IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Posted Jan 12, 2016 16:13 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica) by farnz
Parent article: IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Well, as per the comment you're replying to, if the extension mechanism at layer X really has become unusable through blocking, then you go to layer X+1.

IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Posted Jan 13, 2016 0:19 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

On really cheap consumer routers of 2000-era vintage (typically running a repurposed RTOS, not Linux), that means no IP options, no TCP options (see also the fate of ECN). You're stuck with UDP encaps, and start to look a lot like Teredo.

Plus, of course, you face the same long term issue that Teredo and 6to4 would have faced if they'd taken off - the goal of this transition is to get rid of IPv4 completely, because the Internet has more hosts than it can fit into 2**32 addresses. Somehow, you need to migrate to a point where users who once had IPv4 are not privileged over users who were never able to get IPv4, and where users who never had IPv4 (and thus can't tunnel inside IPv4) are first-class citizens on the net.

IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Posted Jan 15, 2016 13:32 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

On whether options could have been considered because of blocking, note that the comparison would have been versus a completely new protocol that *0* routers supported at all. Would IP options have been dropped at some routers? Sure - though, IP options were a lot more acceptable in the 90s when IPv6 was in the late design phase. Does that mean that choosing to deploy a whole new protocol, that didn't work *on any* router, that needed every router to be upgraded, and a whole new logical layer to be configured, and lots of ancillary protocols to be re-specified (ICMP, IGMP^WMLD, etc., etc.) was the easier option? I don't think the answer to that question is an obvious "of course"....

IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Posted Jan 15, 2016 13:37 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

On the transition issue - eventually the old 'core' disappears as IPv4 links are replaced with v6 (in the hypothetical transition strategy where the v6 space extends the v4 Internet address space and hence can be efficiently routed over it).

IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10 percent deployment (Ars Technica)

Posted Jan 13, 2016 0:39 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Welcome to the port 443 Internet where every protocol is indistinguishable from JSON.