[digitalsushi]

Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now.

I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free.

And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since we were still talking about it.

[ericpauley]

This ongoing "IPv4 with more bits" meme needs to die.

There was no way to change IPv4 to have more address space while maintaining compatibility with existing routers. Routers are hardware-accelerated so can't just support new protocols with a software update.

If you need a new protocol, why just lengthen the address without fixing other weaknesses, since you'll never be able to change it again? This is IPv6, and while you can argue some changes weren't necessary, it is simply not true say that IPv4 with extra bits would have been easy.

[anyfactor]

"If we don't study the mistakes of the future, we're bound to repeat them for the first time." - Ken M

[hn8305823]

And I would make sure it had complete feature parity with IPv4 (DHCP, VRRP etc) instead of embarking on a religious crusade to reinvent the way devices connect.

It took over a decade to get feature parity from the non-network-operators that overtook the IETF, and that seriously delayed IPv6 adoption.

[kelnos]

I know you're joking & making fun of glacial IPv6 adoption, but if IPv6 was just IPv4 + more address bits, I'm sure it'd be fully adopted by now and IPv4 would be something kids taking computer networking courses would be taught about in the "history" section.

IPv6 involved too many other changes to make it a straightforward upgrade. I agree that it's ridiculous that we still don't have universal v6 support, but let's not pretend the protocol designers made it easy.

[fulafel]

There's new features in IPv6 but if you don't use them, it's pretty just more bits as far as applications and users can see. The biggest change is probably replacing ARP, but that part has been unchanged and shipping since the start and invisible to users. And of course there's also simplifications vs IPv4.

The biggest shock is for people who have gotten the NAT stockhold syndrome (which always went against IPv4 internet architecture, there's a reason it's outlawed in the standard track IP RFCs).

[cryptonector]

To be fair, a lot of the growing pains with IPv6 were pains that had to be discovered as we went.

I wish IPng had taken a totally different approach to addressing and routing:

- for addressing, yes, very large (or even variable-length, like CNLP, see below) addresses fields in the IPng header

- for routing, the IPng header should have had a source and destination ASN fields, with the source being filled in by the sender's router(s) (either immediately in the interior, or at the edge), and the destination ASN fields to be filled in by the sender by querying something like the DNS (but optimized for, essentially, CIDR-style IP->ASN lookups, though DNS can do it). This would have made routing much simpler and faster, since routing protocols would only have to exchange information about ASNs and not about any address prefixes, thus yielding much smaller routing tables. The address->ASN lookup service would have needed very little churn since its contents would change only when sites change Internet service providers.

I wasn't there then, so don't blame me, but also honestly I probably wouldn't have thought of this either.

In practice we ended up with something just like this but... without address number portability, which is a shame.

[steve918]

So what's taking you so long?!

[tough]

time travel machine mvp is taking a bit more than planned

[cryptonector]

So far it can only go forwards in time [at 1s/s].

[bastardoperator]

IPv5 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for the win! /s

[gtvwill]

Tbh not sure why the protocol couldn't be upgraded so that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are all accepted. Seems a monumentally shite oversight to not be like that. I mean it's a freaking telephone book address system. Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and didn't upgrade the protocol at all in the last 20 years (is this just entirely due to profit/asset protecting?).

Response was to make a wholly new protocol when they could have just updated the standard and forced suppliers to patch updates?

USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?

Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?

[superluserdo]

This very confident sentiment comes up in every comment section about IPV4/6

- "Updating the standard" is making a new protocol

- "forced suppliers to patch updates" - how?

- "USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?" - because you're changing the address space of the protocol. If the new standard can address more than 2^32 things, then it won't be backwards compatible with v4.

- "Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?" - Assuming you're talking about having a variable-length address from the start in IPV4, because I assume having a non-fixed packet header size would be much more computationally expensive and violate a lot of assumptions that you can make when the header is fixed (having a fixed region of the buffer that is known to always be the full header). You'd be much better having a fixed-length address that is enough to cover all possible nodes in the network - exactly what IPV6 has done.

