If IPv4 were land (iptrust.co)

283 pointsby rokostika day ago401 comments

shubhamjain 21 hours ago

India: 47M

China: 358M

Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.

Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.

[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

rayiner 21 hours ago

Wow I didn’t know CGNAT was a thing for home users.

orangeboats 20 hours ago

I can't tell if this is sarcasm, Poe's law and all.

But if you are living in a Western country, then you are probably blessed with CGNAT-free residential internet.

timpera 20 hours ago

I don't think it's sarcasm, I didn't know this was a thing either! At first, I thought OP was writing about their mobile connection.

Some carriers in my country have recently started to share the same IP between 4 customers, each having a port range (1-16363, ...), but you can always request a full IP for free.

orangeboats 20 hours ago

That explains a lot of the sentiments I've seen on HN then...

I, unfortunately, have been on CGNATed residential internet since 2016, though I used to still get a public IP on request (they stopped doing that though.) I live in South East Asia, for context.

Without IPv6 my only choice would have been relying on a centralized service like Zerotier and Tailscale.

fishtacos 20 hours ago

My current setup is CGNAT on 5G WAN (T-Mobile US), which obviously doesn't open public ports besides needed NAT.

Worse is I have IPv6 connectivity for devices, yet still no open ports available, so no serving available. And I only receive a /64 so no delegation available through router.

So now it's Hurricane Electric tunnel to their nearest (in my city) hosted node for IPv6 and a prepaid 50 USD/year node (technically x2 since I wanted a backup to play around with) for IPv4 port forwarding.

Both options are acceptable because the needed infra is close by in the largest metroplex in Texas, it just sucks to have to do all this extra work to replicate what I could do with a dial-up ISP.

I'll say this - having LLM assistants handle the nasty routing and firewall rules needed to make this hodge podge work without needing to be a network engineer has been very helpful.

toast0 4 hours ago

If you're willing to jump through hoops, you might want to check if it's still possible to setup an EIN and a new SMB T-Mobile 5G internet and get a static ipv4 for a small charge per month.

Personally, I had major issues with the 5g wan equipment and my network as well as a snafu with ordering... Sales rep put in the order for a static ip with a ssn based SMB account, but that got removed during provisioning and couldn't be added back. (And then billing issues because the account didn't get cancelled properly, either)

myself248 16 hours ago

I converted from residential-class to business-class cable a few years ago. In both cases, I had routable IPv4 addresses.

I was just looking at flipping back, but now it seems the default for new resi accounts is CGNAT. They say they'll give me a real IP upon request at no additional charge, but it's anyone's guess how long that holds out.

They don't do IPv6 at all.

Michigan USA.

sandos 20 hours ago

In Sweden CGNAT was not a thing for a long time, the large incumbents still have their huge blocks of IPs so its "just" go to them if you want a pulic IP. Apparently smaller ISPs do use CGNAT, so its fairly common.

Me as somewhat of a nerd, even doubt if I need a public IP, seeing how cyber security is looking today.

GCUMstlyHarmls 5 hours ago

I think CGNAT is the default for new connections in .au, since about 5+ years, at least among "younger" ISPs that popped up around the national broadband network crawlout.

You can generally request to get off it though, at ~1-5$/m extra cost.

Gigachad 2 hours ago

In my experience they charge for a static IP but not to turn off CGNAT. Obviously depends on the isp but I’ve tried a few.

One of them I had to call phone support and they asked me why I wanted to turn it off. I said I wanted to run a server and they turned CGNAT off on my account.

cykros 20 hours ago

It's something I've only recently been made aware of as well. Shocked we're not seeing more push for ipv6 everywhere given that it sounds common enough. If I don't have an IP address, I'm not getting the Internet I'm paying for; I'm getting access to a network that happens to itself have a connection to the Internet. Not unlike some of the BBS's in the early 90s which had Internet access -- I might be dialed in, but that didn't mean my computer itself was on the Internet.

bell-cot 20 hours ago

Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses

icedchai 20 hours ago

A lot of the original /8 holders have sold off chunks to AWS and other cloud providers.

matja 19 hours ago

s/IP/IPv4/g

Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).

IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 19 hours ago

There is no need for that, every modern OS prefer IPv6 over IPv4

matja 19 hours ago

Depends on the application, a web-browser that implements Happy Eyeballs protocol may prefer IPv4 if the IPv6 latency is higher.

nomel 15 hours ago

I know little of this. How/why could one be higher latency over the other?

winstonwinston 13 hours ago

Different paths. If you’ve got a “dual stack” on your computer, give it a try.

tracert -4 google.com

tracert -6 google.com

I do get very different hops and latency.

However for “happy eyeballs” algo to fallback to IPv4, latency needs to be very bad on IPv6.

bombcar 7 hours ago

Happy eyeballs is more to fix totally broke ipv6 than speed differential.

For many years and even how there are networks that advertise they can do ipv6 and hand out real addresses but nothing works.

malfist 19 hours ago

I'd love to do that, if my ISP would provide me an IPv6 address. Windstream doesn't provide IPv6s. They did a trial a few years ago rolling it out and then undid it.

It's crazy I can get fiber to my house in the US, but not IPv6.

jon128 18 hours ago

  Our free tunnel broker service enables you to reach the IPv6 Internet by tunneling over existing IPv4 connections from your IPv6 enabled host or router to one of our IPv6 routers.

  https://tunnelbroker.net/

dijit 18 hours ago

iirc, hurricane electric was offering IPv6 via tunnelling somehow.

https://tunnelbroker.net

I was doing this back when I had BT in London, my internet speed back then was pretty abysmal and it would randomly drop routes- ironically this tunnel actually improved my internet (because of the routes not being dropped, not the speed).

cowlevel 17 hours ago

They do this for free because they're a tier 1, meaning everyone pays to connect to them and they benefit from having more things hosted on their network. It's free because your ISP pays for it.

And they can always tell your ISP if they don't like paying to connect to the tunnelling server they should just implement v6.

alibarber 15 hours ago

Annoyingly, this will not work over CGNAT as far as I know - the tunnel needs 'both ends' to be accessible directly from each other I think.

bombcar 7 hours ago

There are cgnat provides who don’t also give you a real ipv6? Evil.

toast0 5 hours ago

Unfortunately, he.net tunnels have terrible reputation, so if you use this for your regular browsing, you're likely to get hit with more captchas than if you're on a cgnat with well behaved neighbors. Some sites will just not work, with no errors, because why waste errors on networks with bad reputation.

It wasn't always like this, but it was for me the last time I tried.

zeilenende 12 hours ago

Try getting a /24 these days without paying a fortune. We NAT everything and still wait for IPv6 because the ISP CPE barely supports it. Land analogy is apt, landlords everywhere.

TacticalCoder 17 hours ago

> IPv4 is old and broken

IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken? It's literally been working just fine since it came out.

That there are limited addresses is something else: it doesn't mean it's broken.

I don't care that spying/surveillance devices have more trouble spying on me with IPv4 than with IPv6 and I don't care that some apps have a harder time establishing connection.

IPv4 works. SSH over IPv4 works. Browsing the Web over IPv4 works.

teddyh 14 hours ago

> IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken?

It is broken for you by upstream NAT and CGNAT.

broken-kebab 13 hours ago

You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.

Karrot_Kream 12 hours ago

Until a service's WAF catches your /32 because your ISP had previously handed it out to a spammer.

broken-kebab 11 hours ago

There are working procedures to follow in such situations, and minimally competent ISPs deal with them well enough so that most users don't even know the problem exists.

spauldo 11 hours ago

NAT and CGNAT break the basic idea of how the Internet was designed, forcing everyone into servers and consumers. We've just become used to it, and most people have never experienced it any other way.

The Internet was supposed to be a purely peer-to-peer network, where the addresses on each side of a connection pointed to an end node. That's why protocols like FTP or SIP break when NAT is used, and why you have to play games with port forwarding if you want to run services from your house (assuming you have a public IP address at all).

broken-kebab 11 hours ago

It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.

throw0101c 10 hours ago

> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer.

Because just about all applications are currently architected in such a manner.

When Skype first came out many moons ago it allowed peer-to-peer connections with clients, but a lot of clients were behind NAT (especially ones that could not do PCP or UPnP), so Skype had to come up with the notion of "super nodes" that could do relaying.

Protocols like STUN/TURN/ICE/etc had to be developed to deal with all of this blocking of traffic.

If clients could know their 'real' addresses and allow things like PCP (which is often needed for (e.g.) video games), then perhaps there could me less strictly consuming and more collaborating.

spauldo 10 hours ago

We couldn't do it with FTP. That's kinda the point. We didn't have static IP addresses for every machine or the entries in DNS to go with them.

The whole idea of "consumer" and "server" nodes is so baked into how people think about networking they don't even realize it. But that's not how the Internet was intended to be in the first place.

broken-kebab 10 hours ago

You absolutely can do it within the existing paradigm, in a number of ways, actually. Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example.

And if you seriously believe that Dropbox appeared because of NAT, and not because people prefer out-of-the-box solutions, I can only suggest you to go out of your bubble, and discuss technical issues with random people.

"Intended" btw is not even an argument. Internet wasn't intended for many things which we happily do here.

kalleboo 9 hours ago

> Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example

CG-NAT breaks all this. iroh relies on relays from people with non-broken internet (no CG-NAT).

broken-kebab 9 hours ago

>iroh relies on relays

Yes, and DynDNS too. Which is fine, cause it works, and that is what I said. The claim to which it replies is that people have to pay to Dropbox cause poor souls were stopped from sharing files using existing technologies like FTP by the damned IPv4, and not because they simply prefer an out-of-the-box GUI thing.

kalleboo 8 hours ago

There were out-of-the-box GUI experiences, like Apple's "Back to my Mac", that never worked right because of all the issues with poking through NAT caused by IPv4.

Relying on peer-to-peer relays also doesn't scale, which is why Skype dropped its supernode architecture.

spauldo 8 hours ago

I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused.

And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.

Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.

wolrah 10 hours ago

> That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.

Dropbox gained popularity *BECAUSE IT MADE IT EASY TO DO THIS WHEN YOU'RE STUCK BEHIND NAT TRASH*. By the time it was even a thought in anyone's brain the internet had already been ruined by that garbage.

It would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed, syncing data between computers you owned that all had publicly routable addresses is a much simpler problem.

Every ISP that has CGNAT v4 without providing full v6 needs to be shut down. They are either incompetent or actively choosing to make their users' service less useful to restrict them and/or encourage "upgrades". Internet service has a public routable IP address, period.

broken-kebab 9 hours ago

>it would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed,

I'm sorry, but this claim is one of the brightest examples of false consenses effect I've seen in ages. People generally just prefer an icon on desktop to click/tap. And that's the reason Dropbox found its audience.

spauldo 7 hours ago

Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."

procaryote 42 minutes ago

Then imagine the security implications of trusting windows to serve just some selected files over FTP and never have any security hole that exposed other files or allowed RCE

Gigachad 3 hours ago

Only today we would have put everything behind something like NAT anyway because your devices would be getting hacked constantly.

locknitpicker 13 minutes ago

> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.

Dropbox gained popularity because none of us can or want to bother to do it with FTP, with the exception of a very small and determined minority.

Why do you think that even FANG engineers use cloud storage systems such as Dropbox/iCloud/OneDrive/Google Drive/etc. Can't an elite software engineer put together a FTP server?

Why do you think Dropbox et al are still a thing in spite of projects such as Syncthing?

This is not the only instance where user experience and convenience show their value. Look at Docker, for example. The "aktually" crowd will be fast to say that anyone can do the same with chroot et al, but they will again be missing the whole point. It's the same thing why Microsoft tried to invest in Aspire even though Docker is here.

It's like complaining that people can buy bread when all they need to make their own is flour, water, salt, and yeast. That's completely besides the point, ain't it?

throw0101c 10 hours ago

> You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.

CGNAT works for you? Do you play video games at all? Because there are all sorts of people for which it doesn't.

The fact that you may be fortunate enough to get a publicly-accessible IPv4 address on your WAN interface does not mean everyone else is. This type of attitude seems to be akin to "I gots mine."

broken-kebab 9 hours ago

I don't play this kind of games at all, but I still can sympathize with you if it's your preferred pastime, and it doesn't work as good as you'd like. I just don't think it warrants a conclusion that those nets in which we are arguing are broken. They are tangibly, observably doing pretty well. And I find that the idea that in a shiny world of pure IPv6 central servers/nodes would decentralize themselves comes from deep misunderstanding about what "normal" humans want.

Xirdus 11 hours ago

IPv4 stopped working fine some 30 years ago. The invention of NAT was caused by IPv4 not working fine (RFC 1631 was written under assumption it's a temporary solution). Hole punching is a thing solely because IPv4 stopped working fine. Much like Y2K, the reason IPv4 appears to work fine is because absolutely massive engineering effort was put to work around the parts that don't work fine.

sandeepkd 16 hours ago

This is an interesting take, however from what I seen its other way around. Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6. Your ACL rules and tools are still better at handling/managing IPv4 compared to IPv6

Karrot_Kream 12 hours ago

There's more that's been written about configuring/protecting IPv4 networks and if you learn about network security from a mentor or from coworkers at a job, rather than reading books/the internet/LLMs, you're more likely to learn about IPv4 security.

But if you've ever had to deal with endpoint security, if you're just doing static rule based blocking/throttling, /32 or /24 blocking is often your best option. Thanks to CGNAT this often means having a pretty large impact since an ISP's residential customer might end up getting randomly assigned a "bad" address and the cooldown for these rules is often months long or more.

In IPv6 land, you can just block a /128 or even a /64 and rarely hit anyone else in the crossfire.

icedchai 11 hours ago

Blocking /128 is unlikely to block anyone for very long around here. Both the major ISPs give out /56 blocks with prefix delegation. In almost 4 years, mine hasn't changed.

icedchai 11 hours ago

Most IPv4 "security" is a side-effect of NAT. NAT was not intended as a security feature, but it does provide a level of security in the common consumer implementation (PAT, single external IP, unroutable internal network.)

Otherwise, what are the practical differences?

kstrauser 10 hours ago

> Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6.

