Hacker News
points by orangeboats 14 hours ago | 0 comments
It's always the same with those "I hope IPv6 were just IPv4 with more octets" proposals on Hacker News, aka Godwin's law of the Internet Protocol.

It turns out when you ignore the hardest part of the problem, you can always make a good-looking proposal!

[–] mahboi 10 hours ago
That isn't the hardest part. We already got software and hardware supporting IPv6, and yet...
[–] orangeboats 10 hours ago
It still is. A lot of IoT and "smart" devices are still dreadfully slow in updating their software.
[–] mahboi 9 hours ago
Iot isn't what's holding ipv6 back. There are tons of websites and even cloud platforms with totally ipv6-capable hardware and OSes, but the services are v4-only or strongly v4-preferred.
[–] orangeboats 4 hours ago
IoT was an example, a glaring one at that.

IPv6-lacking hardware and software definitely do exist in the wild, have you seen how some programs from incompetent developers accept only IPv4 addresses in the config files? I think all of us have seen at least one such program.

Often times it's just a matter of using another function to parse the address string. But you are shit outta luck if the program is closed source.

[–] mahboi 3 hours ago
Yeah it's in the wild, but random crappy software isn't the reason all these big services are v4-only. Transitioning from v4 to v6 requires redoing your entire network, except you still have to maintain the v4 side until everyone else has done this. So it's not worthwhile unless you have an easy way to go v6-native and only use v4 at the ends, eg cellular networks.