[bluejekyll]

Hm, this analogy is awkward. Definitely agree that it's taken a lot longer to become standard than I would like.

I was discussing this with a coworker today, and we were reflecting on a similar technical rollout that really did take of. The various ascii encodings -> UTF8. This was a big shift at the time and took a lot of time to fix. In fact I know of one large DB that, after a huge amount of outreach with customers, was only finally decommed and replaced with a UTF8 last year.

We decided the big difference was that UTF8 solved a huge problem that effected everyone. Was backward compatible with all basic ascii, and was an easy upgrade in many cases (only a problem if you bastardized stored character sets faking out the system and storing them in a different charset).

IPv6 is nicely backward compatible with IPv4, but in general it is not solving a problem most people have (yet). Most sites work fine with IPv4; IPv6 for many is just work with no significant benefit in general.

That being said, I really want IPv6 to become the only option for a lot of reasons; but there is no stron forcing function.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> but in general it is not solving a problem most people have (yet).

I don't think that that's actually true. People have massive problems due to NAT and overlapping address ranges and stuff ... but it's just commonly accepted as the way IP works, people don't realize that they could just deploy IPv6 and do away with all those problems.

[WorldMaker]

Also, most mobile carriers have been solving real device addressing problems with IPv6 for a few years now. In the mobile space IPv6 is the present, and the transition has been mostly seamless enough most people haven't noticed outside some early hiccups.

[bluejekyll]

Some people sure. But it's nowhere near the number of people that UTF8 solved for.

It would definitely make people's network connectivity simpler and less error prone, but I just don't see it as a huge pressing need.

If NATs didn't exist at all, then this would have been such a huge issue that it would have been needed. For most though, NAT is generally good enough.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

I am not all that sure about that, really.

I guess for most simple home users, it's currently not a huge pressing issue, true. But anything beyond that and you constantly run into issues. And that includes home users who also have to use some VPN to their workplace ...

But that does not mean that NAT really is good enough, it just means that deployed systems nowadays just take it as a given that NAT exists, and any technology that isn't compatible with NAT simply doesn't exist. Which makes it less of a pressing issue in a way, but that does not mean that it doesn't still cause huge costs even to home users in terms of missed opportunities of a NAT-free world.

[bluejekyll]

I see that. And in general I agree with you. I think the only thing being debated here is the urgency of the change, and the harm being done to networks.

Many companies get away with NAT just fine; and that's the entire point. It works well enough that for many it's just not an urgent issue.

Like you said, it would make a lot of technology easier to deploy and build. The orthogonal comment about the Cellphone industry pushing the issue is right on the money. For them this significantly simplies their network management (which has tons of devices moving around). For laptops on wifi this would probably be better as well, but there so much is just solved by the fact that the Web is capable of tracking users across IPs with cookies.

Again I'm not arguing against IPv6; I'm just trying to better understand why it's deployment isn't being done as urgently as that of other things, like UTF8. I think the answer is in the fact that we've built so many workarounds that it stretched IPv4 well beyond its end-of-life.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> I think the answer is in the fact that we've built so many workarounds that it stretched IPv4 well beyond its end-of-life.

Well, that is true in a way (I mean, without NAT (or something similar), there obviously would not be any way to keep going, so, yeah, in that sense, NAT has made things somewhat bearable instead of completely unworkable, thus making the migration to v6 less urgent).

But my point is that the reason why people (companies in particular) aren't migrating to a large extent seems to me to not be because it wouldn't be worth it for them, but rather that they lack the understanding to see that it would be. There are lots and lots of admins out there who operate IP networks and essentially have no clue of IP routing. They have grown up in a world of NAT, and just understand "the router" as "the public internet termination point" or whatever you want to call it. They don't even see NAT as a workaround, but as the obvious and natural state of affairs, because, what are you gonna do if you want to connect more than one machine to your internet connection? You need a router! And router is synonymous with NAT gateway, because that's why you need the router ... or something.

If your whole mindset doesn't even allow you to see the possibility of the natural state of the internet (i.e. end-to-end addressability of all participants), you won't ever notice all the workarounds that you are using. And if, say, port forwarding doesn't occur to you as being a workaround, but rather the obvious thing you just need to do to make some internal machine reachable from the outside, then you also never get the idea that IPv6 might be the solution. You just assume that IPv6 obviously also has to have port forwarding, because you still want to make internal machines reachable from the outside, don't you?