I strongly disagree. That's obsolete knowledge, thrown around by people who want to be considered security conscious but haven't actually updated their knowledge in many years. A statement with similar implications might be "security conscious operators require their users to rotate their passwords monthly", which is what a lot of people use to think a decade ago, and now what it really communicates is that you're talking to a dinosaur.

asdf88990 7 hours ago

But IPv6 is complex and inherently globally accessible. Yes, NAT IS not supposed to be a firewall but it works like one nonetheless in many cases.

IPv6 will never replace IPv4 because it is a different protocol rather than merely a new version. The name is a lie.

kstrauser 5 hours ago

Very weird take, and not supported by facts or evidence, but OK.

asdf88990 2 hours ago

Do you ever wonder if most people don’t “see the facts” and after almost 3 decades and so much the adoption at 50% might mean to consider if the technology is just rubbish?

thayne 3 hours ago

> IPv6 is... inherently globally accessible.

No, it's not. If you really want a NAT there is no reason you can't use a NAT with ipv6. In fact, it can work even better because instead of using a random port for the translation, you can use a random ip address for each connection.

asdf88990 2 hours ago

A random ip address that is globally reachable?

Dagonfly an hour ago

Why would it be reachable? It might be name-able but that doesn't imply reachable.

You're conflating the two parts of NAT: address translation and inbound filtering. A router can block any inbound traffic coming from WAN, even if the IPv6s on the LAN side are public.

In fact, hole punching for IPv4 shows this distinction. By default inbound traffic is blocked, but as soon as private host has opened up a connection, it is (indirectly) reachable and nameable (via the routers public IP + port).

BTW, static IPv4 NAT with public addresses on both sides exists as well.

zekica an hour ago

What do you mean globally accessible? All the devices on my network have global IPv6 addresses for the last 5 years - since my ISP enabled IPv6 but none of them are accessible unless I configure it.

thayne 6 hours ago

My ISP is only a few years old, but they don't support IPv6 at all. And when I complain about it to support, their response is basically "we don't see the point".

charcircuit 5 hours ago

Practically everything on IPv6 also has a IPv4 address you can use instead. Adding IPv6 just adds more that can go wrong.

toast0 4 hours ago

Sure, but if they're a new ISP, chances are they have a hard time getting IPv4 and they likely run CGNAT. If they run CGNAT, the benefit of IPv6 is there's a lot of high volume traffic that will move to v6 and the CGNAT use will be smaller. Routing v6 packets is much easier than tracking connection states and munging packets...

If they have enough v4 for all their customers, sure fine.

zekica an hour ago

It's not just that the ISP will lower their costs for CGNAT, the users will also get a much better experience.

Gigachad 3 hours ago

On IPv4 with CGNAT you get blocked and sent millions of captchas because you are sharing an IP with 5 IoT devices actively running a botnet.

On v6 you don’t have that problem.

kube-system 19 hours ago

> But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks

Maybe Apple and Ford, but it's more than fair that DoD has large blocks since they created ipv4 to connect themselves to other networks. It was only 10 years ago that the US government decided to give up control of IANA.

Mogzol 15 hours ago

Sure there's historic reason that the DoD has such a large block, but it is definitely unfair in the modern world. There is no way they need or will ever use their massive block of addresses. They have 13 different /8 blocks, ~218 million unique addresses, that's over 5% of the entire IPv4 address space.

kube-system 14 hours ago

The modern paradigm you're using as a comparison only exists because this network designed for the US military industrial complex was so freely open and fair that it is now used by everyone.

There were and still are are other global networks -- none of them come close to being anywhere near as open or interoperable. What's the next closest, PSTN maybe?

sebmellen 9 hours ago

Seen differently, it’s fair for a founder who has relinquished most of their control over the system to retain 5% equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

preisschild an hour ago

You can always just use IPv6 where there is plenty of address space available. You can even get a /44 as a hobbyist easily

Surac 2 hours ago

I have no deep ip knowlede, but if the companys do not use those addresses , cant we just use them an snatch away those unused addresses?

johncolanduoni 2 hours ago

Nobody will peer with you if you start announcing addresses you don’t own, so there’s no way to make those addresses reachable on the public internet.

reincoder 19 hours ago

Diamonds and IPv4 share a common trait.

Lab-grown diamonds found a strong role as industrial components, which expanded overall demand for diamond materials and widened their use cases. IPv6 may follow a similar path, with adoption concentrated in newer and novel applications where IPv4 addresses were scarce.

IPv4 seems likely to remain in place for many existing applications, much like natural diamonds in jewelry, regardless of policy/advocacy views.

swores 19 hours ago

> "India: 47M
> "China: 358M

> "Both countries have roughly the same population"

To save anyone else curious from looking it up - their populations are about 1.4 billion (1400 million) each.

jagaerglad 16 hours ago

and one of the countries has an over-reported while the other is underreporting

jon128 18 hours ago

End users do notice CGNAT when their internet voice/video calls keep dropping for no apparent reason.

wtch98 18 hours ago

Most people don't care about a private IP, which is why they cost about $20-$25 each (which would be about $2 a year to finance). I've used Airtel in the past and they certainly offer a dedicated IP. Currently I'm with TATA and Vodafone in India

Indeed a shared IP is arguably a benefit in that it makes fingerprinting harder.

If your ISP had customers who were interested it could spend $150k on a /19 block giving 8000 IPv4 addresses and charge an extra ₹100 a month for them and after two years it would be in profit.

In fact I think Jio and Airtel offer static IPs for residential use for something like ₹300 a month, which given how cheap IPv4 addresses are is a massive money spinner, but I have't spoken to anyone living in India about ISPs for a couple of years.

cowlevel 17 hours ago

China mandates IPv6. So does the US, but the US drags their feet. Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal even though not mandated and no v4 shortage.

throwawayfifo 16 hours ago

>Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal

False: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6

alibarber 15 hours ago

On HN, 'In Europe' means in one person's particular locale based on their experience and generalised across a continent of about 30 countries. But it's always better than in the US of course.

efilife 9 hours ago

Can we stop this europe/us fight? This remark was completely unwarranted

alibarber 3 hours ago

I wrote this as a European (British) who is living in another European country (Finland). People happily write ‘in Europe’ whilst being quite selective in their definition of Europe - usually their very close neighbourhood, and it usually means North and Central Europe. If that.

I’ve seen some truly unhinged takes here, my favourite ever being something along the lines of European cars not having cup holders because we don’t have drive-throughs in Europe… I have driven my Volkswagen across this continent and enjoyed many a hot beverage on the move.

I’ve come to learn that discussions on a lot of things, in English, usually end up as a comparison to the States, especially if it involves the healthcare sacred cow.

debugnik 15 hours ago

I wish, just 37.73% of IPv6-capable users in Europe according to APNIC despite much higher availability in transit AS. Highest subgroup is Western Europe at around 72.09%, which is still far from near universal. Similar per-country numbers from Cisco.

spauldo 11 hours ago

Unless I've missed something, the US only mandates it for government networks. I don't think there is any mandate for private entities to implement it.

cowlevel 10 hours ago

A residential network that can't connect you to government websites is called a fraudulent business model. No different from selling a car that only transports up to 20kg.

spauldo 10 hours ago

I guess I should clarify: the government mandate is that government sites are dual-stack. They have to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4.

xattt 16 hours ago

Bell in Canada continues to offer only IPv4 on their fibre network. I fully expect for them to somehow crap up the transition to IPv6 by putting up CGNAT because fuck you, customer.

TheCycoONE 13 hours ago

Fascinating. The resellers, particularly TechSavvy have ipv6. For TechSavvy I believe it was dynamic /64 by default but static /56 for free on request.

throw0101a 9 hours ago

> For TechSavvy I believe it was dynamic /64 by default but static /56 for free on request.

"On request" meaning you told your CPE equipment to send a DHCP-PD packet, i.e., you didn't have to call them and ask for something special with your account.

alibarber 15 hours ago

PSA that if you have a ham radio licence, anywhere in the world, there are IPv4 addresses available for you for the taking at ARDC (AMPR)[1].

You can either get a block of /24 to announce yourself (you've got to cover all the technical setup and costs of this) or use their free 44net.connect service and just organise a wireguard tunnel.

You cannot use it for anything commercial.

[1] https://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Main_Page

tcdent 14 hours ago

I have looked into acquiring an ipv4 block many times but never came across this. Thanks for the lead!

lifeisloving 13 hours ago

CGNAT is awesome, you cant IP ban me anymore and I dont need a VPN turned on for silly things, and I can control fingerprinting (mostly), CGNAT is great for anonymity. If I want a static it cost me ~10.00 a month, im fine with that.

oefrha 8 hours ago

On the other hand, sometimes you get randomly banned due to someone else’s action on the CGNAT IP. Wikipedia is an obvious example.

lifeisloving 4 hours ago

Thats the only site Ive encountered issues. Im okay with that. I dont think they just let anyone edit anymore anyways.

giancarlostoro 13 hours ago

What I really don't understand is IPv6 has been around... decades now... why the heck havent we started forcing it more and more?

Mountain_Skies 13 hours ago

Attempts to force it get routed around.

spauldo 11 hours ago

A large chunk of IT people don't understand it. So they don't demand it from their vendors. The vendors see the lack of demand so they spend fewer resources on it. When someone wants to implement IPv6, they see the limited vendor support and decide against it.

The last three companies I've worked at have all been IPv4 only. I set up IPv6 in our lab, but neither the SCADA software nor the PLCs we use support it at all, and none of my coworkers can troubleshoot it if problems pop up.

I've got a buddy that's a technical manager at an ISP and he'll straight up tell you they don't do IPv6 because he and his people don't know it.

icedchai 11 hours ago

Yep. I run into "enterprise" cloud environments where IPv6 is disabled, all the time. The sad thing is IPv6 is easier to understand than v4, just based on subnetting practices alone. The real problem is the average "IT" person doesn't understand hexadecimal.

procaryote 12 minutes ago

Thing is, you can run ipv4 only, dual stack or ipv6 only. Ipv6 only won't work. Dual stack has a larger attack surface and is complex. Ipv4 works but costs a relatively tiny bit of money so far.

Why would you not use ipv4?

unethical_ban an hour ago

It's definitely a slight learning curve (a few days at most for basic understanding and troubleshooting). I can't speak to complexities like routing protocol configurations.

But goodness, the infinite-subnets-of-same-size glitch is so amazing. I see companies all the time that struggle to subnet their sprawling enterprise. Different subnet sizes everywhere, fragmented networks, subnet migrations to try to defragment, so on.

Many orgs are so short-staffed and staffed with mediocre talent that they spend their days fighting fires and keeping their flawed current practices operating just well enough to keep the lights on and not cause outages or security breaches. Things like "optimizations" and "redesigns" of the IP stack, even in 2026, would be a 5-10 year journey without a dollar sign benefit attached to it. So they limp along until the transition is seamless and necessary or monetarily desireable.

Dagonfly an hour ago

It's only really a learning curve if you're an expert at IPv4, and try to apply your IPv4 mental model directly to IPv6.

ajnin 7 hours ago

IPv6 brings more address space but also a whole bunch of other stuff, it is much more complex and changes basically everything to how you manage a network. The fact that it's not been widely adopted after 30 years indicates that people generally think the tradeoff is not worth it.

toast0 4 hours ago

Early bad experiences made a lot of people reluctant to try again.

There's a lot of edge cases to bite people still.

That said, something like 50% of users have working v6 now, which helps to file down the edges. Growth of v6 in the last 10 years has been much more significant than the previous 10 years. I suspect the next 10 years will be pretty significant, too.

I don't think many organizations are in a position to force adoption though.

You have mandates from say US government for government services and vendors and similar in some other countries. Some countries can force it through strong regulations on equipment sales. And then there's Jio (and maybe other ISPs) that have significant market power in some locales and a significant lack of v4 resources and can strongly encourage vendors and partners to support v6 for better service to users on their network.

Root_Denied 3 hours ago

We're 10 years out from the Epochalypse as well. Past a certain point you need a governing body to intervene to force the issue in advance of problems with systems, and we've got a dearth of functioning governments these days.

7bit 2 hours ago

You mustn't be on HN very often. People constantly complain about IPv6 being less secure because it doesn't have NAT. And that's part of the reason. Fear and misinformation keeps demand low. The same people don't drive IPv6 implementation where they work, so their fear impacts more than 1 person.

unethical_ban 2 hours ago

From my readings and limited experience, it's two things.

First, IPv6 in the 90s and 00s is different from IPv6 today. Various extensions and standards have been added that make IPv6 administration easier than it was in the early days. I want to say RDNSS is one of them. Background: one of v6's early selling points was SLAAC, where DHCP could be disposed of and endpoints would auto-configure their own IPs in accordance with the network announced by a router. Problem is, without DHCP, there was no way to get DNS, and DHCPv6 wasn't widely deployed/it was discouraged... so how does one get a DNS server automatically? RDNSS came around to announce DNS servers from the router directly.

TLDR: Early IPv6 sucked more than today.

Second, it's simply a chicken-and-egg problem, particularly at the consumer network level. User-friendly IPv6 router configurations are still rare for home routers, and ISPs have simply dragged their feet. At this point, if we're going to have government mandating all manner of things for consumer products, we should be mandating IPv6 support on home routers and that ISPs delegate at least a /60 to each customer.

procaryote 15 minutes ago

Second system effect. It's way more complicated

Replicating even a simple ipv4 lan with mostly stable local addresses and some isp uplink is pretty complex, even assuming all the devices involved support ipv6, which they wont

It's much easier to run a dual stack with v4 for ease of use on the lan and v6 as an additional address that can change whenever and is only used to reach the wan

But the main reason you'd care would be if you can't get a public ipv4 address to NAT to. And if you can't get that, some of the internet breaks anyway.

Marsymars 12 hours ago

My take is that the solution here isn't "give India more IPv4 addresses", it's "force more Americans onto CGNAT", so that it becomes untenable for service providers to treat IPv4 addresses as if they're tied to a single user, and to encourage people to use IPv6.

creatonez 9 hours ago

"swept under the rug with CGNAT" is a really funny way to say "solved by IPv6"

allthetime 9 hours ago

an ipv4 for every man woman and child!

thepmsquare 5 hours ago

i purchased a dedicated ipv4 from my isp.

syngrog66 4 hours ago

what is the meaning (or units) of your first numbers?

