We’re just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later, the band-aid has got to come off. ~4 billion IP addresses are simply not enough for ~8 billion people.
So maybe we should just refuse to pile on more hacks and force the ISPs to get off their ass and upgrade their networks.
IPv6 is now supported in the vast majority of operating systems and routers and firewalls. It’s now down to the carriers/ISPs to configure their networks to use it.
Ie the IPv4 issue is a programming issue, while the IPv6 issue is an administration/configuration issue.
Ie Ciscos software engineers aren’t the ones holding back your ISP from turning on IPv6. Cisco engineers aren’t toiling away adding much needed missing IPv6 features.
Unless I’ve missed something?
And if that ISP happens to be one of those that decided that their core competency is marketing, and outsourced everything else, including network engineering... Well, than they view IPv6 as something expensive/risky (in project costs) in addition to useless.
This actually pisses me off enormously.
It’s not that there’s low (or no) demand, it’s that people are not being recorded as having voiced this concern.
I can say for certain that over the last ten years when ISPs call to upsell their packages I always respond with “I’m not going to upgrade unless it gives me ipv6”. When talking to new ISPs I always ask if they support ipv6 and if not: when.
The answer is always “it’s not on the roadmap, we don’t have any people requesting this”- the follow up I usually ask is “are you going to write down anywhere that I am requesting this? Because others could say the same” and they always say that they won’t record my interest, even though it costs them an upsell or a sale.
So, I figured maybe I’m weird, maybe I am the only one. I have no way of knowing.
Except; I met someone else who also does this- we have the same ISP and they told him: “nobody has ever asked for this” which is categorically untrue since I have asked for this.
We’re being gaslit by the industry.
It’s worse than that. People _complain about it being on_. Look at any forums about home network or WiFi troubleshooting and switching it off on your router will often be in the ‘first, do this’ sort of answers.
Even here this often comes up. The sentiment is ‘IPv4 has to work reliably because so many people don’t have IPv6 and things need to work for them. You’re only asking for trouble by also having IPv6’. As a practical matter it’s hard to argue with, but it’s not a way to make progress…
Yeah, maybe some ISPs should be listening to their customers more (I heard tales of ISPs in the US), but in this they're not wrong: consumer demand really is low.
I've switched between IPv6-connected and IPv4-only quite a few times over the last 20 years due to moving to different countries with different options and was a fairly "early adopter" back in the day with the tunnels XS4ALL had, and even as a technical person I can't say I ever noticed the difference.
you can ask the same question about IPv4 and get same answers.
But ask auto-mechanics, and hoo boy, will there be opinions.
I think this elides the point really.
People don't know when an issue is because of ipv4, for a good example: network issues in online video games are often caused by being unable to NAT punch, lag can also be because connection information is relayed by some far away STUN server. Same with in-game voice chat.
Usually you need to set port forwards to make games work properly.
In the event of GCNAT a customer has no possible recourse.
But nobody understands the issue is largely because of IPv4, they just assume that's how it is, and assume the same issue would exist with IPv6
Larger providers (zoom, apple/facetime, twitch, ...) just set up relay servers and avoid p2p altogether - which cost money, increase latency/jitter, and decrease privacy. You can argue all of that are hidden costs of sticking to IPv4 for longer than we should have.
Carrier-grade NAT (multiple consumers sharing the same IPv4 address) mostly averted catastrophic problems though. It's not perfect, but it works.
A better use of your time and attention will be identifying what, within your scope of influence, can be done to further the reach of global v6 routing.
I agree it’s more important that IPv6 rolls out faster and is more widely adopted today.
But as to your original claim “ Any effort that may be applied to reclaiming v4 address space will always be better directed to expanding global v6 connectivity.” is a false dichotomy.
Maybe this isn't a serious enough crisis and we can just wait til it becomes a real issue for users. When it does, it will probably be incremental rather than catastrophic, so we'll still have time to upgrade networks piecemeal, and with more reason to do so.
