8 ms·

IPv4 Declared Historic – Draft

67 points by nyan4 11y ago

forgottenpass 11y ago
Good. The longer we build as if v4 isn't legacy support, the more drawn-out and uglier the already uncomfortable transition will be.
sparky_ 11y ago
This feels optimistically premature. Sure, it's been superseded, and it's great to move the ball forward. But somehow I think this legacy technology will be in use for a long, long time.
- rmetzler 11y ago
  I think the same, IPv4 isn't going anywhere soon.
  - lisivka 11y ago
    Sorry, but containerization and SDN needs addresses. I can spawn dozen of networks on my computer using docker/flannel/kubernetes, but I have only 1 white IPv4 address for all of them, so I need to use NAT and step-stone server. I have no such limitation with IPv6: each host has it own white IPv6 address and addressing becomes flat. Sorry, but I have no choice, so I use IPv6 today.
- ra1n85 11y ago
  Agreed. The few use cases I see that have a hard requirement for IPv6 typically involve arbitrary drivers like government regulations for unique addressing. I have yet to see much demand for IPv6 driven by functionality.
azdle 11y ago
Everyone take note that this is an individual v0 draft, it says "Type: Active Internet-Draft (individual)" and "Intended status: Standards Track". Before this becomes and RFC (if it ever does at all) it has to go through discussions as an individual draft, then it has to be voted to become standards track, at which point it will become a working group draft where it goes through more comments, editing, and waiting, and only then does it become an official RFC. To give you an idea of the time scale this is talking about, see that this version of this draft expires in September. This is in no way some proclamation that IPv4 is no more, it's more like the obituaries that news papers have sitting around for public figures just in case they die. The IETF isn't quick at getting RFCs published, and it definitely won't be with something as big as this.
- riffic 11y ago
  >IETF isn't quick at getting RFCs published That's not entirely true. An RFC can get published very quickly. At this point there are almost 8000 of them. Perhaps you are thinking of an Internet Standard document: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Standard
- zurn 11y ago
  It's not voting exactly at the IETF, they nominally reject it[1]. Approximately it goes through the relevant working group (without voting but by "rough consensus"), IESG, various reviews and RFC editor. [1] “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code” - Dave Clark, quoted by http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-... for example
chatmasta 11y ago
I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere, as long as it remains in the business interests of major cloud providers, and as long as people continue to deploy NAT based firewalls as a security feature. Re: business interests: Cloud businesses can acquire IP addresses at price points far higher than the average developer can. Now that the ARIN address space is exhausted, cloud providers will begin to buy more and more IPv4 space until they have a complete monopoly and large portions of IPv4 are controlled by just a few companies. This will price other companies out of offering cloud services that are IPv4 compatible. Re: security: Sure, the original intended purpose of NAT was not security, but people use it for that, and will continue to do so. If you want to put multiple boxes behind a single IP address, IPv4 is the easiest way to do it. In fact, IPv6 seems to be a step backward in terms of security. Every device does not need to be openly addressable from anywhere on the Internet, and developers will always choose the path of least resistance, especially when it's more secure.
- drvdevd 11y ago
  Regarding the path of least resistance for developers eventually, hopefully, perhaps traversing NAT will prove to be a bigger pain for the average developer than just using IPv6.
- api 11y ago
  NAT is not a security feature. Please stop repeating this toxic drivel. NAT is not the same as firewalls, and firewalls do not require NAT. NAT is just an ugly hack to stretch IPV4's inadequate address space, and it's one that breaks quite a few protocols and generally makes a lot of things painful and complex. Remember back when there were two dozen different networking layers vying for the ability to link Docker containers? (There still are, but Docker's hype wave has crested so you don't see them every 5 minutes on here.) With IPv6 and no NAT, none of that is necessary. Just give every container a real address, set your firewall rules accordingly, and every container anywhere can talk directly to every other container without any added complexity. Give each container host a /96 address and let it assign container IPs from the remaining /32, for up to four billion containers per host. Since IPv6 specifies that an ISP should hand out /64's to customers, each customer can have 4 billion container hosts. Getting rid of NAT makes everything orders of magnitude simpler. I do wonder about monopoly resistance. I wonder if IPv6 has been shunned by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft clouds because they see a long term advantage in preventing adoption. IPv6 makes peer to peer systems a lot easier to build, and peer to peer is direct competition to the 'run absolutely everything through the cloud' model. IPv6 could actually reduce the cloud's importance (especially for data transit) if it were widely deployed.
forgottenpass 11y ago
I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere A) Get bent. B) You think they don't already know the only chance of dualstack going away is so it can become tristack?
- dang 11y ago
  You can't comment like this here, regardless of how wrong or rude someone else is. If you can't be civil, please abstain from posting until you can. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300655 and marked it off-topic.
kazinator 11y ago
> Current and future work builds on IPv6, making it better for every purpose than the old protocol. Not for purposes like: * I want the IP header I'm transmitting between these two nodes to be as small as possible * I want a CPU and memory efficient TCP/IP stack for an embedded system. Pretty much no successor of anything is better than its predecessor for "every purpose", just every purpose that the speaker happens to care about.
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  IPv6 headers should be easier to parse than IPv4.
- wmf 11y ago
  What's your opinion of 6LoWPAN?
betaby 11y ago
IPv4 reminds me non-Unicode applications from 90s Or ATM, or frame-relay or IPX, or SNA, or 16bit DOS apps. All above were gone eventually. SAme going to happen with IPv4, but I guess at slower rate.
- Aloha 11y ago
  Frame Relay and ATM are still very much living, so are non-Unicode applications, SNA and 16-bit DOS applications a little less so, IPX I think is all but dead however.
__david__ 11y ago
It's interesting to see this looks like it was drafted by a Time Warner Cable employee, and yet my twc internet still doesn't support IPv6. Though it gives me hope that maybe it's coming soon?
- nandhp 11y ago
  If your equipment is all IPv6-capable, you may just need to have swap out your modem. Time Warner Cable has achieved 100% IPv6 availability (possibly excluding certain phone customers): http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs-internet/ipv6/why-don_t-i-have-ipv6-yet-.html http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs-internet...
  - jepler 11y ago
    .. except no static ipv6 even for commercial / business class users? wt---
    - wtallis 11y ago
      What's the point? The addresses TWC assigns are extremely stable in my experience. Are you trying to run a public-facing DNS server or do you have some other need to hard-code IP addresses?
      - abstractbeliefs 11y ago
        Well, DNS needs you to "hard"code the IP addresses you are available at against your domains. Before you suggest DDNS, for some companies, the length of unavailability between a changed IP and the DDNS client noticing and updating can be fatal.
        pyvpx 11y ago
        why are they hosting services on their dynamically addressed business line? everyone offers static addressing on business lines. it's a completely rip off; and conveniently makes the proper route -- colocation, a dedicated server, "the cloud" -- more financially sound.
sergioocon 11y ago
Wow, I released and RFI 12 years ago on IPv6 when I was working in a Telco, and every vendor talked about it as a reality... I am still waiting for that reality to be an actual one. I am still waiting for my ISP to activate IPv6 in my WLAN at home... after all those years

