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Author Topic: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6  (Read 13870 times)

Bowdon

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #15 on: August 21, 2019, 01:47:28 PM »

What is the hold up of IPv6? Is it money? (how much does it cost?), or is it the potential downtime and technical implementation that makes ISP's reluctant to start the process?
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #16 on: August 21, 2019, 02:08:48 PM »

  How long has it been coming? 

A long time.  Pretty sure I remember IPv6 dividing opinion among colleagues, and being ‘just around the corner’, early nineties.  A quick glance at Wikipedia suggests one of the first RFCs was RFC1883, dated 1995....

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1883
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aesmith

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #17 on: August 21, 2019, 02:35:05 PM »

Couple of things strike me about v6 when I've been thinking about it recently.  One is that it's almost as if the 128 bit length is too long, and people need to find ways to "use up" the space.  For example the hardware derived interface ID being 64 bits rather than 48, with the extra 16 bits being completely wasted as they're always the same value.  Or the recommended practice of using a minimum /64 for any network, even a point to point where you'd use a /31 currently.   The other one is that it was a missed opportunity to make IP addresses multi dimensional, rather than just a very long linear list.  Although on that second point I saw a blog by one of Cisco's head honchos suggesting something along those lines, he was proposing that we should consider a devices Interface ID as being it's globally unique identifier, and the Prefix identifies the connection through which it is currently communicating.
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aesmith

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #18 on: August 21, 2019, 03:41:17 PM »

Just noticed in one of the blogs, back in 1990 it was predicted that we'd run out of IP addresses in 1994.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #19 on: August 21, 2019, 10:57:12 PM »

Just noticed in one of the blogs, back in 1990 it was predicted that we'd run out of IP addresses in 1994.

As a 1960s/70s school-kid, we were taught that the world would run out of oil by the year 2000.  We were also taught that, even if we survived the crisis caused by loss of fuel, we’d each have only about a square yard on which to stand on the planet’s surface, owing to population growth.

And let’s not forget the 1990s forecasts of Y2K bugs, with airliners using flawed navigation systems crashing headlong into tins of baked beans with flawed expiry dates, the world over.

None of these happened. :)
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Weaver

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #20 on: August 24, 2019, 12:16:34 AM »

I was put in charge of y2k bug hunting for core communications protocols when I worked at Psion. I’m pleased to say I didn’t find anything that needed fixing, and not was there anything. But long before that I was responsible myself for a y2k bug. I wrote the first Psion Organiser II diary program and that only had two digits for the year. (I can’t remember now, but later machines, might  have had four digits for the year.) At the time, in 1986, it seemed inconceivable that the machines would still be around in the year 1999.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #21 on: August 24, 2019, 08:36:23 AM »

And let’s not forget the year 2038 draws closer every day, with possible dire consequences for any remaining 32 bit Unix like systems....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

I’m aware of bugs I wrote myself, that would manifest if certain sequence counters wrapped.  Rather than a fixed date, the bugs I have in  mind would require a sustained system up-time of several hundreds of years.   I try not to worry about it.
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Weaver

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #22 on: August 24, 2019, 10:35:56 AM »

Have some Unices has their time retval word width fixed anyway, regardless of any 32-bit vs 64-bitness of the o/s? I assume that a 64-bit o/s means that a pointer is 64-bits but in C a uint/int may by default be 32 bits firstly (i) because for many common use cases 64 bits is overkill, (ii) because 32-bits is probably enough - because software was tested with uint set to 32 bits in 32-bit architectures before and worked fine then so 32 bits is enough, and (iii) some compilers prefer to leave uint as 32 bits to reduce the chance if (reasonably rare) risks introduced when porting 32-bit-tested code to 64-bit systems, and (iv) in some 64-bit architectures 64-bit operations have a very very slightly higher cost than 32-bit ones - in x86-64 iirc the slight extra cost is in code size, zero difference in speed, 64-bit operations can have an extra byte in total opcode length compared to 32-bit operations the latter therefore can be regarded as the default.

The time retval typedef should be such that it’s independent of the width of an int or uint, but I suppose the choice for the value of a long or ulong could be a problem - I have no idea. If a time retval type has to be a long that is two machine words on a 32-bit machine then so be it.

(I haven’t done any C in a long while, although I did ten years of it professionally. D has taken over my life. In D, a uint is always 32-bits and a ulong is always 64-bits; and they are guaranteed to be fixed. I don’t like that because there’s no declaration of intent, so I often avoid using those types anyway, preferring uint32_t and uint64_t exact width types and their min width relatives where it matters or where there is any chance that it might matter, to avoid bugs where widths are either ‘just plain wrong’ and have to conform to something else or exact width is part of the algorithm, or where code can fail because of a ‘not wide enough’ error.)

On a 32-bit o/s it 64-bit o/s alike you could make the time retval into uint_least64_t or uint_fast64_t.

