alt Hacker NewsThe world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
Comments
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986324 (2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167686 (2019)
I don't like this post's negativity towards ARP. ARP is the reason we can have IP networking on a LAN without a router. The default gateway just becomes a special case of general IP networking on a LAN.
Otherwise, the networking history part of this post is amazing. I haven't gotten to the IPv6 part yet.
I remember when ipv6 seemed like an inevitable next step. The fact that it fizzled seems like the problem it was trying to solve just doesn't matter? We somehow found enough ipv4 addresses to make the whole thing keep working just fine (from practical end user perspective) which seems like we never truly needed ipv6? Is that the wrong conclusion?
I have come to think that having both SLAAC and DHCPv6 were a big flaw in IPv6. SLAAC is awesome but having two config mechanisms is confusing. It doesn't help that Android refuses to support DHCPv6.
I think SLAAC came from world where computers were expensive, DHCP servers were separate, and they wanted to eliminate them. But we are in world where computers are cheap and every router can run DHCP.
We could have had easy config with DHCPv6 giving out MAC based addresses by default. The auto config would still work on link-local.
What is this article even on about? The stuff on my network assigns itself ipv6 addresses based on their mac address? That's how you can do stateless ipv6?
Regardless, ipv6 was to have more IP addresses because of ipv4 exhaustion and NAT?
My Xbox tells me my network sucks because it doesn't have ipv6, but this is a very North-American perspective regardless.
Thanks for sharing this very interesting read.
There's one point I don't really get and I would be glad if someone could clarify it for me. When the author says that even over wifi, the CSMDA/CD protocol is not used anymore. Then how does it actually work?
Discussing this, the author explains:
> If you have two wifi stations connected to the same access point, they don't talk to each other directly, even when they can hear each other just fine.
So, each station still has to decide at some point if what its hearing is for them or not, as it could be another station talking to the AP, or the AP talking to another station. How is that done if not using CSMA/CD (or something very similar at least)?
Are there any parts in the design of v6 that provide opportunities for companies to further enshittify our experience of the internet?
Very interesting post. I never considered the fact that IPv6 was going to be more than just a bigger IPv4.
Also funny it was made in 1990 and it only recently reached 50% adoption.
> Now imagine that X changes addresses to Q. It still sends out packets tagged with (uuid,80), to IP address Y, but now those packets come from address Q. On machine Y, it receives the packet and matches it to the socket associated with (uuid), notes that the packets for that socket are now coming from address Q, and updates its cache. Its return packets can now be sent, tagged as (uuid), back to Q instead of X. Everything works! (Modulo some care to prevent connection hijacking by impostors.2)
And how the fuck anything in-between knows where to route it ? The article glows a blazing beacon of ignorance about everything in-between.
The whole entire problem with mobile IP is "how we get intermediate devices to know where to go?" we're back to
> The problem with ethernet addresses is they're assigned sequentially at the factory, so they can't be hierarchical.
Which author hinted at then forgot. We can't have globally routable, unique, random-esque ID precisely because it has to be hierarchical. Keeping connection flow ID at L4 instead of L3+L4 changes very little, yeah, you can technically roam the client except how the fuck server would know where to send the packet back when L3 address changes ? It would have to get client packet with updated L3 address and until then all packets would go to void.
But hey, at least it's some progress ? NOPE, nothing at protocol layer can be trusted before authentication, it would make DoS attacks far easier (just flood the host in a bunch of random uuids), and you would still end up doing it QUIC way of just re-implementing all of that stuff after encryption of the insides
(2017)
This is one of my favourite blog posts ever. For those unaware (or who didn't read right to the bottom), the author is the CEO of Tailscale.
One of the problems we have is when we're born we don't question anything. It just is the way it is. This, of course, lets us do things in the world much more quickly than if we had to learn everything from basic principles, but it's a disadvantage too. It means we get stuck in these local optima and can't get out. Each successive generation only finally learns enough to change anything fundamental once they're already too old and set in their ways doing the standard thing.
How I wish we could have a new generation of network engineers who just say "fuck this shit" and build their own internet.
Everyone forgets that the Internet Architecture Board took a religious view on "Internet transparency and the end-to-end principle" which was counter to the realities of limited tooling and actual site maintainers needs. [0]
There were many of us who, even when it was still IPng (IP Next Generation) in the mid 1990's, tried to get it working and spent significant amount of effort to do so, only to be hit with unrealistic ideological ideals that blocked our ability to deploy it, especially with the limitations of the security tools back in the day.
Remember when IPng started, even large regional ISPs like xmission had finger servers, many people used telnet and actually slackware enabled telnet with no root password by default!!! I used both to get wall a coworker who was late to work because he was playing tw2000.
Back then we had really bad application firewalls like Altavista and PIX was just being invented, and the large surveillance capitalism market simply didn't exist then.
The IAB hampered deployment by choosing hills to die on without providing real alternatives, and didn't relent until IPv4 exhaustion became a problem, and they had lost their battle because everyone was forced into CGNAT etc...because of the IETF, not in spite of it.
The IAB and IETF was living in a MIT ITS mindset when the real world was making that model hazardous and impossible. End to end transparency may be 'pretty' to some people, but it wasn't what customers needed. When they wrote the RFCs to make other services simply fail and time out if you enabled IPv6 locally, but didn't have ISP support they burned a lot of good will and everyone just started ripping out the IPv6 stack and running IPv4 only.
IMHO, Like almost all tech failures, it didn't flail based on technical merits, it flailed based on ignorance of the users needs and a refusal to consider them, insisting that adopters just had to drink their particular flavor of Kool-aid or stick to IPv4, and until forced most people chose the latter.
Why repeating the old news?
> Internet routing can't handle mobility - at all.
so all the fairy tales about IP invented for nuclear war was a lie? the moment military started moving around, IP became useless?
Our world. It was a good design in our world.
I don't think v6 is the absolute pinnacle of protocol design, but whenever anybody says it's bad and tries to come up with a better alternative, they end up coming up with something equivalent to IPv6. If people consistently can't do better than v6, then I'd say v6 is probably pretty decent.