A DNS flag day
A DNS flag day
Posted Jan 26, 2019 15:30 UTC (Sat) by naptastic (guest, #60139)Parent article: A DNS flag day
Posted Jan 26, 2019 20:29 UTC (Sat)
by biergaizi (subscriber, #92498)
[Link] (2 responses)
The world in which IPv6 was a good design
IPv6 was intended to revolutionize the Internet. It was thought that the deployment of IPv6 would only take a few years. Then people will be able to eliminate the creeping Layer-2 networking and the ugliness of protocol layer violations around it, so we could eventually remove manual IP configuration, complicated IP headers (to make ASIC-accelerated routers that are competitive with Ethernet bridges), also remove MAC addresses, ARP, and DHCP, and IP-broadcast in general from the network stack, and shifting to a no-bridges, all-router, Layer 3-centric approach, the ultimate software-defined network. Also, IPv6 was planned to be the foundation of a fully end-to-end encrypted Internet, the original IPSec was developed for IPv6.
However, this great vision was never materialized, as layers are always added, but never removed. But enormous amount of resources have already been spent on IPv6, and the only choice is keep pushing it. So unfortunately, the current IPv6 is a degenerated form of the original vision, with only two major features, "more IP addresses", and "restoration of end-to-end connectivity" (don't get me wrong, I'm posting this comment via IPv6).
A sad story in the history of computing. Imagining what is happening in a parallel world.
Posted Mar 5, 2019 7:42 UTC (Tue)
by immibis (subscriber, #105511)
[Link] (1 responses)
Even if not for that, you'll just end up in an XKCD 927 situation. Adding the new option of {IPv6 + let's call it "IPv6L2"} does not make the {IPv6 + Ethernet} option go away. You weren't crazy enough to think I'll throw out my hundreds or thousands or millions of dollars of Ethernet NICs and switches and routers were you? The *very best* case is that I keep all that equipment and it interoperates nicely with IPv6L2. And at that point why shouldn't I keep getting Ethernet equipment so I only have one L2 protocol to manage?
It's not that Ethernet and ARP are good, but at the very least, they're not all that harmful and they're entrenched, so good luck getting rid of them now. It's like saying the next version of Windows will run on RISC-V.
And what the heck will you do if I want to run it over Infiniband? And in the future someone will want to unify Ethernet with IPv6L2...
Posted Mar 5, 2019 9:28 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
The first issue is that IPv6 actually had not solved the problem of multihoming and roaming. It totally could have, without changing the Ethernet layer. But unfortunately, the IETF did not have foresight for this. QUIC (and HTTP/3) are attempting to fix this, but it's probably too late.
The second issue is hierarchic adressing. Ethernet addresses are flat, they don't have any structure. IPv6 -could- have been used to allow automatic hierarchic delegation: your router gets IPs from the ISP and delegates a part of the address space to a smart light switch, a smart switch then acts as a gateway for power line network, giving out each smart light bulb a separate IPv6 subspace, and so on.
IPv6 theoretically supports this with DHCP PD, but... there's not enough bits in IPv6 for it! You will at most get a /48 from your ISP, which only gives you 16 bits to play with. And /56 or even /60 allocations are not at all uncommon. Also, even the DHCP PD standard was finalized only in 2003.
A DNS flag day
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810
A DNS flag day
Five years ago as a university student, I would've agreed with you.
Now, as a software engineer at a networking hardware vendor, I know there's just no way, because things are too tangled already.
A DNS flag day