6 isn't all that complicated for most common use cases. Its fundamental concepts and rules are simple. It also obviates the necessity of the complicated workaround called NAT, without which IPv4 is impractical these days.
It's more like the imperial vs metric system debate. If the world hadn't seen IPv4, I believe that we'd all be using IPv6 without any complaints. The real problem is that IPv6 isn't taught well.
> Separate from that, deliberate decisions were made to make it a "clean slate" without consideration for existing ipv4 hosts. Guess they were hoping the separate stacks would go away eventually, but in hindsight, no way.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The presence of the IPv4 stack isn't what blocks the adoption of IPv6 - at least not technically. They can coexist on the same host and function concurrently without interfering with each other. It was designed to operate like that. The actual blocker is the attitude that people hold towards IPv6 - "We have IPv4 that works already. Why should we care about an alternative?". You can see that expressed on this discussion thread itself.
There is one crucial detail that the IPv6 detractors neglect - the scarcity of IPv4 addresses means that IPv4 address blocks are now heavily coveted and therefore subject to moneyed interests. That isn't very good for the health of the open internet, digital rights and equity. They're thinking about individual trees and losing sight of the whole damn forest. IPv6 isn't a solution looking for a problem. It's the solution for a problem that people simply ignore.
The IPv6 spec was being modified up through 2017. It has more kinds of addresses that behave in fancier ways, with one host having multiple. The very first thing you see with ipv6 is your nice memorable ipv4 addr replaced with a long hex string with some ::s thrown in. Local DNS is commonly recommended with ipv6 for that reason, which maybe is just some misguided advice because it sounds crazy. I guess you could assign and memorize ULAs?
NAT is technically complicated if you're looking inside it, but most people aren't, and for them it's really easier to think about. You've got a public and a private, and there's a very strong default that private isn't exposed. People screw up firewall rules all the time or routers have bad defaults, but it takes more deliberate action to publicly expose a port over NAT. Plus you don't need privacy addresses that way (introduced to ipv6 in 2007). I know "NAT isn't security" but for most people, it is.
Still not even sure what the accepted default firewall behavior is in ipv6, cause some people say "ipv6 lets any device do p2p by its own choice" and then when you ask about security, "your router firewall should always default-deny anyway," so which one is it?
> The presence of the IPv4 stack isn't what blocks the adoption of IPv6
It is. Like they say, most technical problems are really people problems, especially this one.
> Local DNS is commonly recommended with ipv6 for that reason, which maybe is just some misguided advice because it sounds crazy.
Many (most?) SOHO routers already run a combined DHCP and DNS server called 'dnsmasq', which supports DHCPv6. IIRC, dnsmasq automatically adds DNS records for hosts to which it gives out a lease. Android computers don't use DHCPv6, so this won't help you access them by name, but how often do you care to directly access an Android computer?
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ipv6 would have been a breaking change anyway, just take the opportunity to push through any changes that they want to make