←back to thread

The IPv6 Transition

(www.potaroo.net)
215 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.615s | source
Show context
cyberax ◴[] No.41900325[source]
IPv6 is _still_ not at the feature parity with IPv4!

I'm not kidding. For example, Android doesn't support stateful DHCPv6. And DHCPv6 doesn't have the _basic_ feature of DHCPv4: hostnames. You can't easily use it to do a quick survey of your network.

Then you have that @#&(^(&!@^ that is ULA.

With IPv4 we have a very useful pattern: you create an "internal" network that is stable and predictable. It's routed to the outside world through NAT. If the external connection goes down, the internal network is unaffected.

With IPv6 you're supposed to have ULA and the global routed addresses in parallel. So now the external connection goes down, and the router withdraws the prefix from the router advertisement. Half of the hosts lose their external addresses, but keep the ULAs. Half of the hosts don't implement prefix withdrawal, and keep both their ULAs and the normal addresses. Congrats, now these hosts can't talk to each other due to the ULA addresses being less preferred.

And of course, IPv6 hasn't improved on the PMTU. So if you're running an Internet service, you need to use something like 1400 MTU to make sure some of the misconfigured tunneled clients don't get shafted. There's now an RFC that makes it useful: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9268 , but it's Experimental and it'll need ~20 years to be deployed anyways.

IPv6, a story of recursive utter failure at all levels...

replies(3): >>41900798 #>>41901978 #>>41904263 #
1. matrix2003 ◴[] No.41900798[source]
> Congrats, now these hosts can't talk to each other due to the ULA addresses being less preferred.

What do you mean by this? Are you taking about mDNS still referencing the withdrawn prefix?

replies(1): >>41901257 #
2. cyberax ◴[] No.41901257[source]
If two hosts have both mutually accessible ULA and GUA addresses, they will prefer _GUAs_ to talk to each other. So the connection will be susceptible to the prefix withdrawal if the upstream goes down (BTW, IPv6 did nothing sane for multihoming either).

> Are you taking about mDNS still referencing the withdrawn prefix?

That too.

replies(1): >>41911163 #
3. matrix2003 ◴[] No.41911163[source]
Oh, interesting. My machines have not had good mDNS support, so I have been hardcoding ULAs for LAN-only traffic.