YHK - yet another hacker news clone

As predicted:

      We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of
      transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at
      once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the
      Internet make such a cutover impossible.

      Rather, IPng will need to co-exist with IPv4 for some period of
      time.  There are a number of ways to achieve this co-existence
      such as requiring hosts to support two stacks, converting between
      protocols, or using backward compatible extensions to IPv4.  Each
      scheme has its strengths and weaknesses, which have to be weighed.

      Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4
      hosts on the Internet effectively forever.  IPng must provide
      mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng
      has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.

Creating an IPng was always going to be complicated:

      So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand
      the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means 
      [three] things immediately:

            You have to change the version number.

            You have to add new code to handle the new version.

      […]

            You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, 
            with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know 
            nothing of the new protocol.

      Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only 
      two solutions:

            (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both 
                 the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

            (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses
                 between the old and new protocols.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1671

All this complaining and not so much as a single hint or even belief that there's a better solution.

I suppose we could read into the complaint some kind of faith that one does exist, but since nobody has found it yet, the faith is a little uncompelling so far.

Do you think supporting dp is as easy as just slapping a 50 cent port on the side of the display??

> but the point is that the problem with IPv6 is not just that it suffers from bad design on merit

It doesn't.

> instead we got network discovery and globally unique cookies as a bundle deal, with a whole lot of other crap.

How does any of this apply to people not replacing hardware that is ipv4 only?

(Admittedly I haven't had a printer for over a decade and I have never printed from a phone, so maybe I am missing something.)

Have the router issue ULAs only and let the router do stateless NPT (network prefix translation) only.

Done, works great. Doesn’t matter what your internet connection is doing.

Yes, your local devices will use the ULA to attempt to connect to Internet destinations if that’s the only v6 address they have. It works fine.

   With one exception, extension headers are not examined or processed
   by any node along a packet's delivery path, until the packet reaches
   the node (or each of the set of nodes, in the case of multicast)
   identified in the Destination Address field of the IPv6 header.

When v6 was “invented” I believe they thought “everyone” would have PI addresses, as was (relatively) common 30 years ago.

If everyone has their own PI space, and used BGP with their ISPs this would also be “zero setup” with v6 as that’s the entire point of BGP and PI addresses.

It was a definite failure of imagination that they did not think of how this would work if you don’t control your own IP space.

If you have ISPs you can peer with over BGP and your own PI IP space this does “just work” as you’d expect. The same way it “just works” with v4 in a NATless world.

A lot of the things that “just work” in v4 are really just NAT sweeping the rough edges under the rug. The same problems exist in v4, but don’t get seen in practice as local / global addresses are effectively always different on your network (unless you’re lucky enough to be a legacy allocation that has an /8 of v4 I suppose).

If you enforce that same “separation” in v6 (with NPT, or NAT) surprise the “problems” also go away, like they do in v4.