BirdieNZ 13 hours ago

From a Georgist perspective, IPv4 is actually a form of land (it's a finite "natural resource", although that's not quite proper), and you could make a case for "land rent" being taxed on the addresses. This is the same as radio broadcast frequencies, web addresses, actual land, un-mined gold/oil/coal/whatever, and other finite natural resources that create monopolistic tendencies.

TZubiri 6 hours ago

>IPv4 is actually a form of land (it's a finite "natural resource", although that's not quite proper),

It's closer to radiofrequencies I think, these are heavily regulated.

However radiofrequencies are purely natural resources, while IPv4 have a specific copyrightable spec design, domains have trademarkable TLDs

derektank 5 hours ago

Incidentally, auctions of time bounded licenses, which are what we use to allocate frequency spectrum, have the same theoretical pareto efficiency as a value tax.

perilunar 3 hours ago

Whereas IPv6 is effectively unlimited, so by Georgist principles should be free. I wonder if charging 'rent' on IPv4 addresses would be enough to get people to switch over?

andix 21 hours ago

IPv6 got some real traction in the last decade. From around 10% adoption up to 50%. It's not dead, like many are claiming. It works fine, just keep implementing it.

throw0101c 20 hours ago

> From around 10% adoption up to 50%.

Google sees 70-80% from some countries:

* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

andix 20 hours ago

Sure, around 50% is a worldwide estimate.

_rwo 17 hours ago

ah yeah, golden times of crawling google when they actually didn't monitor ipv6 traffic properly against scraping (seo monitoring tools were first to drive 'adoption', lol)

Sesse__ 11 hours ago

I don't know what you count as “golden times”, but at least when we started the measurements, there was no indication bot traffic would drive up these stats at all. (You wouldn't trigger it just by fetching a search result page.)

akho 14 hours ago

I wonder how they measure.

Sesse__ 11 hours ago

I don't know exactly how they _measure_ since I'm not working in IPv6 in Google anymore, but I know how we _measured_ when we started these stats:

https://research.google/pubs/evaluating-ipv6-adoption-in-the...

commandersaki 19 hours ago

But it's not really useful until it has critical mass at say 80 or 90%.

usui 19 hours ago

I keep IPv4 off on a media computer all the time out of curiosity. IPv6-only is still unusable because only about 5% to 10% of top sites that I find during a Google Search work. It's almost guaranteed that a website will not load on all the top results.

So even if it's true 50% of clients support IPv6, only about 5% to 10% of website hosts do.

Sure a person can do a dual-stack setup or do some IPv4-IPv6 translation, but seriously IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.

andix 18 hours ago

Cloud providers and hosters seem to have the least interest in implementing IPv6. Sitting on a huge supply of IPv4 addresses gives them a competitive advantage. So they try to disable IPv6 as a default.

cowlevel 16 hours ago

That's very surprising. Cloudflare supports ipv6 and it would be surprising if only 10% of websites you visit use Cloudflare.

andix 15 hours ago

I guess a lot of sites just turn it off. Even if Cloudflare proxies it over IPv4 the IPv6 source address still shows up in server logs. Features like geolocating users or fraud prevention might need additional work for IPv6.

simoncion 14 hours ago

> ...IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.

The obsession about "IPv6 only" has never made sense to me. Any decent firewall software will let you write rules that apply regardless of IP version. The "software complexity" argument is bunk... you already have v4 and v6 IP implementations in your OS, and every major OS has provided IP-version-agnostic socket interface code for much more than ten years. If you are using software that is IPv6-capable, it's very likely that it's using IP version agnostic library functions.

Unless stewardship of the Internet is wrested from the hands of the responsible, level-headed type of folks that run it now and transferred to the hands of folks who think nothing of making backwards-incompatible changes every six months, IPv4 won't stop running across the Internet within the lifetime of anyone who's currently reading HN. This delay is fine. The only thing about IPv4 that's a problem is that its address space is 32 bits wide. Had it been defined with a 128+ bit address space, we wouldn't have seen another version of IP on the Internet. Now that IPv6 is around to reduce address pressure, there's no big need to do anything about IPv4.

ebiederm 12 hours ago

I believe the folks worrying about IPv6 only are just looking ahead to a possible future. Especially when they are looking at the question of do all the pieces work locally, vs do popular domains support it.

There are domains like T-mobile US that are IPv6 only already. T-mobile runs NAT in the network so that all of IPv4 is NAT'd to IPv6.

I do think it is reasonable to expect there will become a time when IPv6 is pervasive enough, that new deployments will target users with IPv6 rather than IPv4.

Once IPv6 becomes the choice to support to get new customers, it is reasonable to expect that IPv4 support will start deteriorating and will eventually fade away.

I will be very surprised if we don't hit that tipping point in my lifetime. Say the next 30 years.

simoncion 11 hours ago

> I believe the folks worrying about IPv6 only are just looking ahead to a possible future.

I'm certain that that is not what the folks who scream very loudly about how IPv6 has been and continues to be a colossal failure because it's not the only version of IP on the Internet are doing.

> I do think it is reasonable to expect there will become a time when IPv6 is pervasive enough, that new deployments will target users with IPv6 rather than IPv4.

Sure. That's the future I find most plausible: For "residential" connections, provide IPv6 GUAs and IPv4 via CGN... [0] for "commercial" connections, provide IPV6 GUAs and give the customer the option of one or more IPv4 GUAs.

> I will be very surprised if we don't hit that tipping point in my lifetime. Say the next 30 years.

I do hope we get to that point within the next five years, if not ten! But notice that my claim is that IPv4 will still be crossing the Internet after everyone reading HN today is dead. [1]

[0] I'm calling the various mechanisms that only provide an IPv6 address to an end user and do fancy gyrations to provide IPv4 access "CGN", even if might not strictly be CGN.

[1] ...as long as the the responsible, level-headed type of folks that run it now aren't replaced with the "making backwards-incompatible changes to everything every six months is A-OK!" type of folks.

spauldo 9 hours ago

I can totally understand why. IP addresses are hard to get for a large chunk of the global population. There's twice as many people as there are IP addresses.

Plus dual-stack means more work, and more possibilities for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your network. It'd be way easier if you only had to worry about one or the other.

I live in the US and my ISP gives me one address I have to share across all the machines in my house. That's a tragedy - by all rights I should have a subnet or two. You can't directly address any of my servers from the outside on IPv4 which means I have to do hacky crap like port forwarding and can't use a lot of the older protocols that aren't NAT friendly. And I've got it good compared to most of the world!

IPv6 gives us back a large chunk of the original premise of the Internet - that all nodes are peers. IPv4 hasn't been able to do that for decades, and it's warped the way we think about networking by separating everyone into consumers and providers.

simoncion 7 hours ago

> Plus dual-stack means more work, and more possibilities for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your network.

Nope. Your OS vendor already did the work to make both versions of IP work. And as I mentioned, if you're using a decent firewall you can write IP-version-agnostic rules just as easily as you can ones that depend on the version.

Plus, most SOHO firewalls default to dropping unsolicited non-ICMP traffic. That's the exact same security stance that IPv4 + NAT gives you. You have to go out of your way (or be using fancy gear that is aimed at people who know what they're doing) to expose your LAN hosts.

spauldo 7 hours ago

My OS vendor didn't set up my firewall rules, lay out my subnets, or configure my routing. I did that. Twice. Because I've got a slightly more advanced network layout than your typical home user. And that's all much less complicated that what your typical corporate network would be, which is much less complicated than what an ISP or COLO provider has to deal with. And then there's the cloud...

Yeah, sure, if your requirements can be met by a cable modem, then you're basically good to go. Until DNS breaks for some machines and not others, and it's because your ISP screwed something in their IPv6 routing but it still works on IPv4. Or Microsoft's authentication servers decide they don't like your IPv6 subnet anymore and Minecraft refuses to start unless you turn IPv6 off. Or... You get the idea.

simoncion 4 hours ago

> My OS vendor didn't set up my firewall rules, lay out my subnets, or configure my routing. I did that.

Wow! Me too!

> Because I've got a slightly more advanced network layout than your typical home user.

Mine's quite a bit more advanced, if we're being frank. Though, the way I have things set up should be the default for SOHO stuff. This sort of configuration really is something whose setup can be automated, but never will be for as long as dumbswitches are the go to for SOHO equipment.

Anyway. I guess you and I just have dramatically different opinions on what's difficult. ;)

spauldo 3 hours ago

Possibly. Or maybe you and I did a dramatically different amount of work on our networks. My setup is very much not what should be default for SOHO, for instance.

My point wasn't ever about home users anyway.

idatum 18 hours ago

And Windows 11 now supports CLAT.

cyberax 16 hours ago

IPv6 is dead. Nobody cares about it.

I will believe otherwise once even one US hotel chain supports it. I have _never_ seen a hotel in the US with IPv6 WiFi. Not once.

And I once stayed in a hotel (in Mountain View, CA) that gave out public IPv4 addresses.

andix 15 hours ago

Okay, if you say so. Hotel Wifis are known for being on the bleeding edge of technology, and as the main innovator pushing new internet technology. Everything starts with hotel Wifis. /s

cyberax 14 hours ago

Exactly my point. IPv6 failed to reach the "boring, just works" level after 30 years of deployment. So much so that we are now deploying solutions with 10+ years of expected service lifetime that do not support IPv6.

Meanwhile, CGNAT really solved most issues with IPv4. Yes, even the voice/video chat issues.

Want another fun example? Try to find a SIP telephony provider in the US that supports IPv6. Go on. I do this exercise about once a year.

andix 14 hours ago

I don't get your point. IPv6 is at "boring, just works". The majority of the worlds devices run on it dual-stack and it handles a considerable amount of traffic. A lot of 5G networks run on IPv6 single stack with IPv4 compatibility on top.

IPv6 is very much alive. And it's so boring and working so well, that you don't even notice it.

cyberax 14 hours ago

> I don't get your point. IPv6 is at "boring, just works". The majority of the worlds devices run on it dual-stack and it handles a considerable amount of traffic.

Most of the world runs on IPv4. If we shut down IPv6 on the core routers tomorrow, pretty much nobody is going to blink an eye. And now I believe that we should do it and start again.

The 50% stat is really mostly mobile phones on cellular networks, which remain the _only_ major success story for IPv6. Mostly because there's not enough private or even squattable IPv4 space available for many large mobile phone operators.

> IPv6 is very much alive. And it's so boring and working so well, that you don't even notice it.

Sigh. No, it's not. In a thread a couple of weeks ago, I gave several examples:

1. You're a SOHO-type business. How can you do multiple WAN uplinks with IPv6 without NAT?

2. How do you prevent your printer on IPv6 from breaking when your Internet connection goes down?

For context: I deployed IPv6 in my networks in 2006. I have war stories.

simoncion 12 hours ago

> How can you do multiple WAN uplinks with IPv6 without NAT?

Advertise the addresses offered by the primary uplink, then retire those addresses [0] and advertise the secondary when the primary fails. Or are you talking about load balancing, which is its own thing? Either way, this situation is inherently not boring, so the way you solve it is going to be quite a bit more complex -regardless of IP protocol version- than the very boring single-upstream situation.

> How do you prevent your printer on IPv6 from breaking when your Internet connection goes down?

I'll flip this around on you:

How do you prevent your printer from "breaking" when its ISP-provided DHCP lease on its globally-routable IPv4 address expires? How about when the ISP refuses to renew the lease on the printer's current globally-routable IPv4 address and forces it to get a new one?

Obviously, you use the ISP-assigned globally-routable IPv4 address and also assign an RFC 1918 address to the printer.

How to solve this with IPv6? Use ULAs! They're the equivalent of 1918 space in the IPv6 world. Just like in IPv4, IPv6 globally-routable addresses are for global communication and can be used for LAN-local communication. And -just like 1918 addresses- ULAs are for LAN-local communication. Just like with IPv4, if you can't control the addresses that you get from your upstream provider, and/or if your router is set up to retire your upstream provider's delegated address space when your upstream link goes down, then you use ULAs. [1]

I know that OpenWRT has a setting in LuCi to enable advertisement of a ULA prefix, and fifteen seconds of searching revealed that at least some Linksys combination router/APs seem to just generate and advertise a ULA prefix by default. [2]

So, if you're not configuring your LAN this way and upstream provider renumbering is getting in your way, then you really should bother to.

[0] ...by advertising their valid lifetime as zero seconds...

[1] ...or if you happen to like to be able to assign fixed IP addresses to certain pieces of hardware...

[2] <https://support.linksys.com/kb/article/3744-en/>

andix 12 hours ago

> Use ULAs

Isn't that the default for modern routers? They just generate a random ULA during setup and assign it.

Random ULAs are also great for LAN-to-LAN VPNs, because there aren't any private IP overlaps. Everyone setting up their LAN on 192.168.0.x makes it quite a mess on IPv4.

simoncion 12 hours ago

> Isn't that the default for modern routers?

I assumed so because it's the obviously correct thing to do, but I haven't used a SoHo router in so many years, so I don't know.

> Random ULAs are also great for LAN-to-LAN VPNs, because there aren't any private IP overlaps.

Yep! Extremely low chance of prefix collision is their most important purpose. I've been part of several corporate acquisitions, and it inevitably took 6->18+ months to do enough of the IPv4 renumbering and server-discommissioning [0] process to begin to merge the LANs of the merging companies. Had they used ULA addressing, the odds of having to do that massive amount of work would be effectively zero.

And if collisions aren't something you give any shits about, nothing stops you [1] from setting your ULA to fd00::/48 and advertising fd00::/64 on your LAN for static IP addresses that are notably shorter than you can get with IPv4!

[0] ...because there's so little space in the 1918 range...

[1] ...well, unless your router's configuration system doesn't let you specify your ULA prefix...

cyberax 12 hours ago

ULA are useless for most practical purposes because of the source address selection rules.

simoncion 11 hours ago

> ULA are useless for most practical purposes because of the source address selection rules.

/me glances over at my LAN which has been happily using ULAs for local communications and GUAs for global for the past I don't even know how long.

_Sure_.

andix 11 hours ago

The problem is real. In IP discovery GUA is prioritized over ULA. And if the GUA goes away or changes regularly it leads to connectivity issues.

ULA work well in combination with DNS though.

simoncion 7 hours ago

> In IP discovery GUA is prioritized over ULA. And if the GUA goes away or changes regularly it leads to connectivity issues.

