[Nextgrid]

I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed.

The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a decade ago.

People being able to host things themselves, or local-first apps that communicate directly without the need for any middlemen is a negative for the industry. The industry wants there to be a technical need for a middleman, so they can provide that and seek rent over it.

There is no user-level demand for IPv6 because the industry is no longer making any apps/devices/services that would take advantage of end-to-end connectivity (even if it was available now - let's say in a hypothetical world where IPv6 adoption is 100%) since it's more profitable not to, so as a result there is no pressure on ISPs to offer it.

[JohnFen]

I think that it's fair to blame the specification. I don't think the problem is that the industry has changed, I think it's that there's a huge amount of friction and headache for shifting to it. I think that's because it was too large of a change all at once, combined with the initial specification having some real problems (that did eventually get mitigated in later specs).

I suspect that if IPv6 limited itself to just increasing the size of IP addresses, IPv4 would largely be a distant memory by now.

[WorldMaker]

"IPv4 with bigger addresses" would never have been backwards compatible and would always have been a compatibility break and would always have a slow rollout.

The proposals that seemed backwards compatible were just aggressive CGNAT consolidating even more power in the hands of IPv4 address owners. That doesn't seem like a sustainable fix in the long run.

[JohnFen]

> "IPv4 with bigger addresses" would never have been backwards compatible and would always have been a compatibility break

True, but it would limit that break to a single thing. That's much easier to deal with than the whole basket of things that IPv6 brings with it.

[WorldMaker]

Compatibility breaks are always headaches. There's not "just broke a 'single' thing" when it comes to compatibility breaks. That is why strict semver suggests a major bump no matter how "small" a compatibility break appears to the developer. There is no such thing as a "simple" compatibility break to downstream users.

In general, despite the complex vocabulary about most of it, in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4. Its header has fewer fields. Its QoL/QoS fields aren't accidental hacks on top of old debugging fields but intentionally designed fields for that very purpose. SLAAC is a simpler protocol than DHCPv4, though the algorithm sounds more complex at first. (DHCPv6 is basically as complex, but fewer devices and fewer subnets should need DHCPv6 in the first place.) Much of the "basket of things" that IPv6 brings with it are designed to remove complexity that has concreted around IPv4.

They ripped the bandaid completely off with the backwards compatibility break that they made with IPv6, and apparently a lot of people loved the cute stickers they had applied on top of the bandaid. But at this point it is probably better for the skin below to heal without the bandaid than to continue to sticker and bandaid over that and let all that unnecessary glue fester in place. (To push such a metaphor almost to its breaking place.)

[JohnFen]

> in many ways IPv6 is simpler than IPv4.

It's not really about whether or not IPv6 is simpler than IPv4, though. It's about how painful moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is. And it's very painful. If the only thing that changed between the two was that the IP address space is bigger, it would reduce the pain of changing.

I'm certainly not going to claim that my experience is representative of anyone except for me, but the reason that I'm not going to shift to IPv6 until I literally have no other choice is because doing so is an enormous undertaking. Since IPv6 doesn't bring me any benefit that I care about, there is no reason to do so unless I simply can't get on the internet without it anymore.

Please note: I am not bashing IPv6 here, and I'm not saying that a change isn't needed. I'm just expressing some of the reasons I've seen why people resist changing to it, and that I think adopting it would have happened within a reasonable timeframe if it weren't as ambitious.

[WorldMaker]

> I think adopting it would have happened within a reasonable timeframe if it weren't as ambitious.

There's zero proof that an "extended IPv4" would have been adopted on a "more reasonable" timeframe, no matter how you define "reasonable" (faster, I guess is what you are arguing for?).

Exactly where and how do you expect "just add more address bits to IPv4" is an easier transition than IPv6?

The IPv4 header is a fixed size. You can't add more address bits without breaking existing routers. Period. End of technical story. You could embed the additional address bits in the next layer up (TCP/UDP) but you greatly increase the complexity of routing equipment by making it have to understand those layers, to what benefit? In the dual-stack real world we do that all the time with VPNs and STUN tunnels and other gateways and tunnels. We have those exact same tools, already, and those haven't made the transition any more "reasonable", have they?

But it's worse that while routers don't understand the extra bits, the parts of the addresses that get used (the prefixes small enough to fit in IPv4 headers) have to become massive NAT gateways and become massive gatekeepers of huge parts of the IP address space. We know from deep experience that IPv4 address allocation wasn't "equitable" (ARIN got way more space than RIPE and both got more space than AFRINIC and so on; companies like Microsoft and GE got /8 allocations just for asking in the right years).

Does it make that much sense to establish existing IPv4 holders as the forever "landlords" of the internet? That seems to me to only add more incentives to make the transition more unreasonable than IPv6: why support router initiatives that understand the additional address space when the IPv4 address holders can get "extra rent" if they don't, presumably charging all their "downstream" traffic for their gateway usage? We're in a time where IPv4 addresses have noticeable rental costs, I can't imagine what that would be like in a world where large parts of address space have to be on VPNs controlled by IPv4 owners. That doesn't sound to me like a good present or future for the IP protocol, no matter what.

