Hacker News Reader

Comment by orcajerk | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason most haven't moved to ipv6. ipv6 is a solution looking for a problem. What we really need is an ipv7 that takes the best of ipv4 and ipv6 instead of trying to force ipv6 down a reluctant user group.

View on HN

You can't have the best features of the two - in the sense of interoperability - because they are different on a fundamental level: it's impossible for IPv4 nodes to talk to IPv6 nodes without understanding the much larger address space.

There were proposals back in the day (early 90s) for IPng (IP Next Gen, as IPv6 was called back then) to be a hierarchical routing algorithm, that could have kept backwards compatibility with IPv4 and transparently allow seamless operation and routing of IPng islands over IPv4 infrastructure, taking full advantage of the address space expansion.

Think of a sort of CGNAT that instead of stateful hacking with port numbers and the like, would have dedicated fields in the IPv4.x packet, allowing the gateway to statelesly route between the two domains (public IPv4 internet and internal 10.x.x.x network), while maintaining end-to-end connectivity.

Alas, the ITEF guys really wanted a clean slate design and willfully ignored the economic problem, that IPv6 is only useful when everybody upgrades, and as a consequence nobody upgrades. It's probably one of the most costly failures in the history of computing, along with the NULL pointer, 640kB and the likes.

42% of the internet uses v6, and rising. The economic incentives for ISPs absolutely exist, as v4 addresses become ever more expensive and the cost of CG-NAT deployments continue to climb.

> v4 addresses become ever more expensive and the cost of CG-NAT deployments continue to climb.

But IPv6 is not an alternative to CGNAT. If you don't provide either a routable IPv4 or CGNAT, your customers will ask their money back because their internet is broken. The fact that you provide IPv6 or not is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of consumers or businesses.

This here is the major failure of IPv6 design, confusing what "the internet as a whole and the ISP community" need, with the individual incentives that make a single ISP provide for those needs.

It's not that the reluctant user group doesn't like IPv6, they don't like change.

My public IPv4 is something like 14.63.323.85, private is 192.168.1.2 (others are .3, .4, etc), DNS is 1.1.1.1.

My public v6 would be like 2345:0425:2CA1:2020:1100:0567:5673:23b5, private is fc00::::903A:1C1A:E802:11E4, DNS 2606:4700:4700::1111 (don't forget those consecutive colons).

It's not that I don't like change, it's that I don't like changes that make things plainly worse for me.

As someone who runs an ipv6-only network, I can't tell you what my prefix is off the top of my head because it's irrelevant.

Change is about more than just "how many numbers do I have to remember".

The numbers are the only change that's visible to me as a user.

Whatever the next IP is, it needs to be interoperable with the Internet aka IPv4.

It’s clear to me that IPv6 won’t reach critical mass (e.g. 80% of connected devices/servers using IPv6 addresses).

I’ll just wait for a new IP with an actual transition plan.

The problem is that IPv4 is not forward-compatible and therefore there cannot be a protocol that is entirely interoperable. There can only be ones that are somewhat interoperable. And IPv6 has plenty of mechanisms that make things interoperable (NAT64, embedding ipv4 addresses in ipv6, etc.).

What we need is a pure 4 network to be able to talk to a 6 network - that's what it means to be interoperable. Going 6 to 4 is obviously required or otherwise 6 would be a useless protocol to begin with. Anycast routing plus tunnelling is one way to achieve 4 to 6. But the "ngtrans" team didn't accept this a transition plan, nor did they provide an official transition plan for migrating 4 to 6. Basically 6 has been a disaster since the days of IPng and misstep is ignored because they wanted a "clean slate" architecture with a large IP space that nobody really needs.

I'm holding out for a new protocol/architecture to come along and supplant IP by recognising that it needs to be fully interoperable with 4 before it can supersede it.

I think this discussion is 20 years too late, the only reasonable way forward is IPv6 or bust. We're reached the end of the IPv4 space and the pressure is mounting; any imaginable backwards-compatible technology would have to run for many years in a limited mode where it's basically just a better way to do NAT traversal and only then, when most endpoints are compatible, you would get to see the address-space relief benefits.

Another nail in the coffin of a graceful upgrade from IPv4 is the widespread filtering of IP options in the backbone, the only practical way I know you could craft an extended IPv4 packet that is still routable by the legacy infrastructure while forwarding and maintaining all the extra header data required for routing in the IPng realms. This was not necessarily true in the early 90s, and many hardware generations would have had the ability to fix it.

So I somewhat disagree with the GP that IPv4 was not forward compatible: it included a mechanism for just that in the form of IP options that seemed like a good idea in 1983, but which proved technically inappropriate for the future needs of the internet. So you can't really fault IETF for wanting to break away from that and earnestly thinking people would just upgrade.

Having IPv4 host talk to IPv6 server isn't really necessary since there are enough IPv4 addresses for external servers. IPv6 is most important for client addresses to replace NAT, especially carrier-grade NAT, and simplify networks.

The article mentions NAT64, which works well for IPv6-only computers to talk to IPv4 servers. There is enough space in IPv6 to encode the whole IPv4 connection which makes stateless NAT possible.

The other mechanism is 464XLAT and MAP, where IPv4 isn't tunneled over IPv6 network, but encoded in the IPv6 address. 464XLAT is used heavily on mobile phone and uses software on the device. MAP requires support on gateway. MAP is stateless which is savings over carrier-grade NAT.

How exactly do you propose this 4 to 6 mechanism to work? How do you fit more than 32-bit of information into the 32-bit destination field of IPv4?

Because that's what's required to make it fully interoperable. Anything else and it's not a pure IPv4 network anymore and you are in the exact same situation as we are with IPv6.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com