Sure, but you're generally not going to get both addresses associated with a single host unless you either hard-code them or use DNS. For any non-stupid network, source address selection for reaching LAN hosts doesn't really matter. And for many-to-most SOHO networks, you're going to be running dnsmasq, which will quickly set you right after any GUA change.

And like, the thing to be noticing here is that source address selection priorities for both IPv4 and IPv6 seem to give us the same actual behavior. Consider a pair of hostnames served up by BIND 9 and some applications running on bog-standard Gentoo Linux whose '/etc/gai.conf' contains only comments and blank lines:

  # getent ahosts dumbhost.invalid
  1.1.1.1         STREAM dumbhost.invalid
  1.1.1.1         DGRAM  
  1.1.1.1         RAW    
  192.168.30.30    STREAM 
  192.168.30.30    DGRAM  
  192.168.30.30    RAW    
  # ping -n -c1 dumbhost.invalid
  PING dumbhost.invalid (192.168.30.30) 56(84) bytes of data.
  From <redacted> icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

  --- dumbhost.invalid ping statistics ---
  1 packets transmitted, 0 received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss, time 0ms

  # curl -v dumbhost.invalid
  * Host dumbhost.invalid:80 was resolved.
  * IPv6: (none)
  * IPv4: 192.168.30.30, 1.1.1.1
  *   Trying 192.168.30.30:80...
  * connect to 192.168.30.30 port 80 from <redacted> port 47140 failed: No route to host
  *   Trying 1.1.1.1:80...
  * Established connection to dumbhost.invalid (1.1.1.1 port 80) from <redacted> port <redacted>
  <snip>
  # getent ahosts dumbhost6.invalid
  fd00::1         STREAM dumbhost6.invalid
  fd00::1         DGRAM  
  fd00::1         RAW    
  2002:db8::1     STREAM 
  2002:db8::1     DGRAM  
  2002:db8::1     RAW
  # ping -n -c1 dumbhost6.invalid
  PING dumbhost6.invalid (fd00::1) 56 data bytes
  From <redacted> icmp_seq=1 Destination unreachable: No route
  
  --- dumbhost6.invalid ping statistics ---
  1 packets transmitted, 0 received, +1 errors, 100% packet loss, time 0ms

  # curl -v dumbhost6.invalid
  *   Trying [fd00::1]:80...
  * connect to fd00::1 port 80 from <redacted> port <redacted> failed: Network is unreachable
  *   Trying [2002:db8::1]:80...
  * Host dumbhost6.invalid:80 was resolved.
  * IPv6: fd00::1, 2002:db8::1
  * IPv4: (none)
  ^C
  # ip addrlabel list | sort -hk 4
  prefix ::1/128 label 0 
  prefix ::/0 label 1 
  prefix 2002::/16 label 2 
  prefix ::/96 label 3 
  prefix ::ffff:0.0.0.0/96 label 4 
  prefix fc00::/7 label 5 
  prefix 2001::/32 label 6 
  prefix 2001:10::/28 label 7 
  prefix fec0::/10 label 11 
  prefix 3ffe::/16 label 12

Notice how actual application behavior doesn't match what folks in this thread are saying that source address selection dictates. Android behaves the same way, and -weirdly- my OpenWRT hosts have the exact opposite behavior and prefer using global addresses to ULA or 1918 ones, regardless of IP protocol version.

Anyway. If he put both IPv4 GUAs and 1918 addresses in DNS or his '/etc/hosts', he'd be having the same problem he's complaining about here... depending on -I guess- the OS he's using and how his resolver treats the ordering of entires in '/etc/hosts'.

This isn't an IPv6 problem, this is a "Things break for a little while when I use addresses to communicate with a host that can change out from under me instead of addresses that I control and those addresses happen to change." problem.

> ULA work well in combination with DNS though.

Yep! Most everything works great with DNS. Remembering IP addresses is for the birds.

simoncion 4 hours ago

  2002:db8::1

Ah, so this is in the range assigned to 6to4 (2002::/16). Both Windows 10 and Android seem to treat it specially, [0] but Linux does not. So, I changed the AAAA record to 2400:db8::1 and re-ran my tests. I found out:

The 'getent ahosts' output remains unchanged.

When dealing with IPv4, all Linuxes, Android, and Windows 10 intermittently switch between preferring the GUA or the 1918 address. I seem to have gotten unbelievably (un?)lucky when testing v4 on Android, Gentoo Linux, and OpenWRT the first go around.

When dealing with IPv6, Android and Windows 10 always preferred the v6 GUA to the ULA. Every Linux I tried -and I tried several, each from different distros, some with and some without systemd, spread across years of releases- always preferred the ULA to it... except for OpenWRT, which always preferred the GUA. The only way I could get OpenWRT to prefer the ULA was to remove its GUA address but keep its v6 default route in place. Odd behavior. I wish I had a Steam Deck to see if "prefer the GUA" is something that appliance vendors tend to do, or if it's just a dubious OpenWRT customization.

The IPv6 behavior of all the OSs I tested is far better than the v4 behavior... predictability is always good. But it is remarkable that even many years ago, Linux was doing the sane thing for v6 address selection, while its commercial cousins and competitors -apparently- hadn't [1] bothered to think through how best to arrange things for "residential" users.

[0] ...even when no 6to4 addresses are configured on the host!

[1] ...and still haven't...

andix 11 hours ago

There is some truth to it, because they only work well if used directly (either hard coded IPs or DNS).

This problem seems to be addressed already and might be solved in the future: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-rfc6724-upd...

(once again it's surprising how long it takes to clear up all IPv6 quirks)

cyberax 12 hours ago

OK, do you _think_ my questions were that easy?

> Advertise the addresses offered by the primary uplink, then retire those addresses

Prefix withdrawal doesn't work reliably on Android. And neither is it required to work, btw. Neither does this solution allow for load balancing, as all traffic will just go through one connection.

Bonus points: triangular routing to your local NAS through the router.

> How do you prevent your printer from "breaking" when its ISP-provided DHCP lease on its globally-routable IPv4 address expires? How about when the ISP refuses to renew the lease on the printer's current globally-routable IPv4 address and forces it to get a new one?

Printers get an RFC1918 address and don't care about global connectivity.

> How to solve this with IPv6? Use ULAs! They're the equivalent of 1918 space in the IPv6 world.

They're not. IPv6 is nothing like IPv4 operationally. Back to my challenge, ULA will NOT work.

The scenario is very simple: the printer gets a ULA prefix and a GUA prefix. Your computer also gets a GUA and a ULA from the same router.

So far so good.

Now the uplink goes down, and the router withdraws the prefix. The printer sees the withdrawal and removes its GUA address. Your computer misses it, and still has the GUA and the ULA addresses.

Whoops. The printing is now broken somehow. Why?

simoncion 11 hours ago

> Prefix withdrawal doesn't work reliably on Android.

Works fine on the Android hardware I have. Are you attempting to retire prefixes that have an infinite lifetime? That doesn't work, and I don't think it's supposed to work.

> Neither does this solution allow for load balancing...

As I said

  Or are you talking about load balancing, which is its own thing? Either way, this situation is inherently *not* boring, so the way you solve it is going to be quite a bit more complex -regardless of IP protocol version- than the very boring single-upstream situation.

> Printers get an RFC1918 address and don't care about global connectivity.

Okay, so why are you complaining about your printer being broken by GUAs that you're not permitting it to have? ;)

> IPv6 is nothing like IPv4 operationally.

For anyone who's not an IP stack developer, network hardware developer, or Enterprise sysadmin it absolutely is. And other than the fact that every endpoint is able to get a global address in v6, the sysadmin-visible differences between v4 and v6 are minor. RAs instead of... well, nothing, and DHCP for both.

> Whoops. The printing is now broken somehow. Why?

Exactly.

Why isn't your DHCPv6 server putting either both the GUA and ULA, or -better- only the ULA addresses in your LAN's DNS server? This Just Works™ on dnsmasq, which is one of the most widely-deployed DNS+DHCP servers on SoHo gear. [0] dnsmasq's default TTL for hosts added to the DHCP lease file appears to be 0, so -worst case- your sleepy computer tries to continue its conversation with the printer a couple of times, does ND and discovers that the IP it was using is gone, then looks up the hostname again and gets the new address of the printer. I think the trendy term for this back in the 2000s was "self-healing".

If you're going to retort "But we don't use dnsmasq in the companies I'm sometimes talking about!"... well, if you can't figure out how to not register upstream-controlled GUA addresses for your LAN hosts in your DNS, then do what dnsmasq does and serve them up with a TTL of 0.

[0] To head off the "Android doesn't really do DHCPv6" retort: Even though Android refuses to use anything other than DHCPv6-PD for managed address assignment, -AFAIK- Android still sends DHCPv6 ADDR_REG_INFORM messages for addresses it autogenerates on networks with either the "OtherConfig" or "Managed" flags set. I haven't bothered to set up my Linux systems to do this, but I'd be surprised if Windows and Darwin systems didn't do this.

cyberax 11 hours ago

> Why isn't your DHCPv6 server putting either both the GUA and ULA, or -better- only the ULA addresses in your LAN's DNS server?

I don't have a LAN's DNS server or a DHCPv6. BTW, I have had an IPv6-only home network for 10 years, with NAT64 and 464XLAT.

You still haven't solved my puzzle or even understood what's happening. The current source address selection rules result in hosts prefering a GUA address pair over ULA. This _will_ result in broken connectivity when GUA addresses change.

There is currently no standards-compliant way to solve my challenge, except getting an ASN, an IPv6 assignment, and announcing it through your uplinks. Which I've also done in my home network, btw.

There's an in-progress RFC to change this, by preferring ULA-ULA address pairs over GUA-GUA. So it might be usable some time in the 2030-s ( https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-6man-rfc6724-upda... ).

And no, this is not a theoretic problem. It affects protocols like SIP or even mDNS that exchange the IP addresses. They will consistently prefer unstable GUAs over ULAs.

simoncion 9 hours ago

> I don't have a LAN's DNS server or a DHCPv6.

Yeah, that's why you think that this is a "puzzle".

Though, it does invalidate every complaint you've made about IP source address priority. The only ways you'll get multiple addresses for a given host are to either hard-code them, or use DNS [0]. Given that you're not using DNS, then you either have automation to update all those hard-coded configs, or you do it all by hand. Either way, you're deliberately recording addresses that you don't control for your LAN hosts, and considering it a "puzzle" when you have trouble reaching those LAN hosts when your upstream provider changes their address.

[0] Given that every resolver I've ever used pulls data from '/etc/hosts', I'm considering that to be part of DNS for the purposes of this conversation. I'm also considering Avahi and friends to be DNS. [1]

[1] And if you've talked to any long-term Avahi user, you've certainly heard about its habit of -on daemon or host restart- erroneously considering host name of the machine it's running on to be "in use" and appending a "-N" to the end of it. The remarkable eagerness of Avahi to engage this collision-avoidance mechanism makes it entirely unsuitable for discovery of LAN hosts whose hostname is actually important. This fact breaks my heart, but Avahi has been doing this shit for a very, very long time, so it's probably never going to get fixed.

cyberax 8 hours ago

> The only ways you'll get multiple addresses for a given host are to either hard-code them, or use DNS

mDNS exists. As does SIP and SMB.

I first discovered the ULA/GUA issue when my TimeMachine backup dropped mid-session when I was testing Internet connection failover. Apple later fixed it by allowing multiple SMB sessions in parallel and preferring IPv4 connections. I have a pure IPv6-only network, as I said.

The same issue happens with SIP, as phones send their own addresses during the media connection negotiation.

(I have another funny story about SIP: Asterisk used to send a Cartesian product of available codecs and IP addresses, so if you had IPv6 privacy addresses on, it eventually accumulated enough of them to overflow the MTU, causing connections to silently drop)

simoncion 7 hours ago

> I first discovered the ULA/GUA issue...

Check out my research on this issue. [0] The results might surprise you.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50299152>

andix 12 hours ago

> For context: I deployed IPv6 in my networks in 2006. I have war stories.

Early IPv6 was a mess. It took a surprising amount of time for IPv6 to become mature and usable.

cyberax 9 hours ago

I'd argue that it's still not mature. ULA/GUA mess is one example, I recommend reading this delightful thread with beer and popcorn: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/v6ops/7-SuigPyP0R-C6ZC...

Having to waste 64 bits for the local part of the address is another one. There's an RFC in progress to allow neighbor discovery with shorter prefixes, so we might be able to use it by 2045.

And Android _still_ doesn't support DHCPv6.

kstrauser 10 hours ago

> The 50% stat is really mostly mobile phones on cellular networks, which remain the _only_ major success story for IPv6.

The largest ISPs in the US are Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, T-Mobile, Starlink, and Google Fiber. They all support IPv6. The only top-10 US provide that didn't support it is Frontier Communications, who is rolling it out.

In other words, the biggest companies who actually do this for a living all demonstrate that you're wrong.

As to your questions, read up on IPv6 ULA which solves all of them. None of the hosts on my LAN depend on having an outbound connection.

simoncion 13 hours ago

> IPv6 failed to reach the "boring, just works" level after 30 years of deployment.

/me glances over at my phone, which only has an IPv6 address when connected via cellular modem.

/me thinks back to the decade+ of incredibly boring IPv6 service from the residential ISPs I've used.

Sure.

If an ISP wants to provide only IPv6 addresses to CPE, they can set things up so that happens. But if you won't be satisfied until IPv4 no longer passes over the Internet, then you're going to die unhappy about that. The goal for our lifetime is one where every residential site has a global /56 and is behind IPv4 CGN, and servers hosted by commercial entities get to choose whether they assign IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, or both to their servers.

cyberax 13 hours ago

You're welcome to try to solve the challenges from my sibling post. Both of them are solved in IPv4 by a $100 router from a nearby store and with zero configuration.

simoncion 12 hours ago

> You're welcome to try to solve the challenges from my sibling post.

Check my reply to your post. [0] I wrote it up before I noticed your message here. ;)

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295293>

TobTobXX 13 hours ago

/me searching through all the mobile network providers in Switzerland (a technologically advanced country) and not finding any.