- "Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" - IPV4 was first deployed in 1982. Wikipedia tells me that the year before, there were just over 200 nodes on the ARPANET. I think you're doing a bit of a disservice to the people who designed this stuff by castigating them for not factoring a 20'000'000x increase in network size into their protocol.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Because I don’t want to feel like I’m shopping at IKEA when I’m configuring my router.

[p1mrx]

Here are all the IKEA products you can spell in hex:

A16 ALG, A15EDA ALSEDA, A77E57 ATTEST, BA66E BAGGE, BA615 BAGIS, BA7157 BATIST, BEA7A BEATA, BE57A BESTÅ, BE7A BETA, B1BB1 BIBBI, B155A BISSA, B1716 BITIG, B1AD BLAD, B1ADE7 BLADET, B0A17 BOALT, B0110 BOLLÖ, B055E BOSSE, B0A5 BOÅS, BA5715 BÄSTIS, DA7A DATA, DE701F DETOLF, D10D DIOD, D170 DITO, D177E DITTE, D0F7A DOFTA, D01D DOLD, DA71D DÅTID, ED17 EDIT, E1DE EIDE, E16A ELGÅ, FAD0 FADO, FA5 FAS, FA57B0 FASTBO, F1BBE FIBBE, F1A7A FLÄTA, F070 FOTO, 6A5E11 GASELL, 61DEA GIDEÅ, 61E5 GLES, 610BA1 GLOBAL, 610DA GLÖDA, 60D15 GODIS, 605A GOSA, 60516 GOSIG, 1BE57AD IBESTAD, 157AD ISTAD, 1ADDA LADDA, 1ADE LADE, 1066A LOGGA, 1075 LOTS, 1A77 LÄTT, 0B1 OBI, 0DDA ODDA, 011E OLLE, 5A1B0 SALBO, 5177A SITTA, 50DA SODA, 50F1A SOFIA, 501 SOL, 50157A SOLSTA, 57A11 STÄLL, 7A6 TAG, 7A55A TASSA, 7177A TITTA, 70B1A5 TOBIAS, 70B0 TOBO, 70F7B0 TOFTBO, 706A TOGA, 7016 TOLG, 7016A TOLGA, ADA1 ÅDAL, A5E1E ÅSELE, 061A ÖGLA

Quite a few actually. I used https://lar5.com/ikea/ for the input words.

[kelnos]

> Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?

Yes, because designing and implementing a protocol like USB is nothing like designing and implementing an internetworking protocol.

> not sure why the protocol couldn't be upgraded so that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are all accepted

You can't just add address bits to a fixed-size protocol header that wasn't intended to be extended in that manner. IP addresses don't actually look like those dotted strings you're talking about. Those representations are for convenience and ease of reading for humans. For computers, it's a 4-byte quantity that's sent over the wire in binary, not a string of base-10 numbers separated by dots. When these things were designed, CPUs, custom processing units, and RAM were incredibly expensive. When you designed a protocol, you designed it for efficiency in size and parsing speed. Otherwise no one would implement your protocol, because it wouldn't be cost-effective to do so. Today we throw around JSON payloads in our HTTP responses without a care for the bandwidth needed or processing power used to parse. If you tried to do something like that back in 1981 when IPv4 was introduced, you'd be laughed out of the room and fired.

Your middle suggestion ("xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx") makes no sense: each part of the dotted-quad notation we're familiar with represents an 8 bit quantity (base-10 numbers 0 through 255). Adding another base-10 digit is nonsensical. The last example, a dotted-...er...quint? is certainly one option, which would increase the address field in the header from 4 to 5 bytes, giving us 256 times the current number of addresses (more or less). IPv6, instead of going from 4 to 5 address bytes, goes to 8 address bytes. That allows us to give every grain of sand on all the Earth's beaches an IPv6 address, several times over. Overkill? Maybe. Probably. But consider how long it's taken to adopt this new protocol. If we were to only add 1 more address byte, and then run out of addresses again, we'd likely have to wait even longer than this time for a future IPv7 to become adopted.

