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0 pointstgma1y ago0 comments

Huh? It is not a rationale for avoiding IPv6. Quite the contrary. It is a critique on how IPv6 was designed without being interoperable with IPv4 address space. It is very clear that he was right given there are 22 more years of evidence of IPv4 still being very much with us, and foreseeable future.

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kstrauser1y ago

It's almost always cited as exactly that: a reason why people are avoiding IPv6, as though it's proof that IPv6 is too hard to use, and that we could all be on it already if only we'd taken his advice.

It also completely misses the real reason we're not further along: people turned out to be willing to tolerate NAT's breakage. If we actually had to have a public IP per device, we'd have switched already. Instead, ISPs said hey, what if we put your entire house/apartment/office/city behind the same IP? And no one got guillotined or anything, so they did. DJB didn't mention that at all.

ay1y ago

Quote from the doc: “ Answer: We go through every place that 4-byte IPv4 addresses appear, and allow 16-byte IPv6 addresses in the same place.” - this text is pretty much the definition of “IPv6 transition”.

throw0101d1y ago

Also from the document:

> Unfortunately, instead of simply allowing 16-byte A records, people introduced new ``AAAA records'' into the DNS protocol, creating several unnecessary complications in DNS software.

"Simply". Yeah.

Until some non-upgraded client gets an 'extended-A' record response that's the "wrong" size (according itself) and drops the packet (which is the sane thing to do security-wise) and then you've just broken your DNS completely: IPv4 no longer works for some people, and neither does IPv4+.

So you have to wait until all client software understands extended-A records—but what's the motivation for enabling new client software if no one is enabling server-side records because there's no client software. Chicken-egg.

Which is one argument against IPv6: why enable client-side when there's no content, and why bother server-side if there are no client requests? Chicken-egg.

ay1y ago

Yeah. “Why don’t you just…” :-)

djb has a lot of brilliant ideas and excellent implementations of them. But this is neither.

On the flip side this article could serve as a great example of a Nobel disease :-)

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kstrauser1y ago

ay1y ago

throw0101d1y ago

Also from the document:

> Unfortunately, instead of simply allowing 16-byte A records, people introduced new ``AAAA records'' into the DNS protocol, creating several unnecessary complications in DNS software.

"Simply". Yeah.

Which is one argument against IPv6: why enable client-side when there's no content, and why bother server-side if there are no client requests? Chicken-egg.

ay1y ago

Yeah. “Why don’t you just…” :-)

djb has a lot of brilliant ideas and excellent implementations of them. But this is neither.

On the flip side this article could serve as a great example of a Nobel disease :-)

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse