Subj : FidoNews submission
To : Michiel van der Vlist
From : Gerrit Kuehn
Date : Mon Jun 02 2025 06:31 pm
Hello Michiel!
02 Jun 25 13:49, Michiel van der Vlist wrote to Gerrit Kuehn:
GK>> Yeah, why go for IPv6 if IPv4 works just fine?
MvdV> I was just parafrasing you.
And you are right: Leap-frogging ISDN was an option. If I had adopted IPv6 back in 2000 when it first became available, I'd certainly have learned at lot about it. But a good part of that knowledge would be obsolete by now.
In the end, we are discussing about the best choice of time when to move on. This heavily depends on each personal situation, and mine is different from yours, that's all. I do not see much use in continuing this discussion.
MvdV> But in the case of IPv6 isn't it
MvdV> obvious by now? You have expereinced by yourself that "IPv4 does
MvdV> not work fine" any more. Your new fiberglass provider does not
MvdV> offer you a glabally routable IPv4 address.
I'd rather say "IPv6 is not working fine" in this case. It cannot fully replace IPv4 at this point.
GK>> You ignored the drawbacks of POTS,
MvdV> At the time, POTS had no drawbacks for me.
IPv4 has no drawbacks for me as long as it is available. IPv6, on the other hand, has a couple of them.
MvdV> Yes, early adoption does not always work out well. Sometimes it
MvdV> does and sometimes it doesn't.
As I wrote above: it depends on your personal situation.
GK>> Yeah, horrible from a security point of view.I do not want all
GK>> devices in my network to have routable addresses, heck no! Even more
GK>> so when thinking about the address being permanent. IPv6 requires
GK>> much more thought on network security.
MvdV> That point had been debunked over a decade ago! While in he very
MvdV> early days of IPv6 that may have been an issue, now every IPv6
MvdV> capable IPv6 router has a firewll that blocks all unsollicted
MvdV> income by default.
Yes, but that is the pathological setup where you do not want to offer any services to the world (like binkd). Everything beyond that will require reworking at least your perimeter firewall.
MvdV> That you devices have a globally routable
MvdV> address does not mean that they are exposed to the ugly internet.
Given the router is properly configured. However, I still have to bother with permanent or long-lasting addresses that leak metadata and easily allow tracking of your devices. Here come dynamic prefixes and dynamic devices addresses... yes, all doable, but needs proper insight that allows you to do this and check that it actually works.
MvdV> In fact it is more secure that IPv4 hiding behaind NAT. NAT is mode
MvdV> complex and has loopholes...
Which are well known.
OTOH, IPv6 has introduced things like NAT66 and NPTv6 because (years after the first specification of IPv6 - so much for "early adopting") things like permanent addresses that were advertised as a "feature" in the first place turned out to have drawbacks for many people.
GK>> It will do so for a very long time, at least in private networks.
MvdV> You now have DS-Lite where IPv4 does NOT "just keep working".
My private network does not care about DSlite at all.
GK>> How is a network interface having one 32bit address supposed to be
GK>> less complex than a network interface having (at least) three
GK>> different 128bit addresses on top of that?
MvdV> If you had adopted IPv6 earlier and worked with it for some time
MvdV> you would you would know the answer. ;-)
Yeah, if I had been an early adopter I would have lived through experiencing one IPv6 trouble after another and all the things that were invented to patch these. I am not too sad to have been saved from that. ;)
GK>> IPv6 is practically unusable without working DNS,
MvdV> The whole internet is practically unususable without DNS.
Private networks work just fine without DNS in many places. My point was: if your autoconfig DNS fails for some reason. In the beginning, IPv6 completely neglected autoconfig of DNS. This has been patched with managed flags, multicasting and extensions in router advertisements (RDNSS/DNSSL).
MvdV> IPv6 works fine with IPv6. What is the problem?
No problem, I just do not get your point here.
MvdV> Apple demands that apps in the IPhone appstore have demonstrated
MvdV> that they can work in an IPv6 only environment.
I could not care less.
MvdV> They would not invest in IPv6 only if they did not think that is
MvdV> the future.
It is. But as with all new technology: adoption will take time. Over that time, even the new technology will evolve. Everyone will have to find out when the best point in time to jump the train is reached.
Hardly any FTN sysop will have benefitted from IPv6 back in 2000. This is different today, but still far away from "cannot do without".
MvdV> Yes, IPv4 will be with us for quite some time. I may not live to
MvdV> see it switched off. But IPv6 is the future. It is not a gag that
MvdV> will blow over. To keep ignoring it is a dead end.
The "dead end" will stay with us for a very long time, indeed. Maybe another 25 years will suffice, but it probably will not have died out completely until then.
MvdV> "Smaller private network" and "more legacy devices" is a
MvdV> contradiction.
Why?
MvdV> Anyway, these legacy devices can keep running along
MvdV> in a dual stack network until they are no longer supported by the
MvdV> manufacturer or the infrastucture. It does not have to stop anyone
MvdV> from adopting Ipv6.
It does not force anyone to adopt now, either.
MvdV> he who does not prepare for that will run into
MvdV> a dead end street some day.
There are streets so small that you cannot pass them with a truck, indeed. However, a smaller car, a motorcycle, a bike, or just walking by foot may do just fine in these places.
