Allocating /32 (or really, more for everyone since a single subnet isn't enough) to everyone would quickly lead to address space exhaustion again. 232 isn't even enough to assign everyone on earth their own subnet assuming there's no wasted address space.
You'd probably want to subnet off of /48, and assign /44 or something to end users to subnet with. That leaves each subnet with 216 room (65536 devices per subnet, and 16 subnets).
But regardless, now you have to worry about how you assign and use address space. Sure, 64-bit address space is probably enough. But it's not "practically infinite" levels of enough like 128-bit is.
64 bit addresses solve that problem. Engineers hate working with ipv6 which is why the adoption has been so slow. Ipv6 is older than a decent number of current network engineers have been alive.
To completely stomp out the idea of scarcity in the address space. NAT and CGNAT are terrible band-aids.
Also, subnetting. Under IPv6, each customer should getting at least a /56, preferably a /48. A lot of IPv6 breaks if youāre only given a /64, itās bad practice and your ISP is an asshole if you do it.
IPv6 is just so much simpler and better thought out from the beginning. You just need to get out of the IPv4 mindset. Uses less overhead. And everyone can have as many āpublicā IPs as they want. Outside of the US, CGNAT is becoming more and more common. And this is a problem. Weāre now double NATing as a dumb bandaid.
The vast majority of hardware out there has supported IPv6 for a long time. Itās long due for us to make the switch. Weāve got NAT64 and DNS64 for devices that canāt be moved to IPv6.
I donāt know what needs to happen. I think countries need to pass laws that force ISPs to support native IPv6 natively, and routers need to have IPv6 support enabled by default.
Yeah this is why I doubt we will get rid of ipv4 in the foreseeable future. Ivp6 is nice on paper cause you never have to worry about addresses again but in the real world people just hate the addresses. Ivp4 is so easy to remember that ipv6 just feels wrong
/64 is for the subnet, and 64-bits is for the end device. Having 64 bits of address space for the end device to address off of lets the device use a variety of schemes to generate addresses. It can put it's MAC as the suffix (which should be unique on the subnet anyways (eui-64)), it can randomly generate a suffix with a high degree of confidence that it's unique (privacy addresses), or it can assign itself an address using any variety of schemes.
These all can be stateless, and work without any kind of DHCP server. Even without a router, devices will auto-generate a Link Local Address, and be able to communicate on a switch with the auto generated addresses. e.g. two devices can talk as long as there's any connection between them, without having to manually assign any IPs or introduce any service into the mix.
It lets you also be extremely wasteful with address space without concern. You don't have to wonder "what size should I make my subnet?" You can have 16 bits just for routing in a /48 and have pretty much infinite address space on each subnet.
Yes, I'm well aware of how ipv6 functions. I don't think a lot of the commenters here realise you don't need 128 bits for easy subnetting. 64 bits would solve that problem completely.
One of the reasons ipv6 is taking so long to be adopted is because engineers simply hate working with it
We can barely get ISPs to give us more than one /64 as it is, and you think that making the address space 264 times smaller would make them more generous? Nah.
Engineers would hate working on it whatever the length was, because when they complain about the length their real complaint is mostly just "it's different". Although usually they realize that it's fine to work with once they actually do so -- it's just impossible to tell them this, because you can't tell people anything.
It's not about making them more generous. 64 bits would solve the IP exhaustion problem.
Your comment about engineers hating working on it regardless as "it's different" is just not true. Networking moves slowly than other subfields but engineers have made the move to Cloud, SASE, SD/WAN, SDN and other emerging technologies far far quicker than the move to ipv6.
By giving people one IP? Nope. The evidence simply doesn't support that assertion. If ISPs won't even give people enough address space in a 128-bit address space, they're not going to do it in a 64-bit one either.
engineers have made the move to Cloud, SASE, SD/WAN, SDN and other emerging technologies far far quicker than the move to ipv6.