[Dagger2]

It's honestly not that hard. Looking at your other posts, you think it's hard because you're unfamiliar with it, because you're trying to overcomplicate it, and because you're trying to do everything all at once rather than gradually.

None of these things are IPv6's fault.

Hell, give me remote access to your network and I'll set it up for you -- at least enough to get you started on it if not 100% on every single thing. I don't expect you'll take me up on that offer, but it'd be easier to just do it than tell you about it, since you can't tell people anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

[bauruine]

Why is it so painful for you? As someone that has been running everything dualstack for over a decade I'm seriously interested where people are struggling with it.

The only pain I've ever seen is in corporate networks where all the tooling around the network management are IPv4 only but those would break even if you add a single bit to an IPv4 address.

[nottorp]

> The problem is that the computing industry has changed.

Nah, the problem is ipv6 has been designed by a commitee for a lot of enterprise-ish features so the hobbyists have taken a look and postponed setting it up internally for when they have absolutely no choice.

I've asked for simple ipv6 tutorials in discussions on HN and elsewhere and whatever I got pointed at was always longer than the article we're discussing and incomplete.

Basic set up of ipv4 for a home network can be explained over just one pint. Looks like you need two barrells for ipv6.

[yesco]

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6/configurati...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/routing/examples...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6_ipv4_transi...

- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6/ipv6_extras

[nottorp]

Yeah right. The summary of the first page already throws around like 4-5 acronyms that each require reading a separate documentation.

And that's only for configuring your router, not your local network...

[yesco]

Okay then please provide me the level of documentation you are looking for, but for an IPv4 network. Sounds wonderful, I'd love to share it with new hires.

[JohnFen]

> I've asked for simple ipv6 tutorials

There really does seem to be a lack of good documentation about all of this. The docs that I've seen appear to be aimed at actual network engineers, or are so incomplete as to not be worthwhile.

I would be much less stressed by all of this if I could find something good that sits between those two extremes.

A part of me, though, suspects that the reason there is no "middle ground" documentation is that it's not possible -- that IPv6 is too complex for that. Not saying that's the actual reality, but it has the whiff of it.

[yesco]

All networking is complex.

I asked the other guy this, but I'll also ask you. Please provide me the level of documentation you are looking for, but for an IPv4 network. If you have some grand tutorial that explains it as easily as you make it out to be, then I truly would love to see it, I will include it in my onboarding documentation at work.

Because I understand both IPv4 and IPv6, and do not consider IPv6 the more complex protocol by any measure. I suspect your "whiff" is more a bias towards what you are comfortable with, rather than a true reflection of IPv6's complexity.

[nottorp]

> Because I understand both IPv4 and IPv6, and do not consider IPv6 the more complex protocol by any measure.

You mentioned "new hires" while i mentioned hobbyists. You're talking about a business network where people are paid to do it, I'm talking about home networks and home labs.

You're basically confirming my statement that IPv6 was designed for enterprise needs?

[bauruine]

There are millions of people using IPv6 without knowing it. The ISP has everything preconfigured and if you use a third party router it's normaly one or two options to set. And it just works like for IPv4.

[nottorp]

I have that. Not enough at hobbyist level though.

[AndreasHae]

> The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a decade ago.

Sounds a bit over the top. Can you name some examples?

[Nextgrid]

10 years ago if you made software that uses all kinds of lies and dark patterns to get access to a user's contacts list, uploads it to your server and then you did data mining on it, people would be concerned and consider the software malicious.

Likewise with analytics - tracking every single action you do in an app (along with generic metadata such as IP addresses - which often leaks your general location and your relationship with anyone on the same network since you'd be sharing the IP address with them) would have been considered spyware.

When there were talks of tracking people for ad targeting in the early days of the internet people (rightfully) freaked out, even though that tracking was really primitive by today's standards.

All of those things are now considered legitimate and are routinely done.

[WorldMaker]

I remember how often DoubleClick were the villains of tracking and privacy over-reach on early Slashdot, and then Google bought DoubleClick and became worse than DoubleClick ever were as top Slashdot villains and yet Google is still often called the heroes in the adtech space. (Though that sea is somewhat changing again as even more mainstream media catches up to tracking prevention.) It remains such a profound reversal to me.

[ndriscoll]

We also used to have a name for malware that injected ads into your computer: adware. Now ads are just part of Windows.

[JohnFen]

Indeed. When I look at how far things have fallen in this regard, it gets very hard to feel positive or optimistic about the internet.

[toyg]

And the human race. The biggest revolution in communication since Gutenberg, and in less than half a century it's been used almost exclusively for evil purposes.

[unethical_ban]

Instagram, for one.