Seriously, this drives me mad. There is NO WAY to get IPv6 on mobile networks in Switzerland. Neither Swisscom, nor Sunrise, nor Salt, and of course no reseller.

And Android handles this particularly poorly. I have some servers set up in my tailscale network on private IPv6 addresses, but android doesn't query AAAA addresses if it has no ::/0 route, so I HAVE to route all my traffic through my VPN which often creates other complications (with corporate wifi etc.)

andix 12 hours ago

I get your frustration. But not having access to IPv6 personally does not mean IPv6 is dead. It's very much alive and handles considerable amounts of traffic.

simoncion 12 hours ago

To be clear, 'TobTobXX' isn't 'cyberax'. 'cyberax' is claiming that IPv6 is dead, whereas 'TobTobXX' is -quite justifiably- complaining that both his local cellular ISPs and Android suck.

TobTobXX 12 hours ago

Well ok, not dead. Dead sounds final and I still think that we will get more IPv6 deployed in the future. And I set up all my servers as IPv6-first. So no, I don't think IPv6 is dead.

But I'd claim it failed completely. Many very public services (eg. github.com, sentry.io, office365.com, archive.org) outright don't support it. And the fact that infrastructure providers (like mobile network carriers) don't support it either, proves that it is far from "alive". In fact, I'd say it is deader than MMS, Fax and landline. For these I can still get service. For IPv6 (on the phone) I can't.

andix 12 hours ago

It only failed to fully replace IPv4. But it runs perfectly fine along IPv4 and is very much alive. It replaced IPv4 where it was needed and didn't where it doesn't matter yet.

Email didn't replace letters on paper. But I wouldn't say email failed completely.

simoncion 11 hours ago

> ...and didn't where it doesn't matter yet.

Given the number of scaredy-ass ISPs out there who refuse to offer IPv6 service, I disagree with this. But I do strongly agree with the rest of your comment.

I also very strongly assert that claims of the form "IPv6 is not the only version of IP used on the Internet, therefor it is a complete failure." maybe with a side of "And this 'failure' means that IPv6 is a dead protocol." are just plain stupid. v4 and v6 were very deliberately designed to coexist, and if v4 continues to run on the Internet until the day the Internet is shut down, that's totally fine.

In my opinion, the most plausible future is one I mention in my second paragraph here. [0]

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50297244>

jodersky 12 minutes ago

I am in the same situation. However, I have found that there's a workaround/hack to make Android 'think' it has IPv6 connectivity. Instead of routing ::/0 through your VPN, simply add these two routes to your devices:

  - 2001:4860:4860::/112 (for chrome)
  - 2000::/128 (for the system)

They don't need to be actually accepted by your VPN. They only need to exist in Android's routing table for it to start using AAAA lookups.

The drawback is that this breaks happy eyeballs, and you may notice slower response times on requests (since now your phone will start by quering AAAA results first which always fail for sites not on your VPN, and then fall back to the A result). In practice however I haven't really noticed any difference.

Dagger2 7 hours ago

https://doc.didww.com/voice/outbound-trunks/outbound-sip-inf...?

Sesse__ 11 hours ago

Last time I was in a California hotel, it had IPv6 just fine. That was 2012. Perhaps you choose the wrong hotels :-)

throw0101a 9 hours ago

> IPv6 is dead. Nobody cares about it.

Except for everyone on T-Mobile US:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6oBCYHzrTA

Or all of FaceMeta's internal infrastructure:

* https://engineering.fb.com/2017/01/17/production-engineering...

Or 86% of France:

* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

10111001 15 hours ago

The only thing that surprised me was that Canada was so small compared to other Western countries. But I suppose that might be an artifact. The map shows IPv4 proportional to land area, but a "fair" allocation would have IPv4 proportionate to population, not land area, and I'd assume Canada is (overall) less densely populated than most other developed countries.

xacky 21 hours ago

The fact that we have yet to fully deprecate IPv4 should be considered a great failure in the tech industry's competence.

Miaourt 21 hours ago

It's actually a blessing for some, what would drive a company holding such a large capital of IPs to make it lose value by supporting IPv6?

TZubiri 21 hours ago

No, backwards compatibility is competence.

throw0101c 21 hours ago

> No, backwards compatibility is competence.

Creating an IPng was always going to be complicated:

      So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand
      the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means 
      [three] things immediately:

            You have to change the version number.

            You have to add new code to handle the new version.

      […]

            You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, 
            with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know 
            nothing of the new protocol.

      Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only 
      two solutions:

            (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both 
                 the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

            (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses
                 between the old and new protocols.

* https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1671

For anyone curious as to the decision-making process, here are the criteria for what the IETF was looking for in an IPng:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726

Here are the candidates that were floating around at the time, and the reason why the winner was chosen:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752

TZubiri 18 hours ago

This is very valuable, but not sure if you think it contradicts my comment.

I'm not saying that IPv6 is incompetent, or that IPv6 implementations break backward compatibility, or that the problem can be solved without breaking bc.

I'm saying that while IPv6 breaks bc itself, dual stack does not, and even full migrations can maintain bc or gracefully degraded.

In essence, not all implementations IPv6 are good, and not all migrations from IPv4 are responsible, if someone is blindly team IPv6 or blindly team IPv4 in general there's a lack of nuance.

cowlevel 16 hours ago

It's impossible for a long address system to be compatible with a short address system. No one has ever found a way to make it work. Plenty of people think they have, but upon closer inspection, they haven't.

NAT is the only one that actually does work, and it's terrible.

TZubiri 13 hours ago

Dual stack?

cowlevel 10 hours ago

That is not compatibility, that's accepting the lack of it

preisschild an hour ago

i find NAT64 acceptable

OnlineTux 21 hours ago

Why? It was designed and implemented by competent people and continues to work today.

xacky 21 hours ago

If you have a dedicated IPv4 address, those behind NAT and CGNAT face significant throttling and false positive blocking. It's been made worse by scraper botnets.

jon128 18 hours ago

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle

PeterStuer 21 hours ago

Then again, given some even failed to adopt the metric system ...

Also, that same tech industry has shown remarcable competence in working around IPv4's limitations.

inglor_cz 21 hours ago

This is quite similar situation indeed. It was once easier to adopt the metric system when the infrastructure was not yet as developed around the previous ones.

Austria-Hungary adopted the metric system in the 1870s. Back then: no cars, no highways, no speeding laws etc. Oxen-drawn wagons in the countryside were not built to a precise spec.

Only the railway, the architects and the artillery had to really switch. Ordinary people would still ask the grocer for half a pound of ham in the 1930s.

USA in the 1970s would have to remeasure all the land communications etc., or end up with a weird hybrid like the UK.

WHat we have in IPv4 and IPv6 is the weird UK-like hybrid...

throw0101c 18 hours ago

Australia managed to do a complete† change over starting in the 1970s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia

It's going to take decades, mostly waiting for the non-metric folks to die off probably and the raised-on-metric folks to grow up, but if you don't start you'll never finish.

† Can Aussie HNer confirm?

KnightHawk3 18 hours ago

I'm Australian and the only things measured in imperial units is babies (stones? But I think younger parents now use metric, but my parents only know baby weights in stones), beer (pints, but not the same as overseas I think, also it can vary by state), certain types of land units ("acerage" is a common land plot size) and height (feet and inches, for some reason people don't understand it in metric)

These are all customary usage so I'd say we are completely switched over, we couldn't tell you generally what these units look like outside of "how big is a baby" or "how tall is that person" or "is my beer large or small" really.

Symbiote 15 hours ago

Babies would be measured in pounds and ounces, as they weigh roughly ½ stone at birth.

spauldo 7 hours ago

AFAIK you all use imperial pints, which are a little bigger than the ones used in countries that still use the customary system (US and I assume Liberia). I'm pretty sure your pints are the same as those used in the rest of the commonwealth, but corrections are welcome.

That goes back to the fact that the imperial system replaced the older customary system after the American revolution. The US legislated a somewhat simplified version of the Customary System the English were using at the time, which was a piecemeal system based on several different acts of parliament over hundreds of years. We (much) later made slight changes so that our measurements are based on metric.

The Imperial System was instituted in the UK in 1826 and most of the measurements stayed the same, which is why our foot and pound are the same as your foot and pound. The biggest change was that imperial simplified the various liquid measurements to make them uniform. Before then, different liquids used different measurements. The gallon used in the US was originally based on the wine gallon whose value had been last set by parliament in 1709.

poncho_romero 14 hours ago

Canada also changed over in the 1970s. I was told as a kid that the US had planned to switch with us but backed out at the last minute. I'm not sure if that's true or not. Today, the imperial system holds on in a few places, like heights and weights of people (although not at the hospital) and cooking temperatures.

throw0101c 10 hours ago

> Today, the imperial system holds on in a few places, like heights and weights of people (although not at the hospital) and cooking temperatures.

Construction: "two-bys" are used, with 16/19.2/24" offsets for studs and such (though the building code has millimetre equivalents).

mahboi 17 hours ago

IPv4 is better than IPv6, and imperial is better than metric. I would like something to replace IPv4, but that thing shouldn't be IPv6 and probably won't be at this rate.

cowlevel 16 hours ago

How are they better?

drnick1 16 hours ago

They are better for human consumption/understanding. Have you ever had to type an IPv6? It's awful.

cowlevel 10 hours ago

How could you ever have really long addresses without having that problem?

mahboi 9 hours ago

They don't need to be really long. Adding one more octet to v4 makes it 1 trillion addresses. Sure the header should support longer than that, but it doesn't mean everyone needs to use all of it.

Dagger2 8 hours ago

1 trillion addresses isn't anywhere near enough[1]. Remember that we're not talking about L2 here. (...I don't think 1 trillion MACs would even be enough if we want to ensure they're unique, and it seems the IEEE agree with me since they expanded MACs to 64 bits, but that's a different conversation.)

And you already don't have to use all 128 bits in v6. You're forced to use about 48 of them, but the rest is your choice. You can just... not use some of them. It's fine.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1715/

mahboi 7 hours ago

The world is already managing with 32 bits of addresses plus NAT, and NAT most likely gives you less than 256 concurrent users per address. But sure, if some cheap ISP only owns a few /32s and needs to use more octets, let them do that, doesn't mean my 4-octet address needs to be super long too.

You're kinda forced to use 128 bits in v6 if you're an end user, cause that's the lowest common denominator. SLAAC is default, DHCP6 is widely unsupported. Most ISPs also only give out a /64 per spec minimum.

mahboi 15 hours ago

IPv4 is inherently more user-friendly. IPv6 was designed for a world, in the 1990s, where it was expected that every host wanted to be routable. SLAAC etc were all natural consequences of that. For today's use cases, the v4 NAT public/private thing actually turned out to be nicer than v6 global routing. There's still confusion today about whether devices are exposed on a v6 network because the spec itself says default-deny firewall is optional. They had to recently add privacy addresses. The other kinds of v6 addrs like link-local and ULA add more complexity. V4 addresses are easy to remember, which v6 advocates keep saying doesn't matter but it does. There are all these little network management details that are messier in v6, as you will find on online help forums for v6 advocates who you cannot write off as just being too used to v4.

The v6 spec also has all these alternative ways to use it more like v4, commonly brought up as a cop-out against the above criticisms, but that's actually part of the problem. The spec is too big, and things only implement a subset of it, see Android not supporting DHCP6. Realistically you'll have 99% of people using anything like this the default way, and the spec does define SLAAC, no-NAT, etc as default.

But you could say v6 is better just cause it has more addresses, and that's fair.

...Imperial is better than metric because it lines up with everyday usage better unless you're specifically concerned about the physical properties of water. Especially ˚F vs ˚C. Not a big deal though.

ratorx 15 hours ago

Can you give some examples of where Imperial works better from first principles and why you think so?

mahboi 15 hours ago

0-100˚F lines up well with weather ranges, and 1˚F is about the smallest diff someone can feel. Many digital thermostats use integer ˚F and introduce 0.5 steps if you switch to ˚C, even in countries where ˚C is default, so they kinda admit it.

Pounds vs kg, similar story as F vs C. Pound is pretty much the human-discernible granularity. Otherwise doesn't matter.

0-100 MPH lines up well with car speeds, which is usually the thing you're measuring with that. KPH is excessively granular for that. Probably not by design, but yeah.

The feet/inches vs meters/cm thing matters less. It's base-12 vs base-10. You can do decimal feet or fractional meters of course, but it's less common, so apparently both ways are fine.

throw0101a 8 hours ago

As a Canadian I have no idea what 72˚F means or feels like: is it warm or cold? I do know what 22˚C feels like and how to dress for it. How "intuitive" a temperature number is completely learned behaviour and cultural acclimation.

Pounds vs kg: see above. All the non-American people seem to have "intuitive" grasp of metric measurements.

> 0-100 MPH lines up well with car speeds, which is usually the thing you're measuring with that. KPH is excessively granular for that. Probably not by design, but yeah.

So 'more granularity' is good for temperature but not for speed. Got it.

> The feet/inches vs meters/cm thing matters less. It's base-12 vs base-10. You can do decimal feet or fractional meters of course, but it's less common, so apparently both ways are fine.

By "foot" do you mean 'regular' foot or survey foot:

* https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot

Because there are two different units in the US customary system, used for basically the same purpose, that use the same name. And the "foot" isn't the only unit like that:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(force)

Here's another one: which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold? A pound of feathers. Because feathers use one 'pound-system' [1] and is 453g, while gold uses another pound-system [2] and is 373g. But of course an "ounce" of gold (31g) is more than an "ounce" of feathers (28g), because Troy is 1/12 of pound but Avoirdupois is 1/16. In addition to the above "ounces" there is also "fluid ounces".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight

mahboi 7 hours ago

I didn't say it's about being used to one. It can be "in the 20s" C for multiple months, kinda silly. 22.0˚C also feels different from 22.5˚C. There's a right amount of granularity for temperature and for speed.

Foot and pound have unambiguous meanings in the US. There's a reason the whole survey foot and gold-pound thing is trivia that nobody knows, they're niche or abandoned systems that you only use if you're being clear that it's not regular feet or pounds. I also know that the US system is technically not "imperial," but nobody cares.