67 points by nyan4 11y ago

Good. The longer we build as if v4 isn't legacy support, the more drawn-out and uglier the already uncomfortable transition will be.

sparky_ 11y ago

This feels optimistically premature. Sure, it's been superseded, and it's great to move the ball forward. But somehow I think this legacy technology will be in use for a long, long time.

rmetzler 11y ago
I think the same, IPv4 isn't going anywhere soon.
- lisivka 11y ago
  Sorry, but containerization and SDN needs addresses. I can spawn dozen of networks on my computer using docker/flannel/kubernetes, but I have only 1 white IPv4 address for all of them, so I need to use NAT and step-stone server. I have no such limitation with IPv6: each host has it own white IPv6 address and addressing becomes flat. Sorry, but I have no choice, so I use IPv6 today.
ra1n85 11y ago
Agreed. The few use cases I see that have a hard requirement for IPv6 typically involve arbitrary drivers like government regulations for unique addressing. I have yet to see much demand for IPv6 driven by functionality.

azdle 11y ago

Everyone take note that this is an individual v0 draft, it says "Type: Active Internet-Draft (individual)" and "Intended status: Standards Track". Before this becomes and RFC (if it ever does at all) it has to go through discussions as an individual draft, then it has to be voted to become standards track, at which point it will become a working group draft where it goes through more comments, editing, and waiting, and only then does it become an official RFC. To give you an idea of the time scale this is talking about, see that this version of this draft expires in September. This is in no way some proclamation that IPv4 is no more, it's more like the obituaries that news papers have sitting around for public figures just in case they die. The IETF isn't quick at getting RFCs published, and it definitely won't be with something as big as this.

riffic 11y ago
>IETF isn't quick at getting RFCs published That's not entirely true. An RFC can get published very quickly. At this point there are almost 8000 of them. Perhaps you are thinking of an Internet Standard document: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Standard
zurn 11y ago
It's not voting exactly at the IETF, they nominally reject it[1]. Approximately it goes through the relevant working group (without voting but by "rough consensus"), IESG, various reviews and RFC editor. [1] “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code” - Dave Clark, quoted by http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-... for example

chatmasta 11y ago

I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere, as long as it remains in the business interests of major cloud providers, and as long as people continue to deploy NAT based firewalls as a security feature. Re: business interests: Cloud businesses can acquire IP addresses at price points far higher than the average developer can. Now that the ARIN address space is exhausted, cloud providers will begin to buy more and more IPv4 space until they have a complete monopoly and large portions of IPv4 are controlled by just a few companies. This will price other companies out of offering cloud services that are IPv4 compatible. Re: security: Sure, the original intended purpose of NAT was not security, but people use it for that, and will continue to do so. If you want to put multiple boxes behind a single IP address, IPv4 is the easiest way to do it. In fact, IPv6 seems to be a step backward in terms of security. Every device does not need to be openly addressable from anywhere on the Internet, and developers will always choose the path of least resistance, especially when it's more secure.

