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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

> The next step is going to be nobody wanting to update to IPv6.

I hate that IPv6 has such low usage, and it is exactly the same problem you describe. We have a protocol meant to replace IPv4 and eliminate several kludges (NAT) in the process. But guess what? People would rather keep on hacking the previous protocol to the extremes than learn and implement a newer better system. IPv6 is better than IPv4 in literally every sense, but your sysadmin can't be bothered to deviate even slightly from her decade old knowledge.

So now we have all sorts of v4 in v6 tunneling, someone even talked about NAT for IPv6 (WTF?!). The end result is that v6 is incredibly complex due to these backward stuff.

We need Apple to deprecate IPv4 like they did 32 bit. Otherwise companies will keep us locked into old technology for eternity.

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The telcos use it, ISPs use it. Cloud doesn't use it yet because AWS is backwards at migrating some of their services (eg RDS). But they support IPv6 in VPCs and for ingress/egress to the internet.

Effectively they run dual stack and people are starting to realize that allocating subnets in /24 chunks is getting painful and it's much easier to allocate in /56 then /60 then /64 and that using ULAs and routing and NRDP and DNS is a much better way to do things.

IPv4 in the cloud is mostly people not wanting to understand more than 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16.

IPv6 is actually easier but it requires learning about a new Layer 2/3 set of protocols. NDP is really better than arp/bootp/dhcp etc.

Use SLAAC and then mDNS and DNS-SD.

There was a really neat use of IPv6 on here the other day that lets you avoid the port mapping/iptables dance in K8s by treating a node as a LAN and giving each pod its own IPv6 "node area network" address. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245057

> IPv6 is actually easier but it requires learning about a new Layer 2/3 set of protocols.

Exactly! It's simple to understand if you throw away the decades of cruft that has accumulated in IPv4.

ARP is a mess, half the specification is vague and everybody just does whatever they want. NDP is amazingly intuitive and sensible, but you have to stop thinking of it in terms of ARP.

> IPv6 is better than IPv4 in literally every sense

The addresses are harder to type, harder to yell across an office while setting up equipment, and impossible to remember. I honestly think this is it’s major failing that has prevented wider adoption. Aesthetics make a big difference, like it or mot, and IPv6 is far less accessible than IPv4.

Beyond that, IPv4 is arguably generally simpler for someone not well versed in networking to get a baseline understanding of.

I thought domain names were created so we don’t have to yell IP Addresses.

And yet if you set it up right, you don't need to type them or yell them or remember them.

> Beyond that, IPv4 is arguably generally simpler for someone not well versed in networking to get a baseline understanding of.

And BASIC is easier to program in than Rust if you're not well versed in programming.

IPv6 addresses come in 3 flavors, unicast, anycast, multicast.

Unicast addresses are for a single host, like a unique telephone number

Anycast addresses go to the nearest receiver, like 911

Multicast addresses go to a group of hosts that are listening to the address for that group, like everyone streaming the same show on Netflix at the same time.

Unicast addresses are either local to an interface/LAN/site, or global.

Anycast addresses are global.

Multicast addresses can be very local or across a wider area like a company or can be global.

You can tell what sort of address it is by the start:

* Multicast addresses start with "ff".

* LAN addresses start with "fe".

* Site (multiple LAN) addresses start with "fd"

* Anything else other than "00" is global, but some have special meanings, like "2001" is used for documentation.

There's a protocol called NDP that all the hosts use to give themselves addresses and find out how to connect to other hosts.

That's a start. The fiddly bit twiddling details can come later.

> And BASIC is easier to program in than Rust

And Visual Basic is #6 on the TIOBE rankings despite being officially retired whereas Rust is #25

Simplicity sells.

Look at XML vs JSON. XML is feature packed. Arguably the "better" format but JSON has taken over because it's way easier to use.

REST beat SOAP and XML-RPC because it was less complex and waaay easier to build.

When there is something that is easy and even potentially a little simpler than needed which does the same thing as something complex, the simple thing almost always wins - even if - or especially if - its worse. The whole "Worse is Better" mantra has always proven true.

I've said for like 20 years now that they should have just tacked a couple more octets onto IPv4 and rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

Exhaustion was and still is the most important problem to fix. Get that out of the way, and then we could have fixed the other things wrong with IP one at a time.

We could have been on like IPv12 by now. Small iterative changes are easier to absorb. Adoption would have happened already. instead we threw the baby out with a bath water, classic second system syndrome.

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