JDups 6 hours ago

I'm not sure common urban/highway speed limits like 30mph/70-75mph line up better than the 50kmh/100-110kmh you see in Canada.

spauldo 8 hours ago

I'm not the person you were replying to, but I can answer this one. And yeah, I can see all the metric fanboys (a very small subset of metric users, mind you) hovering over that downvote button, but I don't get paid in Internet points so here goes:

The nice thing about imperial (as well as the customary system used in the US) is that it's based on measurements that people have found useful over thousands of years. They're human units, adapted to what people need to do with them, not the other way around.

It's difficult to explain to metric folks because it's really something you have to experience. But here's an example:

Reservoir volume in the US is measured in acre-inches. An acre is a unit of area used for measuring property, usually farmland. It's a bit less than half of a hectare. And of course an inch is 2.4cm. Acre-inches sounds totally bizarre when you first hear about it. But for the people that need to work with this value, it's an extremely useful way to measure reservoirs and gives you an intuition that you just don't get from cubic meters.

It's true that you can't just convert that to other units of volume without doing some math or looking up the conversion rate, but that rarely matters. If you're trying to figure out how fast the lake will rise or fall with a given inflow and outflow, you're going to have to have some way to account for the fact that the lake is a) an irregular shape and b) takes up more area the higher the water gets. You already need to know the area of the lake at any particular height to work out the evaporation rate anyway, so that's a number you're going to have. The units are designed to make that calculation easier, which was really important back in the days when slide rules were the state of the art.

All the customary units are like this in one way or another. They're units designed for a particular domain, and when used in their domain they work very well and calculations can be done in your head. They use fractions because that's what people have historically used (seriously - my grandfather could work fractions in his head faster than I could type them into a calculator, and he made asphalt for a living. Imagine what a carpenter could do.).

Think about it. Imagine you were never taught a measurement system. You find yourself needing to come up with a unit to make measurements for wooden planks you're going to use to build a house. Would you choose a unit as long as a meter? Or one as short as a centimeter or even a decimeter?

Bonus challenge to the fine folks clicking that downvote button: give me a real practical reason to prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit, besides the fact that Celsius is part of the metric system. No, the freezing and boiling points of water don't cut it - I work with hydrocarbon fuels, I salt my driveway and patio, I don't live at sea level, and quite honestly every American 8-year-old can spout off 32° and 212°. There's a Fahrenheit equivalent to Kelvin (Rankine) so the Kelvin to Celsius equivalence doesn't count either. My claim is that both scales are completely arbitrary, and only advantage one has over the other is that you're used to one of them. Go ahead, prove me wrong!

throw0101a 8 hours ago

> The nice thing about imperial (as well as the customary system used in the US) is that it's based on measurements that people have found useful over thousands of years. They're human units, adapted to what people need to do with them, not the other way around.

US customary is not "thousands" of years; temperature (Fahrenheit) only came out in 1724 for example, and many other units were only standardize much more recently:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement#History...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_of_units_of_measurement...

Second, even with-in the system itself there was also sorts of inconsistencies. Until just a few years ago there were two "foot" units; one was recently retired:

* https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apothecaries'_system

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Pharmacopeia

Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(force)

> Think about it. Imagine you were never taught a measurement system. You find yourself needing to come up with a unit to make measurements for wooden planks you're going to use to build a house. Would you choose a unit as long as a meter? Or one as short as a centimeter or even a decimeter?

Millimeters. That single unit gets you down to very small scales (finer than 1/16") and to large lengths: four significant digits (9999mm) gets you to the equivalent of >32' (~11yd).

* https://web.archive.org/web/20200516223819/https://themetric...

As evidence for this Australia/NZ/EU do everything in millimetres in construction.

spauldo 7 hours ago

> US customary is not "thousands" of years

You misunderstood me. It's based on measurements that people have been using for thousands of years. The Romans had feet and miles, for example - not exactly the same lengths, but for the same purposes. The Japanese shaku is almost exactly the same as a US foot. A Japanese Shō is about half a gallon. A Chinese jīn is just slightly larger than a pound. There's a reason for this.

> there was also sorts of inconsistencies

I never claimed otherwise. But do notice that the survey foot and standard foot weren't used for the same purposes, and the difference between them wasn't likely to confuse anyone except maybe people new to the field.

> Here's another one: which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

Yep, Troy weights. And no one's sure where the Troy system came from. The main reason for its use is because of international trade. Also not something regular people (i.e. people that didn't work directly with precious metals) would have had contact with.

> Millimeters

Hah! Yeah right. Look at all the various non-metric systems that have existed throughout history. Did any of them use something like millimeters to measure wooden planks? Why not?

> As evidence for this Australia/NZ/EU do everything in millimetres in construction.

They do it because the metric system is mandated there and it doesn't give you reasonably sized unit for that scale of work.

Try this: go to a home center (or whatever it's called there - the place you buy building supplies) and measure some drywall. Do the measurements you made agree to the advertised ones within half a millimeter? Compare the dimensions of drywall sheets from different pallets and manufacturers. Do their dimensions agree to within half a millimeter? If not, that's a sure sign you're using units poorly adapted for purpose.

Root_Denied 3 hours ago

A couple more to add to your list: an inch is about as long as your thumb joint (with some variation between individuals obviously). It's an easy way to gauge the size of everyday objects without needing to carry around a tape measure.

The recommendation for emergency supplies is about a gallon of water per person per day - or 3.7 liters if you're using metric.

I've also heard it claimed that the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale is more functionally useful because the endpoints of 0 and 100 represent the tipping point of serious danger for humans from hot or cold weather. The closer you get to 100 degrees the more care you need to take about heat stroke and keeping hydrated, and similarly the closer you get to 0 degrees the more care you need to take about retaining heat and staying out of the elements - the freezing and boiling point of water isn't a necessary marker for survival. And people like nice round numbers to serve as markers for such things, divisibility be damned.

Metric is sterile and functional for calculation and consistency, which is fine and necessary for many things, but that's not a reason to completely ditch Imperial.

perilunar 2 hours ago

> Reservoir volume in the US is measured in acre-inches.

Never heard of an acre-inch before, and I'd have to get out a calculator to work out how much water that actually is in pints or gallons, or how much it weighs.

The metric equivalent would be a hectare-meter or a hectare-mm. I know a hectare is 100 m x 100 m, so 10,000 m². So I instantly know that a hectare-meter is 10,000 m³ (10 ML, or 10,000 tonnes of fresh water). A hectare-mm is 10 m³ (10 kL). If my 1 ha block gets 1 mm of rain, then that's 10 kL or 10 tonnes of water. So easy i can do it in my head.

> And of course an inch is 2.4cm

2.54 cm.

woah 13 hours ago

IPv6 has a huge amount of bloat created by guys in cargo shorts and pony tails being flown out to exotic locales 3x a year for IETF conferences to argue about minutia and try to get their name on some IPv6 spec document. All they needed to do was add a couple more dots onto IPv4 and maybe switch to hex.

Dagger2 12 hours ago

Wasn't it from academics in their ivory towers? That's kind of the opposite of flying out to exotic locales.

Of course, back here in the real world you can look at the RFCs yourself and see that they're credited to places like Ipsilon Networks, Xerox and Sun Microsystems. Boring corporate network companies.

woah 10 hours ago

No literally, the IETF meets 3x a year in a different location each time and all the guys from with cargo shorts from the companies you named argue about IPv6 minutia all day and spend their per diem by night. It's actually a lot of fun.

cowlevel 9 hours ago

Ah yes exotic locations like San Francisco, New York, London, Prague, Sydney, and Tokyo. Totally not major business hubs or anything.

Dagger2 9 hours ago

Some of those locations probably did feel more exotic back in the early 90s than they do today... but they're also sensible places to hold international conferences. Where are you supposed to do them, if not there?

mahboi 12 hours ago

Nah, the details in the spec all have good reasons, but it's based on the original mistake of making it an entirely separate network from v4 with new address blocks.

throw0101a 8 hours ago

> […] but it's based on the original mistake of making it an entirely separate network from v4 with new address blocks.

This was not a "mistake":

      So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand
      the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means 
      [three] things immediately:

            You have to change the version number.

            You have to add new code to handle the new version.

      […]

            You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, 
            with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know 
            nothing of the new protocol.

      Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only 
      two solutions:

            (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both 
                 the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

            (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses
                 between the old and new protocols.

* https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1671

mahboi 8 hours ago

Yes it's 3A. They didn't need to make the new protocol have separate state from the old one. Let me keep my old address on the new protocol.

throw0101a 7 hours ago

> Yes it's 3A. They didn't need to make the new protocol have separate state from the old one.

Except there will be a period of time when many 'network elements' (routers, firewalls, servers (web, SMTP, DNS, etc), clients) will not be updated for the new protocol so you may also need 3B.

And this will be true for any IPng, and not just the one that just happened to be chosen to be for "IPv6" (which was SIPP, over CATNIP and TUBA; see RFC 1752).

> Let me keep my old address on the new protocol.

You can/could. You can encourage people who have addresses in the older protocol to use the new one with "free" "automatic" address assignments in the new one to encourage translation and tunnelling:

> For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by appending the IPv4 address to 2002::/16.

> For example, the global IPv4 address 192.0.2.4 has the corresponding 6to4 prefix 2002:c000:0204::/48. This gives a prefix length of 48 bits, which leaves room for a 16-bit subnet field and 64 bit host addresses within the subnets.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

And the 'old' IPv4 addresses are available in the new IPv6 world:

> Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. A previous format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", was ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated.[5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresse...

There is no way around this limitation: you must have a separate network space because of physical limitations.

Your supposed solution, and many others, have been thought of already. Have been tried. You are not thinking of anything new in your proposal.

mahboi 7 hours ago

6to4 and NAT64 are not what I'm saying. Those involve a relay server and v4 translation, and there's an entire memo on why that's unreliable and abandoned. I want to switch to fully native IPv6 without changing any of my addresses. There's no reason this should be impossible.

cowlevel 10 hours ago

That's what they did and you're here complaining about it

mahboi 9 hours ago

IPv6 invalidated the existing IPv4 addresses, changed the addressing scheme, and de facto got rid of DHCP and NAT in favor of SLAAC and global routing. It doesn't share any state with v4. This was a very different set of choices from just adding more bits to v4.

throw0101a 8 hours ago

> All they needed to do was add a couple more dots onto IPv4 and maybe switch to hex.

There is no 'just' extending the address length:

      So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand
      the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means 
      [three] things immediately:

            You have to change the version number.

            You have to add new code to handle the new version.

      […]

            You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, 
            with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know 
            nothing of the new protocol.

      Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only 
      two solutions:

            (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both 
                 the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

            (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses
                 between the old and new protocols.

* https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1671

You also have to update DNS to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. (A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A+" address (for "IPv4+" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.)

In any 'address extension' plan the legacy code cannot use the new address space; you have to:

* update the IP stack (like with IPv6)

* tell applications about new DNS records (like IPv6)

* set up translation layers for legacy-only code that cannot be update to reach extended-address-only destination (like IPv6 with DNS64/NAT64, CLAT, etc)

nomel 15 hours ago

My digital calipers can display freedom fractions. It makes my eyes bleed.

charlieyu1 21 hours ago

Not enough supply/demand. AWS charge like $0.005/hr per IPv4 address

BLKNSLVR 21 hours ago

Well the migration from IPv4 to IPv6 is probably less important and less impactful than climate change, and let's check the score on that...

:grimace:

mtoner23 18 hours ago

one is close to hundreds of millions in cost and with likeminded stakeholders. the other is hundreds of trillions in costs with the entire human population as stakeholders.

BLKNSLVR 9 hours ago

... and yet IPv6 still taking its sweet time.

Point being that patterns on small scales match patterns on larger scales.

tcfhgj 17 hours ago

but climate change is not up to the tech industry

BLKNSLVR 9 hours ago

Decreasingly the case it would seem.

Root_Denied 3 hours ago

The datacenters certainly aren't helping their case.

perilunar 3 hours ago

Depends on what you mean by 'tech'.

VCFundedGenYer 21 hours ago

IPv4 is perfectly and objectively fine on internal networks. IPv6 is overkill and way too complicated for most.

IPv6 can be selectively applied to say, NAT addresses, but other than that, IPv4 is just fine and your statement is incorrect.

orangeboats 20 hours ago

You can't selectively use IPv6 in the WAN and IPv4 in the LAN.

How would an IPv4 client send a packet to an IPv6 server? The IPv4 packet has only 4 bytes to spare for the destination address.

You can't.

Anything longer, even if it's just 1 bit, would require a new IP version.

freeone3000 20 hours ago

You can run a 4to6 NAT, where specific v6 addresses (the ones you’re talking to) are aliased to reserved v4 addresses out of the PUA.

orangeboats 19 hours ago

I have seen people suggesting this before, but it's problematic for a few reasons:

- If you are managing the 4to6 mappings manually, it's obviously not going to be scalable. Just to give people an idea, websites nowadays can connect to 10+ IPs in a single page due to CDN load balancing and stuff.

- If you are handling the mappings automatically, such as by monitoring DNS queries and creating dynamic mappings based on that, the issues become more insidious: applications with hardcoded IP literals would fail without an obvious reason.

wmf 15 hours ago

The "solution" is that IPv6-only servers do not exist and will never exist.

favorited 14 hours ago

I have encountered multiple IPv6-only domains - certain random domains were accessible through Chrome, but unreachable from any command line tools. Turns out they were IPv6-only, and Chrome was doing its own DNS resolution, while anything that was using the platform DNS stack was hitting a black hole between OPNsense and my ONT.

growse 19 hours ago

Alternatively, IPv4 simply does not scale effectively on the LAN, whereas IPv6 allows much simpler addressing and routing topologies. Simple = good.

throw0101c 18 hours ago

> IPv4 is perfectly and objectively fine on internal networks. IPv6 is overkill and way too complicated for most.

Unless there's a merger/acquisition and the two companies both use 10.0.0.0.

Most home networks use 192.168, and so you can't use that in corporate environments, because the WFH people who VPN in could then have routing snags between local and remote locations.

Also, in your VPN software be sure to perhaps not use 172 addresses (like my previous job did), as some of those ranges are used by Docker by default, and so you can cause issues for developers.

But other than that IPv4 RFC 1918 is not complicated at all…

tredre3 12 hours ago

In theory IPv6 solves the problem by putting all of this under a single prefix (fc00::/8) and asking nicely that implementation/admins add 40 random bits to form their prefix. Which is plenty to prevent (almost all) eventual conflicts.