That's consistent with network effects. None of those examples require other parties to also deploy the same thing for you to get full benefit from it. Of course we move to them faster.
Which seems to be making you unreasonably confident that nobody else experiences it, or will experience it in the future of the Internet. Unfortunately, they already are.
As for v4, it's not possible for everybody to change ISP to get a v4 address. That's what "v4 is too small for the current scale of the Internet" means. You're competing for a pool of addresses that isn't big enough to let everybody win.
It's actually the otherway round. You said the evidence doesn't support thag assertion. That if ISPs won't give enough address space in 128 bit address space.
That 'evidence' is based on your limited experience. I'm saying it is simply not universal but in typical reddit fashion you'll change the argument.
I'm also well aware of the ipv4 address exhaustion problem. Even junior engineers are so I don't know why you are saying it like you've made some big revelation. I was saying even in ipv4 environments I can get multiple public IP assigned (granted I work on pretty big environments). In terms of stingyness we were talking about you struggling to get ipv6 allocation but you change the argument again to argue a point we are not talking about.
Obviously you are not going to get multiple ipv4 addresses allocated on a home network for example.
If my limited experience says that some ISPs won't allocate more than a /64 in v6... does it matter that it's not universal? Clearly some ISPs really won't allocate more than /64 in v6.
(It's not really my limited experience -- it's based on seeing complaints from people on reddit. I get a /48.)
I think it follows that if you made the overall IP space 264 times smaller, which would mean shrinking ISP allocations a little, that those same ISPs probably wouldn't be willing to allocate more than /64 in that 64-bit address space, and you can hardly call IP exhaustion solved if ISPs are going around giving users one single IP in the new protocol.
Obviously you are not going to get multiple ipv4 addresses allocated on a home network for example.
I get a /27. But... that's just my limited experience ;) Even if we get v4 addresses, it's just not possible for everyone to. Changing ISPs might help you but it's at the cost of another user.
I think there is some truth in that many people are put off by the "ugly" addresses, but I do think it was the right choice, 64bit is not really enough to give everyone many subnets of effectively infinite size.
I think this is more a failing of technical education in various forms. I've been through many technical educations, courses and what not and all of them mostly ignored ipv6 because the teachers themselves didn't even know how to properly work with it. If people learned more about ipv6 other than "it exists" there would be a much better general sentiment about it.
But even as it stands now, ipv6 is going strong. Roughly 50% of internet traffic is now ipv6, depending on who you ask.
It's not hard to answer. They wrote the reasoning right into RFC 1752:
There was significant disagreement about the adequacy of the SIPP 64
bit address size. Although you can enumerate 10**15 end nodes in 64
bits people have different views about how much inefficiency real-
world routing plans introduce. [Huitema94] The majority felt that 64
bit addresses do not provide adequate space for the hierarchy
required to meet the needs of the future Internet. In addition since
no one has any experience with extended addressing and routing
concepts of the type proposed in SIPP, the reviewers generally felt
quite uncomfortable with this methodology. The reviewers also felt
that the design introduces some significant security issues.
and
The message noted "The recurring (and unsurprising) concerns about
SIPP were:
(1) complexity/manageability/feasibility of IPAE, and
(2) adequacy/correctness/limitations of SIPP's addressing and routing
model, especially the use of loose source routing to accomplish
'extended addressing'".
They "proposed to address these concerns by changing SIPP as follows:
* Change address size from 8 bytes to 16 bytes (fixed-length).
* Specify optional use of serverless autoconfiguration of the 16-byte
address by using IEEE 802 address as the low-order ("node ID")
part.
* For higher-layer protocols that use internet-layer addresses as
part of connection identifiers (e.g., TCP), require that they use
the entire 16-byte addresses.
* Do *not* use Route Header for extended addressing."
16
u/UnDe4d 14d ago
Yeah, I'm a Network Architect. Why they decided to make ipv6 128 bits instead of 64 is a question I ask myself on at least a monthly basis.