Comment by asdfsa32
3 days ago
A few more RFCs, a few more IP over IP bandaid, a few more extensions, and we will get there. By God IPv6 is a stain in the history of computer science.
IPv6 should have really just worked like NAT/IP over IP on IPv4 hardware and fast path on IPv6 hardware. But instead we got a monster that keeps growing with things like NAT64, 4over6, DS-Lite, MAP-E, and now BGP stopgaps and a growing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IPv6_transition_mechan...
> IPv6 should have really just worked like NAT/IP over IP on IPv4 hardware
This literally exists. There's no need for it to be part of the original specification because it's a completely separate concept.
There's nothing wrong with ipv6 other than the general human desire to not change things that "work" and for people who are currently powerful because they own a bunch of ipv4 to resist changes.
> There's nothing wrong with ipv6 other than [long list of human things]
The unfortunate reality is that technology exists to serve us. If humans don't want to use it, it means that your technology is wrong. End of story. It doesn't matter if you (or any of us) think it's elegant and beautifully designed.
That's like blaming the photovoltaic cell for the lack of solar power in america.
There's no way to design a technical solution to a social/human problem at ipv4 shortage is a human problem.
People have spent literally the last 40 years trying to come up with a solution "better than ipv6" and NOBODY HAS. Does that tell you anything?
Declaring a technology-in-transition dead is truly a take.
It's like declaring SSL/TLS dead in 2012 because some websites were not using it. (Yes, I remember the dark times when even authentication data was transmitted over plain text.)
2 replies →
If your solution is that “if everyone just used IPv6 we wouldn’t have this problem” then it’s not a solution. Standards like USB, Wi-Fi, HDMI, DP, etc. are so successful because they are by out-of-the-box backwards compatible with their predecessors.
>HDMI, DP, etc. are so successful because they are by out-of-the-box backwards compatible with their predecessors
Takes on Hacker News can truly be wild sometimes.
I certainly don't recall being able to use DP on a VGA monitor without some sort of adapter!
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> This literally exists. There's no need for it to be part of the original specification because it's a completely separate concept.
By that token, IPv6 never had to exist at all then, but we know that is completely missing the point.
IPv6 is a privacy nightmare without privacy extensions. It is designed with "a stupid desire to pretend we can boil the ocean".
Close to 3 decades and we are barely scraping 50%: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/
Running a IPv6-only network that doesn’t interact with IPv4 networks in any way is great and it works.
The actual gap is the mess of mixing/transitioning, and it wasnt planned properly in the last 30years
7 replies →
> without privacy extensions
Privacy extensions are enabled by default on every major operating system.
> There's nothing wrong with ipv6
Sweet summer child...
There's EVERYTHING wrong with IPv6. It's a recursively bad protocol. From the basic header design (extension headers, wtf) to the "human management" layer ("why should we deploy IPv6 if it actively _breaks_ stuff?").
As an example, try to design a standards-compliant IPv6 network where you can reliably print from an Android phone if your Internet connection goes down and the router withdraws the prefix. It's trivial with IPv4 and _impossible_ with IPv6.
> if your Internet connection goes down and the router withdraws the prefix
My router advertises both the public prefix from my ISP and a ULA prefix for internal LAN connections (essentially the IPv6 equivalent to RFC-1918). This gives me stable local addresses that do not change and work without public internet access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address
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The extension headers are fine, because they frequently are not needed, so the fact that they are optional allows the IPv6 header to be significantly simpler than the IPv4 header, which has some seldom used fields which are always present.
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If it works with mainstream Linux, sounds like an Android problem
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That's not a very good example.
1) I can count on one hand the number of times my Internet connection has gone down in the past 5 years.
2) I can count on zero hands the number of times I've tried to print from a phone, ever.
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This isn't one of those. It's for ISPs who run a native IPv6 backbone and want to exchange and route IPv4 traffic without setting up IPv4 addressing.
It is a network. No part of it is exactly a surprise. But 3 decades in, we are still getting there. Almost 50% any year from now!