The thing is, asking nicely doesn't always work. Sure, automated tools like docker/incus/wireguard/tailscale will respect it. But admins who don't want to be stuck typing long addresses? Not so much. I've lost count of how often I encounter a network admin that manually set their prefix to some fcXX::, when it's not outright fc00::.

Of course you can (and should) blame this on admins and not on IPv6, but then the same could be said of IPv4 where adding entropy to 10.X.X.0 is the usual recommended way of doing things.

throw0101c 10 hours ago

> In theory IPv6 solves the problem by putting all of this under a single prefix (fc00::/8) and asking nicely that implementation/admins add 40 random bits to form their prefix. Which is plenty to prevent (almost all) eventual conflicts.

IPv6 solves this by making it easy for everyone to get their own 200::/3 address so that when two companies get together they have completely different /48s (or whatever).

> […] but then the same could be said of IPv4 where adding entropy to 10.X.X.0 is the usual recommended way of doing things.

There has never been a recommendation to add entropy to 10/8 addresses. At least I have never heard of such a thing. Can you provide a citation for this (alleged) recommendation? Is there an RFC of some kind?

jon128 18 hours ago

It's the hobbyists who LARP as network engineers, and that end users and hiring managers can't tell the difference, who are holding everyone back.

Anyone who doesn't by default set up IPv6-only networks by default with NAT64 and DNS64, or who present any notion that IPv4 is somehow "okay", shouldn't have a job anywhere, not even an entry-level desktop support job.

throw0101c 21 hours ago

Ran across a comment a while ago on some fun "IPv6 math":

    On the surface of the Earth [land+water], there are 8.4 IPv4 addresses per km². Not counting the oceans, that would be 28 IPv4 addresses per km² land.

    IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm² (yes, square millimetre).

    In terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth.

* Via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326806#unv_28331245

A second way of thinking about it:

* Stars in the Milky Way: 400 Billion

* Galaxies in the universe: 2 Trillion

* So (4x10¹¹)x(2x10¹²) = 8x10²³ stars in the universe.

* Size of IPv6 address space: 3.4x10³⁸

* Find the ratio between addresses and stars: 3.4x10³⁸ / 8x10²³

IPv6 offers about 430 trillion times more addresses than estimated stars in the universe. From Tom Coffee's presentation "An Enterprise IPv6 Address Planning Case-Study":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tnh4upTOC4

brk 20 hours ago

But it is really about more than just the available pool of addresses.

Much of the IPv6 rollout challenges have been centered around routing and security. It's great that I can personally have (in theory) more IP addresses than I would ever practically need (and I am saying this as someone with 200 IP endpoints just in my house), but if I can't easily manage and control access much of the theoretical benefit goes away.

IMO, IPv6 solved the address pool size part of the issue, but it made managing the v4 to v6 transition very painful.

throw0101c 18 hours ago

> IMO, IPv6 solved the address pool size part of the issue, but it made managing the v4 to v6 transition very painful.

There is no easy way to transition from IPv4 to any kind of IPng; see my other comment:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50288091

cowlevel 16 hours ago

You can still control access. Most home routers have firewalls that work a lot like V4 port forwarding except they don't have to maintain NAT tables or use as much CPU .

tredre3 12 hours ago

That is a fun exercise! However the reality is that public IPv6 is always given out in 48 or 64 bits prefixes (minimum).

The math is a lot less impressive when you do it with 2^48 or 2^64.

unethical_ban 2 hours ago

Yep. IPv6 should be thought of as 2^64 subnets, each with "enough space for everyone" within each subnet.

nrki an hour ago

Noone pointing out that it's a mistake to use a Mercator projection for thjs

schmichael 19 hours ago

Comparing land area to IP address assignments is one of the sillier visualizations I've ever seen. I can't imagine what this is intending to convey. Should Siberia have more IP addresses than all of Europe?

swores 19 hours ago

It can be interesting to look at without implying that it ought to be evenly distributed by land space.

phainopepla2 18 hours ago

Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but I don't see what's interesting about it at all. Visualizing IPv4 against population (or maybe GDP) would have been far more illuminating.

cbondurant 21 hours ago

I'd be interested to see how this compares to the same scaling procedure, but by population. Essentially seeing what the IPv4-per-capita is.

huijzer 20 hours ago

Unsurprisingly, the map is very similar to the World Population Density Map: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00

yassermanss 2 hours ago

Interesting. I think this can be used a measure of prosperity of a nation. like GDP.

wmchen 16 hours ago

One thing that was always a curious anomaly for me is Brazil having the second largest number of autonomous systems (ASNs) in the world. [1]

I've been told that this is actually because Brazil has a very competitive local ecosystem of small ISPs competing with eachother on the regional scale.

[1]: https://bgp.he.net/report/world

kassner 2 hours ago

There is federal funding available to finance the connection of underserved areas, specially rural, so the nature of the problem makes it natural to be fragmented. Also considering how bureaucratic Brazil is, most of the red tape was greatly streamlined for small providers.

timvdalen 21 hours ago

Good to see the Dutch were able to seize a lot of blocks from the sea!

teekert 21 hours ago

It's what we do ;). I'll never forget my visit to the Delta Werken, 35 years ago? Remove our dikes, boom, half the country gone.

Anyway, the Netherlands also seems to be an attractive place to build datacenters.

calmbonsai 7 hours ago

Yeah, but it’s not land and the analogy quickly breaks down given that’ ya know, NAT exists and DNS servers are under soverign control.

Guillaume86 21 hours ago

Population would make more sense.

bluGill 21 hours ago

There is nothing that makes sense. The world population is about twice the total number of IPv4 addresses total. Many people own more than one device, and there are good networking reasons that you want most of the possible addresses on any network segment unused. There is no way to solve all of those problems at the same time and so nothing make sense when we are talking about IPv4 and it never will.

mahboi 15 hours ago

NAT is the solution so far

bluGill 14 hours ago

NAT is a terrible solution with major downsides.

We are close to not having enough just for the servers people really want much less random things that should be contactable peer to peer.

NAT should not replace a firewall

mahboi 14 hours ago

Sure, but it's evidently not that bad. And actually safer than firewalls because the default is so strongly deny-inbound. Most people absolutely don't want random devices on LAN to be exposed to WAN, and those with servers can get a public IP.

polski-g 14 hours ago

IPV4 per traffic usage would make even more sense.

Dagger2 9 hours ago

Or perhaps we should be distributing the land more fairly.

MisterMunchkin 21 hours ago

I still think we should just extend the length of IPv4. In my proposed system, existing addresses would become a subnet of the new set.

Eg 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1

And then we dish out all the new address space. You would get the network providers to handle address conversion until software and hardware has been updated. Because all the existing addresses are reserved in the new set, it doesn’t affect them.

Keeps all the nice parts of IPv4, doesn’t require everyone to switch to an entirely new system, backwards compatible with existing hardware/software. Problem solved.

harrouet 21 hours ago

You can do this in IPv6

mahboi 15 hours ago

Not really. My home IP is 71.177.17.171, how do I get an equivalent v6 that gets routed directly to me? NAT64 and 6to4 don't do this.

Dagger2 13 hours ago

It's not clear what you're asking for exactly.

You have 2002:47b1:11ab::/48. If your ISP supports it, packets sent to that /48 will be delivered to you as native v6 packets, otherwise they'll be stuffed into a v4 packet which will be sent to 71.177.17.171. Or there's ::ffff:71.177.17.171 which will reach you using unmodified v4 packets.

That's two different ways your v4 address is present in v6.

mahboi 13 hours ago

I would like 71.177.17.171, encoded as 2002:47b1:11ab:: or whatever static prefix, to go directly to my router as v6 packets without ever being translated to v4. 2002:47b1:11ab:: doesn't do that, it goes to a 6to4 relay and is translated to v4. I'm pretty sure every ISP will at best give you a v4 /32 and an unrelated v6 /64. I don't want that separate v6 address, I want the same logical address for both.

Dagger2 9 hours ago

2002:47b1:11ab::/48 will go to your router if you announce it in BGP. It only goes to a 6to4 relay if there's no more-specific route.

(On home Internet you'll probably need your ISP to handle the announcements, like they already do for your v4 address.)

mahboi 9 hours ago

Even if I owned my ISP, pretty sure no other ISP would honor that announcement. That's a reserved 6to4 range.

throw0101c 21 hours ago

> I still think we should just extend the length of IPv4. In my proposed system, existing addresses would become a subnet of the new set.

There is no "just" extending the address length:

      So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand
      the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means 
      [three] things immediately:

            You have to change the version number.

            You have to add new code to handle the new version.

      […]

            You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, 
            with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know 
            nothing of the new protocol.

      Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only 
      two solutions:

            (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both 
                 the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

            (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses
                 between the old and new protocols.

* https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1671

> Keeps all the nice parts of IPv4, doesn’t require everyone to switch to an entirely new system, backwards compatible with existing hardware/software. Problem solved.

You have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support your "IPv4+" plan. Just like with IPv6.

You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6. In any 'address extension' plan the legacy code cannot use the new address space; you have to:

* update the IP stack (like with IPv6)

* tell applications about new DNS records (like IPv6)

* set up translation layers for legacy-only code that cannot be update to reach IPv4+-only destination (like IPv6 with DNS64/NAT64, CLAT, etc)

You're updating the exact same code paths in both the "IPv4+" and IPv6 scenarios: dual-stack, DNS, socket address structures, dealing with legacy-only code that is never touched to deal with the larger address space.

"Just adding more bits" means updating a whole bunch of code (routers, firewalls, DNS, APIs, userland, etc) to handle the new data structures. There is no "just": it's the same work for IPv6 as with any other idea.

cr3ative 21 hours ago

Hey, if you want to add OAuth and JWT to that idea for some reason, boy do I have an RFC for you https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html

teddyh 14 hours ago

It’s a draft RFC.

Dagger2 13 hours ago

So is this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meow-mrrp

Being an IETF draft means nothing at all, as covered in this IETF draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wkumari-not-a-draft/

teddyh 13 hours ago

Yes, that was my point.

mitxela 21 hours ago

That's literally what ipv6 does.

georgyo 21 hours ago

This is all the bad parts of ipv6 with none of the good parts...

You still need to have routers, clients, and absolutely everything to understand the new scheme to use those new addresses.

charlieyu1 21 hours ago

Not using hex is a plus I guess?

growse 21 hours ago

You're welcome to not use hex. For either addressing scheme.

bottled_poe 21 hours ago

And vice-versa for decimal on ipv6 if desired, I guess?

throw0101c 21 hours ago

> And vice-versa for decimal on ipv6 if desired, I guess?

Or octal:

* https://networkingtoolbox.net/ip-address-convertor/represent...

charlieyu1 17 hours ago

IPv6 is 16 bytes, the person I replied to gives a 8 bytes scheme

dspillett 16 hours ago

However many bytes are used in the scheme, you could in theory use decimal or hexadecimal to represent an address in string form for either scheme. Once the string is unpacked and interpreted, the address is just a number.

Though I've never seen a v6 address represented that way, it would make then noticeably longer, so I don't know if anything will accept such a string as a valid address. Though IPv4-mapped addresses are sometimes show as a mix (::ffff:10.5.2.1 for 10.5.2.1) so maybe I'm wrong there.

Likewise I've never seen IPv4 addresses written in hex in the wild, but the relevant specs say it is valid. `ping 0xc0a82bc2` works just as well as `ping 192.168.43.194` but I doubt many forms accepting IPv4 addresses will validate that and allow it.

bluGill 21 hours ago

Computers use binary. Hex is a human convenience. For anyone in computers hex is much better than decimal for obvious reasons. For anybody not in computers hex makes no sense and I'd need weeks of math lectures (which they wouldn't do the homework for and thus fail) to explain it.

Sharlin 20 hours ago

Honestly IPv4 addresses should always have been formatted in hex, like FF 00 00 69, with whatever delimiter. Would make it trivial to write directly as a 32-bit int, and parsing and formatting a string would also be cheaper. And you could have funny blocks like CAFE.0.0.

WorldMaker 20 hours ago

You can indeed make good use of those funny names in IPv6. If your /64 or /56 prefix is $prefix you can assign your coffee pot to $prefix::cafe or maybe keep it just fe80::cafe if you only want link local access to your coffee pot.

preisschild an hour ago

much easier than `cafe.local` with mDNS :)

nekusar 21 hours ago

That was kinda the way IPv5 proposed to handle it.

But the big big problem isn't windows/Linux/mac. Writing drivers for those are "easy".

The problem lies in all the networking gear speaks only IPv4 and/or 6. LLM assisted hacks can get into maintenance areas, but these devices are also built to support the least amount of things. Like, there may not be enough ram or storage to even run it.

And 20 years in, you see how well IPv6 has taken off :eyeroll:

And even on my network, I disabled IPv6. My upstream ISP is doing something that makes '6 unstable, but '4 is fine. And I find most network engineers don't have to maintain '6, so they never really learn it.

spauldo 6 hours ago

I thought IPv5 was a protocol designed for telecoms to route voice data over packet networks, though? It wasn't supposed to be a replacement for IPv4.

mort96 21 hours ago

> backwards compatible with existing hardware/software

Absolutely not. Existing IPv4 hardware and software expects addresses to be 4 bytes long. They expect packets to have a 4 byte source address at offset 12 in the header, then a 4 byte destination address at offset 16. Everything breaks if you try to give them a header with an 8 byte source address at offset 12 and an 8 byte destination address at offset 20.

throw0101c 21 hours ago

> Absolutely not. Existing IPv4 hardware and software expects addresses to be 4 bytes long.

As does DNS.

"A" records are fixed at 32 bits, so you have to add a new record type and update all DNS software, plus user-space API/library code and data structures to ask for and store the new record type.

Just like IPv6.

There is no "just" adding more addresses: whatever scheme anyone comes up with is the same amount of work as IPv6.

