What about IPv6 right here on earth?

Posted Jan 26, 2011 16:11 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: What about IPv6 right here on earth? by drag
Parent article: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

You should really read DJB's text. Software would be upgraded over the years so that they could (this is how we got dual 4/6 stacks anyway). However, the existing addresses and setups would stay the same.

In other words, systems would be upgraded to IPv6 in place, with no additional configuration required. Networks, dns, firewalls, services, routers etc. would keep working as usual.

We would have had almost 10 years for all this. More than enough. Too late now.

What about IPv6 right here on earth?

Posted Jan 26, 2011 19:27 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't think it would have happened that way -- the vendors would still have bought the cheaper router that is aware only of 4-byte address matching (in silicon).

You're assuming that it's all software, and that upgrading your stack to a hypothetical IPv6 that is fully backward compatible with IPv4 would essentially have been free. Neither of those is true. Vendors would simply have offered to sell new, improved revisions of their existing, "legacy", IPv4-only devices -- without adding the more expensive silicon that is aware of the new, longer address matching.

What about IPv6 right here on earth?

Posted Jan 26, 2011 22:18 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> I don't think it would have happened that way -- the vendors would still have bought the cheaper router that is aware only of 4-byte address matching (in silicon).

And that's fine. If they don't want to route new, IPv6, hosts. Ever.

However, people connected to their network would automatically start asking for this routing. Because they would already be on IPv6. Without doing anything. Any new host they wished to access that had a real IPv6 address (i.e. not legacy IPv4) would be out of their reach. This would create a lot of complaints (hey, my friend can see this cool new site and I can't), which would either get rid of idiotic ISPs or force them to upgrade. Without the need to tell customers that they need to do something special to see IPv6 hosts.

What about IPv6 right here on earth?

Posted Jan 27, 2011 12:01 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

They would "start asking for this routing" ? Like they're asking for IPv6 right? Even better, why should I care that Joe Blogs on the other side of the world wants me to spend millions of dollars upgrading my network? He's not _my_ customer.

What about IPv6 right here on earth?

Posted Feb 3, 2011 14:43 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

We already have the situation you're discussing - I have today's IPv6 and IPv4, and can get to any cool sites that exist on IPv6 only.

Problem; there are no cool sites that are available on IPv6 and not IPv4. The reason? If I'm available on IPv4, close to 100% of my target market can get to me; if I'm not, only a tiny fraction of a percentage point can get to me. The economics are simply not there; in your hypothetical "IPv4++" world, the idiotic ISP would respond with "you need to do this very complex thing (at least as complex as deploying IPv6 is in today's world) to get access - it's the site's fault for using IPv4++". Net result? Everyone continues to use plain IPv4, ignoring the extended addresses possible in IPv4++, because you haven't solved the chicken and egg problem.

Note also that thanks to buggy systems, it's not safe to dual-stack your hosts by default. There are machines out there which think they have working IPv6 routing, but don't - about 0.1% of Google users last time I looked for the figures. So, real world experiments tell us that even co-existence of two protocols doesn't work properly; this leads to a thought experiment. How exactly does IPv4++ handle the case of two IPv4++ hosts with an IPv4 only segment in the middle, such that you can successfully talk IPv4 but not IPv4++?

Any answer that assumes that IPv4++ can transit the IPv4 segment has failed already - IPv6 can transit over IPv4 segments, yet we still see brokenness. Any answer that implies that an IPv4 only host cannot distinguish IPv4++ traffic from traditional IPv4 traffic has failed already - the most common form of brokenness in the IPv6 world is IPv6 in IPv4 tunnelling, where the IPv4 network deliberately blocks protocol 41, and there would have to be some similar indication that this is IPv4++ traffic.