This assumes that they can even get an IPv4 address. New ISPs and telcos may not be able to get enough IPv4 addresses to assign each individual connection one.
So either (a) the CPE only gets an IPv6 address and they have to use DNS64/NAT64 or 464XLAT to reach the IPv4 Internet, or (b) the CPE gets a shared address space (100.64.0.0/10) IPv4 address and CG-NAT ensues:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_shared_address_space
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
In which case the end-user gets to deal with double-NATing (first with their CPE/home router, and second by the ISP).
Case in point someone that is surprised that every customer gets a public IP address and CG-NAT is not done:
Trying to see the most charitable position here - is there an aspect in which redefining 127/8 to 127/16 across billions of devices is actually feasible?
Imagine trying to get the same people to upgrade router firmware...... no chance
0: https://old.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/mqfy9a/just_got_our_ne...
Earlier versions of cable modems had flaws that allowed consumers to push configs on the ethernet port and uncap their cable modems and gain higher speeds than they had paid for.
"Thank you for upgrading your service to our VVVIP Price Tier! Your first three months as a VVVIP customer is 50% off..."
They did, but the overhead at the time was high. And they generally didn't peruse unless you were causing trouble....or slipped up on OPSEC.
Cable ISP network security back in the day was horrid. SNMP string would get leaked. With that you could snmpwalk the entire node you were on. It was amusing.
There are so many other devices out there that are required for this change to work, it is insane to think it could be done.
Which is why there are technical standards for the ISP to do it from their end:
> Technical Report 069 (TR-069) is a technical specification of the Broadband Forum that defines an application layer protocol for remote management and provisioning of customer-premises equipment (CPE) connected to an Internet Protocol (IP) network. TR-069 uses the CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) which provides support functions for auto-configuration, software or firmware image management, software module management, status and performance managements, and diagnostics.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069
(At least on ISP-issued CPE.)
that logic has been hard-coded inside every OS and vast amounts of software for 30+ years
and to gain less than 0.8%?
they'd do better targeting the reserved multicast range
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-unicast...
Ha. Ha. Ha.
> that logic has been hard-coded inside
The thing is what some things are literally hardcoded. I have a whole bunch of network gear circa 2010 in production.
It does support IPv6, but for the most part it is extremely rudimentary. What do you want from a box what implements SSH by running a telnet session over a no-auth SSH session?
And while I can run the latest Windows/Linux/Whatever on my server gear, the network gear is not that simple to upgrade.
I ran into this 10 years ago. I decided to roll out IPv6 to clients. Router docs said it was supported. Then I watched CPU usage peg because every packet hit the CPU. Turns out it was implemented in software; no ASIC support. Was quite the buzz kill.
Expires: 12 May 2022
Expires: 8 September 2022I haven't recently looked at who has deployed what, but is this really it? US ISPs like Spectrum has been handing out IPv6 addresses for years now. My Verizon wireless phone can access IPv6 resources w/o issue as well.
However, show me the cloud services folks are implementing that are dual stack. Start mandating new service deployment is dual stack, and it'll happen. Similar to how the US Govt is pulling it off.
Just add another octlet at the start, but stored in the options field. Old stuff won't get confused, and new stuff will know that empty means 1.x.x.x.x.
Problem solved.
This is basically the same problem as IPv6, except worse since we'll start from zero.
In hindsight, clearly a better plan than "this is IPv6, it's new, it's better, everyone will adopt it!" was needed for IPv6, and it would have helped if the IPv6 people were a bit more pragmatic from the start in their design (religious opposition to NAT springs to mind), but now it's about 20 to 25 years too late.
All we have to do, is explain that ipv6 reduces anonymity online, and thus, makes it easier for predators to track children. And thus, ipv6 endangers children!
This will enable a wellspring of governement grants, to roll out firmware updates for switches and routers, etc.
See? A non-problem.