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[Question] what exactly is hard about adopting IPv6?? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by danhab99@programming.dev to c/networking@sh.itjust.works

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I mean on a technical level. Are the devices that make up the infrastructure of the internet hardwired with IPv4? Is the firmware on these devices impossible to upgrade remotely?

If it's just a matter of software or firmware then adoption should only take like a year but clearly that isn't the case. So what specifically is stopping us?

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[–] undefined@links.hackliberty.org 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can still use NAT for IPv6 if it’s something you really want, and it works similarly to IPv4.

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But at that point there's no difference other than it's less familiar and more fiddly with v6. Why even bother.

[–] undefined@links.hackliberty.org 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

To be blunt, I don’t know what 99% of the other commenters are talking about. I’ve never had so many problems with IPv6 in my life, and I’ve been using it for over 10 years now.

At the same time, I’ve only seen less latency and higher bandwidth on IPv6 aware services (though the underlying reasoning is unclear to me).

As someone who builds websites for people all over the globe with any mix of IPv4 and IPv6 it really irks me that people are finding seemingly any excuse to not just move over to IPv6.

What about it is fiddly?

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 4 months ago

What about it is fiddly?

The insane addresses. The reliance on DNS, the unpredictability of addresses, that each device can have so many addresses and you need to know what each does and is used for and how that impacts inter-network routing and firewall rules. Privacy IPs, what the hell? Its a solution to something that's fixed by tried and understood IPv4 NAT.

If you just want a flat simple network where everything on your lan is equal, everything has a globally unique and trackable IP I'm sure it's fine. But if you have something more sophisticated it becomes much more complicated. And I genuinely can't see how IPv6 advocates can't see the problems it introduces.

What we need is a larger address space and fast adoption, that's it. If after 30 years of awful adoption rates and only when people have a gun to their head they begrudgingly might adopt it, then you have a bad protocol.