I disagree. The current adoption woes are exactly because IPv6 is so different from IPv4. Everyone who tries it out learns the hard way that most of what they know from IPv4 doesn't apply. A less ambitious IPv4 is exactly what we need in order to make any progress

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bc569a80a344f9c 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not _that_ different. Larger address space, more emphasis on multicast for some basic functions. If you understand those functions in IPv4, learning IPv6 is very straightforward. There’s some footguns once you get to enterprise scale deployments but that’s just as true of IPv4.

	▲	almosthere 8 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		multicast has been dead for years
	▲	krupan an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Lol! IPv4 uses zero multicast (I know, I know, technically there's multicast, but we all just understand broadcast). The parts of an IPv4 address and their meaning have almost no correlation to the parts of an IPv6 address and their meaning. Those are pretty fundamental differences.

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throw0101a 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I disagree. The current adoption woes are exactly because IPv6 is so different from IPv4.

How is IPv6 "so different" than IPv4 when looking at Layer 3 and above?

(Certainly ARP vs ND is different.)

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krupan an hour ago | parent [-]

I didn't say it was different 'when looking at layer 3 and above". I said it's different from IPv4. At the IP layer.

	▲	Dylan16807 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		At the IP layer just being different is 90% of the trouble. Being less ambitious would have some upsides and downsides but not seriously change that.

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sgjohnson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But that is a bug in history. IPv6 was standardized BEFORE NAT.

“most what they know from IPv6” is just NAT.

> A less ambitious IPv4 is exactly what we need in order to make any progress

but we’re already making very good progress with IPv6? Global traffic to Google is >50% IPv6 already.

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btilly an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Current statistics are that a bit over 70% of websites are IPv4 only. A bit under 30% allow IPv6. IPv6 only websites are a rounding error.

Therefore if I'm on an IPv6 phone, odds are very good that my traffic winds up going over IPv4 internet at some point.

We're 30 years into the transition. We are still decades away from it being viable for servers to run IPv6 first. You pretty much have to do IPv4 on a server. IPv6 is an afterthought.

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sgjohnson an hour ago | parent [-]

> We are still decades away from it being viable for servers to run IPv6 first.

Just put Cloudflare in front of it. You don’t need to use IPv4 on servers AT ALL. Only on the edge. You can easily run IPv6-only internally. It’s definitely not an afterthought for any new deployments. In fact there’s even a US gov’t mandate to go IPv6-first.

It’s the eyeballs that need IPv4. It’s a complete non-issue for servers.

	▲	btilly 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You have a point. But you still need DNS to an IPv4 address. And the fact that about 70% of websites are IPv4 only means that if you're setting up a new website, odds are good that you won't do IPv6 in the first pass.

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Aloisius an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretty sure NAT was standardized before IPv6.

NAT is RFC 1631.

IPv6 is RFC 1883.

Admitted, that was very basic NAT.

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sgjohnson an hour ago | parent [-]

RFC 1631 is a memo, not a standard.

Actually, my bad. NAT was NEVER standardized. Not only NAT was never standardized, it’s never even been on standards track. RFC 3022 is also just “Informational”

Plus, RFC 1918 doesn’t even mention NAT

So yes, NAT is a bug in history that has no right to exist. The people who invented it clearly never stopped to think on whether they should, so here we are 30 years later.

	▲	Aloisius 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That doesn't really say much. Basic NAT wasn't eligible to be on the standards track. It's not a protocol or anything that implementers need to specifically interoperate on. Same reason firewalls are in informational or BCP RFCs. There are proposed standards for specific protocols related to NAT like FTP extensions for NAT (RFC 2428) or STUN (RFC 3489) and it's referenced in various BCP RFCS like RFC 4787.
	▲	yrro 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If only the inventors of NAT had patented it and then refused to license it!