Now, going back to the fairly modest 1-byte increase in the address fields (and presumably no other protocol changes). For some devices a fairly simple software update would suffice, but for many router-type hardware of the time (25+ years ago), it wouldn't have been feasible to solely upgrade the software or firmware. Consider that things like routing tables would now require 25% more memory per address, and memory was something routers of the time didn't have in abundance. And some of these older pieces of hardware actually had parts of the protocol "parsing" done in hardware, which you can't change after the fact; you need to scrap the entire thing and build something new.

I do agree that it was foolish to design a whole new protocol. If they'd just released a new protocol where the only change was more address bits, I'm sure it'd be fully adopted by now and IPv4 would be a thing of the past.

[bombcar]

What probably could have been done (and kind of was done with NAT) would have been to move one byte from the port number to the address, giving us 256 additional “Internets” worth of addresses but limiting each address to 256 ports.

[p1mrx]

That's a good idea; it's called MAP-T.

Here's a NANOG presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmfYHCpfr_w

[VoodooJuJu]

You could do that, and if you did, I think you'd find a lot of success with your new solution, as people the world over would switch to using it.

Just make sure you make it as user-friendly & functional as its predecessor and don't stuff a whole bunch of nonsensical half-baked features into it. Otherwise, people may have no choice but to keep using the older solution.

[listenallyall]

That's awesome. I have no doubt you would use common sense and make the addresses in this new system simple, recognizable, and just an extended version of what everybody is already used to, like 111.222.33.44.55.66

[jedberg]

This right here was the biggest mistake for IPv6. Adoption would have been so much easier if IP6s were just "extra numbers" tacked onto the end so that if an old router saw it, it would ignore the extra bits and send it to the "IPv4" part of the address.

[alphager]

That's not how routers or routes work.

[jedberg]

I'm aware of how routers work and this is obviously simplified. But basically you would just have a high part of the address that would be outside the mask, and old routers would just ignore it.

So your IPv6 would be 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8, and old routers would just see 5.6.7.8 and route to the place where that IP should go. The router at 5.6.7.8 would be responsible for understanding IPv6 and how to route from there with the full address.

[kelnos]

That wouldn't work either. Why would the 5.6.7.8 router necessarily know how to route to the longer-address destination? There's no guarantee it's been upgraded. And why should it have to, anyway? It could get DoSed (accidentally, even) by traffic intended for a completely different destination outside its control.

Also consider that even if that 5.6.7.8 router knew how to route to the 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 network, it would have no guarantee that the packets wouldn't hit another router along the way that didn't understand the extra address bits. You could end up with weird routing loops and other issues. (Fortunately TTLs would quash these, but not after wasting a bunch of extra resources.)

Now, there might be some clever ways to work around this, and it might require some more internet infrastructure to deal with these routing challenges. Maybe that would have been faster and cheaper to deal with than the current IPv6 mess we have, maybe not.

[jedberg]

The device with IP 5.6.7.8 would have to be capable of routing the new packets, but nothing in between would. Just like today the device at 5.6.7.1 has to know how to route 5.6.7.8/24. It’s just assumed that the special IP knows what to do.

[vel0city]

> So your IPv6 would be 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8, and old routers would just see 5.6.7.8 and route to the place where that IP should go.

Thats absolutely not what would happen to an IPv4 only router though. You're fundamentally misunderstanding what IPv4 actually is.

That IPv4 router getting a packet with a source address of 9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16 addressed to 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 wouldn't know to route it to 5.6.7.8. That packet would be parsed as a source of 9.10.11.12 and a destination of 13.14.15.16. The real destination would have been spilled over into the Options header or payload of the packet. This is because in IPv4, bits 128-159 are the source address, 160-191 are the destination. Having a 64-bit address mushed into an IPv4 packet would just lead to those bits spilling over to the next location.

An IPv4-only router would not be able to route your theoretical IPv6 packet.

[jedberg]

I assume the high bits would be in the variable length ip option field. So to an old stack it would look like a packet from 13.14.15.16 to 5.6.7.8. Both of those devices would have to be capable of routing ipv6 packets, but nothing in between would.

[organsnyder]

The potential number of edge cases in IPv4-only hardware is staggering.

[jedberg]

For sure, and they would have been found really quickly. But in either case, it would involve fixing or upgrading the hardware or software, which is true whether we do it with extra numbers or the whole new scheme for IPv6.