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by simias
3248 days ago
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But don't you think UI is extremely important in these situations? If you sold IPv6 as "it works like IPv4 but with 128 bit addresses" I'm sure it wouldn't seem nearly as daunting to make the switch. But when you start looking closely you realize that it's more than that. Regarding the size of the routing table, is it really that much of a big deal? Is it significant in the ISP's expanses? I find that hard to believe. Also, obviously the ISPs might want to use clever tricks to save on bandwidth and processing power but that's not really what I'm talking about. ISPs have the manpower and the knowledge necessary to deal with that difficulty. The case I have in mind is what is, in my experience, 99% of the private networks today: you have a single public address, a NAT/Firewall/Router combo and then a handful of private subnets. This is where the migration should be as simple, seamless, familiar and comfortable as possible. This is where people can't be bothered to spend one week understanding IPv6 and reconfigure everything and still not be certain that they won't break something. This is where having IP addresses that actually look like IP addresses matter. |
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Well, yeah, that's why they invented a more compact notation than 207.170.223.70.213.170.133.129.131.136.235.244.33.54.210.133.
> If you sold IPv6 as "it works like IPv4 but with 128 bit addresses" I'm sure it wouldn't seem nearly as daunting to make the switch.
But ... it doesn't seem daunting? I mean, obviously, you seem to think so, but I didn't find anything daunting about it when I enabled IPv6 on my network and servers ~ 15 years ago.
> Regarding the size of the routing table, is it really that much of a big deal? Is it significant in the ISP's expanses? I find that hard to believe.
The current global IPv4 routing table has ~ 670,000 entries, the current global IPv6 routing table has ~ 41,000 entries, distributed over 58,000 and 14,000 ASes, respectively.
Mind you that a router has to do a routing table lookup for every packet, so tens to hundreds of millions of lookups per second for backbone routers. The CAM for routing table storage is one of the performance limiting factors of a router, and the larger it needs to be, the slower and/or more expensive it gets.
> The case I have in mind is what is, in my experience, 99% of the private networks today: you have a single public address, a NAT/Firewall/Router combo and then a handful of private subnets.
There were 6to4 or teredo, for example, which allowed for some of that. But part of the problem is that if you want to talk to IPv6 hosts over v4-only connectivity, you need to talk to some sort of gateway--the IPv6 host itself obviously doesn't have an IPv4 address (otherwise you could just as well speak IPv4), you yourself cannot directly speak IPv6, so ... you need some party that is connected to the IPv4 and the IPv6 networks to translate between the two. If that is supposed to provide good performance, your ISP needs to operate such a gateway. Which means it's not exactly an automatic solution either.
> This is where the migration should be as simple, seamless, familiar and comfortable as possible. This is where people can't be bothered to spend one week understanding IPv6 and reconfigure everything and still not be certain that they won't break something.
Well, for the most part, most end users really shouldn't need to do anything like that. Even less so that with IPv4, really: Your ISP assigns you a prefix, your router assigns addresses to your devices, and everything should just work.
If you actually want to do some fancy network setup or something ... well, really, it's not that difficult. Easier than v4, really.
> This is where having IP addresses that actually look like IP addresses matter.
But they look exactly like what IP addresses have looked like for the last almost 20 years! IPv6 IP addresses, that is ...