I’m just wondering now - there’s no possible reason to make them signed is there? If these times are signed then we could handle dates before 1970. But could that be a bad thing because of ambiguity and compatibility problems with old code and the meaning of the bit pattern that could be 1969 - I’m lost here. My instinct as always is to make such a thing unsigned.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #23 on: August 24, 2019, 09:02:30 PM »

Weaver, there was a time when I’d have enthusiastically embraced a debate about the merits vs downsides of signed vs unsigned for time_t, and about the merits vs downsides of extending it to 64 bits, where possible.   These days, I have trouble justifying (to myself) coding decisions I took last week, so I’ll avoid discussing Unix internals. ::)

I did find this wiki page, which might be of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
In  particular I liked...
Quote
Unix enthusiasts have a history of holding "time_t parties" (pronounced as "time tea parties") to celebrate significant values of the Unix time number.[16][17]

Now that’s new to me, but I can believe it. :D

@Chrysalis, apols this thread has drifted off topic.  Feel free to bring us back into line, with a suitable rebuke.   
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Weaver

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #24 on: August 25, 2019, 01:33:30 AM »

Likewise off-topic apologies  :blush: :(
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #25 on: August 25, 2019, 01:36:34 AM »

IMO IPv6 is seriously flawed and router support is all over the place.

Even on pfSense,  I can monitor traffic routed between the WAN and LAN very easily from within the UI, IPv6 you cannot.

Despite being on Zen I disabled IPv6 for the LAN as the Xbox One would get a different IP every time it rebooted, due to changing its UUID.  This meant I couldn't tell the firewall to allow all traffic in/out to that IP address, killing connectivity in games.  Which is absolutely bizarre when on IPv4 you can simply allow its IP to control uPNP and call it a day.

The fact some devices use DHCP6 and others use router announcements, it just completely screws up firewall management on the router.  Plus its not like you can simply allow IPv6 everywhere, how do you know things like IoT devices are correctly firewalled?  Why would I trust every client on the network to be correctly firewalled anyway?  Windows has even been known to switch the firewall between Private and Public on a whim, I'd rather not trust it.

Basically IPv6 throws security out the window, plus I still had the odd connectivity issue with Android.
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Weaver

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #26 on: August 25, 2019, 03:46:25 AM »

I hear your point about the difficulty of firewalling in IPv6 due to the unpredictability of IPv6 addresses. The fact that IPv6 addressing is all over the place is a feature not a bug. It’s supposed to be a privacy feature, and truly zero-config address auto assignment when for example based on MAC addresses, just works, every time, and no reliance on dhcpv4, no problems with networks not starting up because there is no dhcp server as it’s either out to lunch or has not booted faster than all the other devices. IPv6 zeroconfig just works 100% which is so good. The all-over-the place IPv6 address assignment is indeed really annoying to sysadmin such as you and me. It’s also promoted as a privacy feature which does work to stop eg cross-site tracking on the web. In fact this is not the fault of IPv6, but of operating systems which have failed to make decisions about who controls the freedom to use or not use privacy addresses, who must use admin-assigned static addresses and who must use dhcpv6. IPv6 dies specify a mechanism iirc for telling operating systems that they must use dhcpv6, or otherwise they can do what they like. I get the feeling that some operating systems might be ignoring this instruction, it’s a long long time since I read up on all of IPv6 autoconfig. The robustness of it is very impressive but null points for operating systems.
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burakkucat

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #27 on: August 25, 2019, 04:49:08 PM »

b*cat adds just a very small comment --

I'm waiting for IPv8 to appear. Basically 128 bit (like IPv6) but with logic and sanity in abundance. Until then I'll continue to use IPv4.
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PhilipD

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #28 on: August 25, 2019, 07:30:19 PM »

Hi

Basically IPv6 throws security out the window, plus I still had the odd connectivity issue with Android.

It doesn't throw security of the window, IPv6 is still fire-walled by the router, certainly on pfSense.  pfSense is a stateful firewall, so all unsolicited incoming connections are blocked by default, but incoming connections initiated by an outgoing going connection is tracked and allowed in.  No different to how IPv4 works, except IPv4 also typically is used with NAT that kind of acted like a second firewall, but that's by accident, not by design.  The only way a IoT device would be accepting unsolicited incoming connections is if you put an exception in the pfSense firewall.

Regards

Phil
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niemand

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Re: UK ISPs shameful lack of IPv6
« Reply #29 on: August 25, 2019, 11:06:45 PM »

I would imagine if there were that many security concerns with v6 ISPs would be much more reluctant about deploying it.

When they deploy to their own CPE they ensure that stateful firewalling is in place. Such firewalling comes by default in most home routers, with NAT on top.

It shouldn't be a problem now and the evidence from millions of users in the UK alone is that it isn't.
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