drvdevd 11y ago
Regarding the path of least resistance for developers eventually, hopefully, perhaps traversing NAT will prove to be a bigger pain for the average developer than just using IPv6.
api 11y ago
NAT is not a security feature. Please stop repeating this toxic drivel. NAT is not the same as firewalls, and firewalls do not require NAT. NAT is just an ugly hack to stretch IPV4's inadequate address space, and it's one that breaks quite a few protocols and generally makes a lot of things painful and complex. Remember back when there were two dozen different networking layers vying for the ability to link Docker containers? (There still are, but Docker's hype wave has crested so you don't see them every 5 minutes on here.) With IPv6 and no NAT, none of that is necessary. Just give every container a real address, set your firewall rules accordingly, and every container anywhere can talk directly to every other container without any added complexity. Give each container host a /96 address and let it assign container IPs from the remaining /32, for up to four billion containers per host. Since IPv6 specifies that an ISP should hand out /64's to customers, each customer can have 4 billion container hosts. Getting rid of NAT makes everything orders of magnitude simpler. I do wonder about monopoly resistance. I wonder if IPv6 has been shunned by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft clouds because they see a long term advantage in preventing adoption. IPv6 makes peer to peer systems a lot easier to build, and peer to peer is direct competition to the 'run absolutely everything through the cloud' model. IPv6 could actually reduce the cloud's importance (especially for data transit) if it were widely deployed.

forgottenpass 11y ago

I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere A) Get bent. B) You think they don't already know the only chance of dualstack going away is so it can become tristack?

dang 11y ago
You can't comment like this here, regardless of how wrong or rude someone else is. If you can't be civil, please abstain from posting until you can. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300655 and marked it off-topic.

kazinator 11y ago

> Current and future work builds on IPv6, making it better for every purpose than the old protocol. Not for purposes like: * I want the IP header I'm transmitting between these two nodes to be as small as possible * I want a CPU and memory efficient TCP/IP stack for an embedded system. Pretty much no successor of anything is better than its predecessor for "every purpose", just every purpose that the speaker happens to care about.

virtuallynathan 11y ago
IPv6 headers should be easier to parse than IPv4.
wmf 11y ago
What's your opinion of 6LoWPAN?

betaby 11y ago

IPv4 reminds me non-Unicode applications from 90s Or ATM, or frame-relay or IPX, or SNA, or 16bit DOS apps. All above were gone eventually. SAme going to happen with IPv4, but I guess at slower rate.

Aloha 11y ago
Frame Relay and ATM are still very much living, so are non-Unicode applications, SNA and 16-bit DOS applications a little less so, IPX I think is all but dead however.

__david__ 11y ago

It's interesting to see this looks like it was drafted by a Time Warner Cable employee, and yet my twc internet still doesn't support IPv6. Though it gives me hope that maybe it's coming soon?

nandhp 11y ago
If your equipment is all IPv6-capable, you may just need to have swap out your modem. Time Warner Cable has achieved 100% IPv6 availability (possibly excluding certain phone customers): http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs-internet/ipv6/why-don_t-i-have-ipv6-yet-.html http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs-internet...
- jepler 11y ago
  .. except no static ipv6 even for commercial / business class users? wt---
  - wtallis 11y ago
    What's the point? The addresses TWC assigns are extremely stable in my experience. Are you trying to run a public-facing DNS server or do you have some other need to hard-code IP addresses?
    - abstractbeliefs 11y ago
      Well, DNS needs you to "hard"code the IP addresses you are available at against your domains. Before you suggest DDNS, for some companies, the length of unavailability between a changed IP and the DDNS client noticing and updating can be fatal.
      - pyvpx 11y ago
        why are they hosting services on their dynamically addressed business line? everyone offers static addressing on business lines. it's a completely rip off; and conveniently makes the proper route -- colocation, a dedicated server, "the cloud" -- more financially sound.

sergioocon 11y ago

Wow, I released and RFI 12 years ago on IPv6 when I was working in a Telco, and every vendor talked about it as a reality... I am still waiting for that reality to be an actual one. I am still waiting for my ISP to activate IPv6 in my WLAN at home... after all those years