Comment by immibis
Comment by immibis 2 months ago
Every proposed alternative to IPv6 that I've ever seen has just been IPv6 with extra steps. What's yours?
Comment by immibis 2 months ago
Every proposed alternative to IPv6 that I've ever seen has just been IPv6 with extra steps. What's yours?
Getting rid of IPv4 address allocation is one of the huge advantages of IPv6. IPv4 is chopped up into little pieces and the routing table is mess from it. Starting from scratch, IPv6 can make that better.
IPv6 also realized that most people don't need their own address space. It is valuable in IPv4 to own an allocation, but IPv6 is so huge it doesn't matter.
For setup, IPv6 does it automatically for customers. Peering requires entering IPv6 addresses, but that is a one time thing.
> Getting rid of IPv4 address allocation is one of the huge advantages of IPv6. IPv4 is chopped up into little pieces and the routing table is mess from it.
Basically IPv6 only solves problems if you're paid full time to do network administration.
If you just run a small network among other things, it creates problems. Because you can't hold the new structure in your head if it's not your main job.
> Starting from scratch, IPv6 can make that better.
Yeah right. Want that "things you should never do" Joel link?
He was talking about Netscape, but I think IPv6 is a much better example.
The nice thing about IP v6 is there is effectively "no structure" to hold in your head. You never need to think about or find out what the netmask is, it's always /64. You never need to calculate the next subnet boundary, increment the digit before ::. You never need to do all sorts of the things associated with IPv4 structure, private addresses and conflicts, NATs and double NATs, DHCP server just to have clients automatically work...
The biggest downside for IPv6 in small networks is, ironically, something which was added later and not part of the initial (nor actually required, but devices opt to do it anyways) and that's "randomized auto rotating addresses" for security. Without them addresses look something like 1234:abcd::${mac} or 1234:abcd::12 but with them they look like 1234:abcd::4729:ab65:f902:7ee0 and a device might have 4 active if it's been running the whole day. I think this one extension is something like 80+% of people's reaction to IPv6 and it didn't even call for it originally.
Yeah, the route fragmentation a disadvantage of what I've had in mind. My focus is just on getting things to speak v6 to fix the scarcity problem first. Maybe at some point the owners could've swapped addresses back to defrag things.
That's my proposal, ipv6 with extra steps. As in, incremental steps instead of one impossibly big change. tl;dr keep the pre-existing v4 /32 blocks day 1, and the rest follows.
Edit: I said "my" proposal, but pretty sure the same idea has been brought up many times.