* https://github.com/becarpenter/misc/blob/main/why6why.md

knottn 21 hours ago

The set of all ip hardware and software is much much larger than just what currently exists, as it includes all hardware and software that is yet to be produced. Said another way, it’s a foolish consistency.

mort96 21 hours ago

I responded to a claim about existing hardware/software.

malfist 19 hours ago

For every complex and difficult problem, someone has an easy, simple and wrong solution. Usually the presence of "just" is a good clue.

icedchai 21 hours ago

This seems achievable if you can figure out how to fit 64-bits into 32. ;)

zeroq 21 hours ago

Kids these days can fit 64-bits into a 3-bit hole, and if you squint hard enough it still sounds like a robot. Amazing times, I tell you.

vrighter 20 hours ago

just put it in the square hole!

_blk 21 hours ago

You just drop the top half. Or xor it? That'd make for some nice traffic-pattern art ;)

Now the reason this doesn't work is that the address length is not encoded, so if you make the address longer, no one knows about it and they [routers and destinations] just assume the wrong address and send it on or discard the frame

ndriscoll 21 hours ago

How does 192.168.0.1 talk to 192.0.0.0.0.168.0.1? Like, literally, how does it make a packet with that destination address?

The entire ipv4 space is already mapped to reserved subsets of ipv6, by the way. e.g. ::ffff:0:0/96 (i.e. 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.255.255.w.x.y.z) or 64:ff9b::/96. v6 devices can already "talk to" v4. The problem is the ipv6 space is obviously not a subset of ipv4, so v4 doesn't have a clean way to talk to or even about v6.

orangeboats 21 hours ago

>Eg 192.168.0.1 becomes 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1

How is this different from ::192.168.0.1? :)

wpm 21 hours ago

I can read one at a glance and the other makes me fill in the blanks myself after having to count how many invisible blanks I need to fill in.

Of all the sins of IPv6, its tied between using ':' as the separator, and the god awful '::' "just skip writing the address because we made them too fucking big lol"

Wouldn't have been a problem if they hadn't given every square millimeter of the planet 100 billion addresses.

orangeboats 21 hours ago

You are telling me ::192.168.0.1 is not immediately visible as 16-4 bytes?

Fine, let's change the question.

Without counting, how many zeroes are there in 192.168.0.0.0.0.0.1?

wpm 20 hours ago

mahboi 14 hours ago

You don't need 192.168.0.0.0.0.0.1. 40 bits covers the world easily, like 1.2.3.4.5. This doesn't mean the field has to be only 40 bits, could be 128 and you don't write the trailing 0s. Of course this means no SLAAC.

But I don't get why the other commenter was proposing putting the 0s at the beginning instead of the end. Shouldn't the new address space be under the existing subnets?

growse 20 hours ago

My blog's hosted on either 3106689564 or 42540619367231808600192856535952785520 depending on your addressing scheme.

See, no colons in sight!

mahboi 14 hours ago

whoa you got a 310 number

throw0101c 20 hours ago

> I can read one at a glance and the other makes me fill in the blanks myself after having to count how many invisible blanks I need to fill in.

The protocol chosen for IPng, SIPP, did actually have "only" 64 bits, but this was deemed not enough as folks did not want to have to worry about running out again (amongst other reasons), and so tweaked it to have a fixed 128 bits:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752

SIPP originally was variable-length capable, but it was decided fixed-length was better (e.g., for hardware like ASICs).

> Wouldn't have been a problem if they hadn't given every square millimeter of the planet 100 billion addresses.

For the record: IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm²; in terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth.

wpm 20 hours ago

You're right, my 100B per square millimeter undershot by six orders of magnitude.

I woulda thought 18 quintillion would've been enough addresses for the next century or two but good thing we locked in all this extra data we throw away with a '::'.

I'm sure it was all well considered by intelligent people, but it was still a dumb decision.

ndriscoll 19 hours ago

What problem does 128 bits cause? Just that you don't like :: for a run of 0s? Do you need to care about ipv6 addresses in your work? Because I can tell you that when I'm trying to design simple, efficient routing and firewall rules (with e.g. 100s of thousands of endpoints across different datacenters on different continents), it's really nice to be able to subnet things the way I'd like instead of the way I must to squeeze things into the space I have, and not have to worry about backing myself into a corner later because I gave the wrong number of bits to various dimensions. And worst case, if you somehow got it wrong, just give yourself an entire /64 or more to try again, with it being compatible with what you did (no need to do a phased migration that requires reclamation as you go along).

Like I only tangentially interact with this stuff, but I can't imagine how a network operator wouldn't prefer we live in an all ipv6 world.

cowlevel 16 hours ago

Don't forget you want extra bits for hierarchical routing. Companies like Amazon and cloudflare have many separate address blocks instead of one big one because that's what was available, but it means every router in the internet has to remember all their blocks instead of just one.

andix 21 hours ago

There is barely any legacy hardware/software that doesn't work with IPv6. It's just not an issue.

Dual-stack is also the default, and CG-NAT exists as a fallback. For IPv6 only websites there is still the option to use a HTTP proxy.

spauldo 6 hours ago

There's still quite a few pockets of the industry where IPv6 just isn't available. Industrial control systems, for instance - there's lots of PLCs and SCADA software that are still IPv4-only. It's changing slowly, but industrial computing runs on thirty year time scales and there's still a lot of stuff out there that won't even run on modern operating systems. We use 32-bit Windows XP VMs or sometimes even FreeDOS for some of the software we use.

inglor_cz 21 hours ago

This reminds me of the following XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/

zamadatix 21 hours ago

Lots have thoughts on this, few take the time to review the existing implementations/proposals and explain both how it is their approach doesn't run in to the same problems as well as the problems their proposal still doesn't resolve.

Most of the time, this results in people thinking the big problems are one set like "if only there was a way to translate" while the real remaining problems are another set like "and how do you get people to want to transition when it works well enough for those clients in the translated state".

dspillett 21 hours ago

That would still constitute an entirely new system, just one that looks very like the previous one. So much code and other infrastructure (routing tables in hardware etc.) relies on IPv4 addresses being 32-bits not 64 and that would all need to change, complete with extra new stuff being added for that translation layer while both are in operation (which would end up being near permanent, people will find ways to keep the old stuff running as long as they can). I expect that this new scheme would just become a new version of CGNAT, “Global NAT” perhaps, with the same problems that adds.

IIRC something like that was considered when IPv6 was first being designed, be deemed insufficient for the long-term future. 64-bits is thought to be enough to stave off address starvation though, which is why IPv6 address ranges are usually assigned as /64s (my homer link has a /48 range should I wish to use it all!), so I can see your reasoning on that level.

arjie 18 hours ago

128 innit? Otherwise your /64 would have no subnets.

dspillett 16 hours ago

Yes, the whole address is 128 bits.

Hence my having a /64 (/48 in fact, should I ever enable more than the current /64) shows that 64-bits is enough for global addressing. If it wasn't then giving me a /64 would be part of a path to creating an address exhaustion problem just like the one with IPv4 (which was exacerbated somewhat by handing out /8 ranges unnecessarily in the early days).

arjie 15 hours ago

Ah, I misunderstood while skimming the comment thread. Reasonable claim. Thanks for explaining.

TZubiri 21 hours ago

I recall something like this, what did you call this? ipv8?

the thing is that it does require a switch similar to ipv6. but maybe there’s a subnet that maps 1 to 1 with the legacy block?

something like this could theoretically be pinned onto ipv6 AND anyone could do it, just select a 98 bit prefix you own, and the rest of the 32 bits you can map to ipv4.

phase -1 could be tunneling traffic through a single zone proxy which would be inefficient and is purely conceptual

phase 0 would be the same, but with an anycast ipv6,same ip that resolves differently based on location, like 8.8.8.8

phase 1 would be the mapping prefix to ipv4 (and viceversa?) being distributed to the routing tables like, which could be done via application logic (most efficient), or via some deep arcane isp routing conf files, or just a hell of a lot of routing table entries for each ipv4 but duplicated, possibly programatically controlled by an application that generates router table files as a target, thus avoiding desyncs and effectively becoming the first option of application level implementation

maybe something like this already exists though

of course it’s horrible hacking (as hacking in the non crime sense often is), but it allows for a purely technical solution to issues of political and administrative nature.. which is all the rage nowadays

cowlevel 16 hours ago

There already is a subnet. Actually a few. ::ffff:192.168.0.1 is reserved for when you need to pass an ipv4 address through an ipv6 API (e.g. v6 client application on a dual-stack OS on a dual-stack network) and 64:ff9b::192.168.0.1 is reserved as an actual address for NAT64 gateways to use (v6-only client, network has a NAT64 gateway somewhere on it)

Sharlin 21 hours ago

> until software and hardware has been updated

Yeah, about that part. This is a "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" type of idea.

orangeboats 20 hours ago

It's always the same with those "I hope IPv6 were just IPv4 with more octets" proposals on Hacker News, aka Godwin's law of the Internet Protocol.

It turns out when you ignore the hardest part of the problem, you can always make a good-looking proposal!

mahboi 16 hours ago

That isn't the hardest part. We already got software and hardware supporting IPv6, and yet...

orangeboats 16 hours ago

It still is. A lot of IoT and "smart" devices are still dreadfully slow in updating their software.

mahboi 15 hours ago

Iot isn't what's holding ipv6 back. There are tons of websites and even cloud platforms with totally ipv6-capable hardware and OSes, but the services are v4-only or strongly v4-preferred.

orangeboats 10 hours ago

IoT was an example, a glaring one at that.

IPv6-lacking hardware and software definitely do exist in the wild, have you seen how some programs from incompetent developers accept only IPv4 addresses in the config files? I think all of us have seen at least one such program.

Often times it's just a matter of using another function to parse the address string. But you are shit outta luck if the program is closed source.

mahboi 9 hours ago

Yeah it's in the wild, but random crappy software isn't the reason all these big services are v4-only. Transitioning from v4 to v6 requires redoing your entire network, except you still have to maintain the v4 side until everyone else has done this. So it's not worthwhile unless you have an easy way to go v6-native and only use v4 at the ends, eg cellular networks.

preisschild an hour ago

Tbf there are always bad implementations. Good "smart" devices nowadays should be based on the Matter standard, which natively uses IPv6 addressing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

gwbas1c 20 hours ago

I believe that was proposed before IPv6.

That being said, we should take the time to understand why IPv4 is still hanging around when IPv6 has been around since before most people got internet access. What is really holding IPv6 back?

mahboi 15 hours ago

Everything in v6 was for a good reason, but it was targeting now-outdated use cases. Separately, there's no good migration path from v4. They should've kept the v4 address blocks in v6, and following the natural consequences of that, it'd be way easier to migrate. But they didn't do this with v6 because they were trying to solve the address fragmentation issue upfront, which again had valid reasoning but in hindsight wasn't the right move.

binaryturtle 18 hours ago

You could just use something like fd00:dead:beef::192:168:0:1 for your internal IPv4 host(s). Basically do a human-readable mapping of your IPv4 LAN IPs into a IPv6 private space. Now you only need to remember the ULA prefix and then can continue to use your IPv4 just with colons instead dots. Problem solved. :-)

mahboi 16 hours ago

This gets brought up on every ipv6-related submission, and the basic idea is sound. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781622

cowlevel 16 hours ago

Not really, it assumes people will make IPv5 devices without a reason to. If you can get them to make IPv5 you can use the same mechanism to get them to make IPv4/6 dual-stack.

mahboi 16 hours ago

People already make ipv6 devices, that's not the problem though. It's also maybe possible to do ipv5 with ipv6 hardware at least on the hosts, since the v6 header is totally fine for this.

cowlevel 9 hours ago

Well then how's that different from just v6?

mahboi 9 hours ago

V4 address blocks, DHCP, and NAT, not SLAAC. So if I have 1.2.3.4 in ipv4, my ipv5 address is also 1.2.3.4. Ipv5 isn't a separate network from v4, it shares all the v4 state, and I can enable without giving it much thought. And once there's enough adoption, I can start handing out addresses like 1.2.3.4.5 that are incompatible with v4-only hosts.

happyPersonR 18 hours ago

I’m hoping with RE everything, for at least consumer IOT products we’ll get to a point where we can just get rid of a lot of the need for ipv4 for home.

What’s left are just apps and devices that people don’t wanna change out but are probably pwnd and I don’t think are gonna get updates because the teams that wrote the software moved on and the companies don’t wanna keep spending on sustaining.

rayiner 21 hours ago

Meanwhile I’m here carving out a couple of /64s from the /48 block of IPv6 addresses Comcast gave me.

tgv 21 hours ago

The elephant in the room: I didn't check the other mammoths, but e.g. Amazon has 4.4% of all ipv4 addresses.

mitxela 21 hours ago

They have more than 4.4% of all servers so none of this is unexpected.

dogscatstrees 16 hours ago

The scrolling scaling-controller on the map is genius. I wish more maps would add this dynamic ability to scale the logical size when there is a considerable ratio delta to the land size.

clbrmbr 8 hours ago

was fun at college to plug in a laptop into the dormroom's ethernet jack and get assigned a public address. (i went to a /16 school, not a /8 sadly)

sebastianmestre 19 hours ago

I initially read the "As" in the "As land" label as "land of plural letter A". Which I understood as the land of DNS A records, which seemed like a whimsical yet fitting name.

cowlevel 16 hours ago

introducing asland, the mythical lion daemon.

not really sure what it does, resurrect itself when dead?

(Fun fact: Aslan is canonically Jesus)

oakchris1955 21 hours ago

Either I've lost it, or there are other countries there that are bigger losers than the DRC. North Korea says it is 1069.6 times smaller, Greenland says it is 1507.8 times smaller, etc.

blaze33 21 hours ago

> Tables include countries with at least 100,000 IPv4 addresses and 20,000 km² of land.

mschuster91 21 hours ago

> Either I've lost it

You haven't lost your marbles, this looks like straight Claude slop, just look at the fonts.

fluxsolstice 21 hours ago

What an interesting critter the UK is in terms of its shape

amelius 17 hours ago

Can't we use AI to rewrite the whole internet (including flashing of routers) so it supports IPv6 everywhere?

sp4cec0wb0y 17 hours ago

I can't tell if this is a joke or not lol

amelius 16 hours ago

And fix all vulnerabilities while we're at it.

mahboi 15 hours ago

Can I have an AI look at my ff::ee::::fa345::32sdfklasd ipv6 address and translate it to something like 192.168.1.4, and have another AI make sure my frikin Amazon Stick isn't exposed to WAN