misunderstanding scale (was: Ipv4 end, its fake.)

Laszlo Hanyecz laszlo at heliacal.net
Sun Mar 23 18:30:21 UTC 2014



On Mar 23, 2014, at 4:57 PM, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> Basically because none of them have ever been on the Internet proper
> where they can connect to their home machines from wherever they
> are in the world directly.  If you don't know what it should be
> like you don't complain when you are not getting it.
> 

It's ironic that those of us that do understand this are mostly the same ones saying that it's ok to give 'the users' NAT.  The reality is that some (many/most/all?) of our 'users' are probably smarter than us and they just get around it with VPNs/tunnels just like we do.  Just because they aren't complaining directly to us, doesn't mean they are satisfied.  Every gamer with a console is basically screwed - they have to jump through hoops trying to figure out how to forward ports or whatever else, because these home routers all give them NAT.  We can probably argue cause/effect on this, but it's all tied together - those routers wouldn't have had to do NAT if they could somehow request unique numbers for each device.. but now carriers are doing that same NAT internally, because hey, 'the users' are already used to it anyway, from having done it on their home gateways. 

It's not that the users are ok with NAT, or that they prefer it, it's just all they can get.
IPv6 is far from perfect, but it's a direct answer to the resource exhaustion problem.  It seems unlikely that IPv4 will ever be dropped, but it can be made largely irrelevant by building out IPv6 networks.

As far as the enterprise side of things, many of the people working in that area today have likely never known any other kind of network except the NAT kind.  A lot of these guys say things like 'private ip' and 'public ip' - they've have this ingrained in them for the past 15+ years, and the idea of real internet is scary.  I'm not sure how this problem of education is addressed, and it might sound stupid, but it's a real problem.

The other side of things is that some software vendors with large market share are doing their own share of actively trying to undermine IPv6 deployment in subtle ways.  You can read RFC6555 for the details.  Just as an example, on Mac OS, users accessing a dual stack website from a dual stack host may not ever actually take the IPv6 path, so if there are people auditing how many clients are using v4 vs v6 they would get skewed results.

I know everyone has their own parameters that define what's worth it and what's not, but I think most people's lives would be made easier by embracing IPv6.

-Laszlo


> ISP's have done a good job of brain washing their customers into
> thinking that they shouldn't be able to run services from home.
> That all their machines shouldn't have a globally unique address
> that is theoritically reachable from everywhere.  That NAT is normal
> and desiriable.
> 
> I was at work last week and because I have IPv6 at both ends I could
> just log into the machines at home as easily as if I was there.
> When I'm stuck using a IPv4 only service on the road I have to jump
> through lots of hoops to reach the internal machines.
> 
> Mark
> 
>> R's,
>> John
>> 
>> 
> -- 
> Mark Andrews, ISC
> 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
> PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org
> 





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