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Comment by Fizzadar | Hacker News Reader

While it's sad that there are so many large and unused blocks (Apple, DoD, etc), whats worse is the disgraceful adoption of IPv6 by ISP's.

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Doesn't matter one bit. Why do people trot out this hilariously wrong argument every time IPv4 comes up?

ARIN was burning 2 /8s per month before they ran out.

Let me repeat that: 2 /8s PER MONTH.

There is no clawback scheme that can make any amount of difference. At best we buy ourselves 1-2 years. In reality, taking back all the large unused blocks would buy us months.

Furthermore almost all of those large blocks were handed out before the RIRs existed and are owned so there is no legal mechanism to take them back even if it could make a difference.

One of the companies I worked for migrated from a public IP range to using the DoD 11.* address range for their internal network. That was always a fun subject when talking with the network guys.

Despite all the hate that Comcast (deservedly) gets, they do bring IPv6 to my apartment. Good on them for being on the ball.

In the service provider industry, Comcast really have been the leaders in the deployment of IPv6. Most of their challenges are around crappy IPv6 implementations in customer equipment.

> Despite all the hate that Comcast (deservedly) gets, they do bring IPv6 to my apartment. Good on them for being on the ball.

Which would be great if everyone was running IPv6 - however my experiences is that some IPv6->IPv4 tunnels break some protocols (like T-Mobile's IPv6->IPv4 tunnel - I have to use IPv4 because their tunnel appears to break SIP connections. I'm not sure if they did that on purpose for suspect reasons. And of course - they don't make this easy...).

No, SIP is a terrible protocol so things will often break unintentionally. A lot of NATs also try to "fixup" the breakage and make it worse.

> No, SIP is a terrible protocol so things will often break unintentionally.

I use Asterisk and I've never had random problems with SIP. All my problems have been due to network (such as firewalls or network disconnected) or client implementations. I've found this article which makes me laugh [1]:

> The solution is remarkably easy!

If it's so easy - why doesn't he create an RFC proposal for a SIP 2.0?

SIP isn't the only protocol that isn't flawless. FTP and VPN comes to mind.

But here is an article that states exactly what I said and experienced [2]:

> SIP works fine in either an IPv4-only or IPv6-only environment, but issues arise in a mixed environment.

[1] http://www.talkingpointz.com/why-sip-sucks

[2] http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/can-sip-and-ipv6-...?

Yes, FTP has an atrociously bad design. The difference is that SIP wasn't made in the early 80s, so what's their excuse? VPNs typically do OK, except IPSec because the IETF didn't want to admit that NAT existed (though I believe they cleaned that up with an add-on and things are mostly fine now.) As an end-user, hopefully your implementors have solved most problems for ya. As an implementor, SIP is a curse. (HTTP, which SIP drew its nutty parsing rules from, recently ditched the entire format in preference of a binary format. Not related to the IP-embedding-galore that SIP added, but still interesting to note.)

SIP does not "work fine" in an IPv4 only environment, as any NAT user will attest to. It can, by ignoring the RFC and hoping that no middleware gets involved. (Middleware only gets involved because the RFC makes it a juicy target.)

> VPNs typically do OK

Assuming the network administrator has configured his router for VPN pass through [1].

> SIP does not "work fine" in an IPv4 only environment, as any NAT user will attest to.

Seems to work fine for me. The built in SIP client for Android works great in IPv4 both NAT and non-NAT. However, it seems to have some issues with IPv6 (not surprised due to the lack of feedback on the Android bug tracker...). Zoiper on the other hand will work through pretty much anything you throw at it.

I'm not saying SIP is perfect - but my experiences with SIP have been generally positive with Asterisk. Now I'm also in control of Asterisk and can tweak the configuration - I'm sure a lot of canned SIP systems are completely broken.

[1] http://www.tp-link.us/FAQ-558.html

> Which would be great if everyone was running IPv6...

1) The big players already are.

2) Residential availability of IPv6 will help make the business case for IPv6 activation for operators who have not yet been able to see the train barrelling down at them. (Something about eggs and chickens...)

3) ISTR that Comcast serves at least 20% of the US residential ISP market.

Not bad that! Here (UK) we have yet to see a major ISP embrace IPv6 properly.

IPv6 growth has slowed down to about 8% per month, as google counts. Where is the boundary between graceful adoption and disgraceful? 9%/month? 11? 50?

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