back to article Stern Vint Cerf blasts techies for lackluster worldwide IPv6 adoption

Co-inventor of TCP/IP and so-called "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf has urged network nerds to "get with the program" on World IPv6 Day. In a video to celebrate six years since the creation of World IPv6 Launch, Cerf offers optimistic impatience with the rollout of the next-generation network addressing protocol. He notes …

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            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: "Who is Colt"

              "Even if I worked in infrastructure I'd have to do so in the UK to know who they are, it would seem..."

              This is a UK website. And Colt are present in most of Europe too.

              1. jake Silver badge

                Re: "Who is Colt"

                This is not a UK-only website, you insular git.

            2. TheVogon

              Re: "Who is Colt"

              "Regardless my point stands, they are obviously a company that needs to use/know IPv6 inside/out. "

              So it has a business benefit versus not using it. QED.

          1. tip pc Silver badge

            Re: @TheVogon

            are they bigger than VF (having borged C&W)?

    1. Chronos
      Holmes

      Re: Why?

      IPv6 has no business benefit.

      Two words: Routing tables. Once IPv4 trading of sub-class C blocks begins in earnest (you ain't seen nothing yet) the black boxes that connect the dots that your MBA mentality doesn't even think about are going to start breaking in new, hitherto unseen and quite probably amusing ways.

      IPv4 was designed with the old class system in mind. CIDR was an afterthought. Like so many of these afterthoughts such as PAE, it was a half-arsed, horrible bodge that just happened to mask one symptom while leaving the underlying disease in place.

      Besides, this is the Internet. "Business interests" should not be your first concern. Keeping it open, neutral, working and self-healing should be. Again I find myself checking the address bar to make sure I'm on El Reg and not some bloody awful, buzzword-laden business think-tank site which has a bottom line of "how can we give everyone else a smaller share and us a bigger one?"

      1. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: Why?

        >Once IPv4 trading of sub-class C blocks begins in earnest (you ain't seen nothing yet) the black boxes that connect the dots that your MBA mentality doesn't even think about are going to start breaking in new, hitherto unseen and quite probably amusing ways.

        I get the feeling another RFC is on the way...

        Yes, it might be yet another 'sticking plaster' but to TPTB in business and government, such matters need to be resolved by those responsible for the Internet.

        Re: MBA mentality

        Remember the problems that were had in getting business to take Y2K seriously and more recently GDPR? "MBA mentality" is more widespread than you may think - particularly outside of the IT department.

        1. Chronos
          Thumb Up

          Re: Why?

          Roland6 wrote: Re: MBA mentality

          Remember the problems that were had in getting business to take Y2K seriously and more recently GDPR? "MBA mentality" is more widespread than you may think - particularly outside of the IT department.

          Well said. Until the iceberg makes a hole, we steam on at full speed. Then we all go down together¹. I think they teach that damned mantra in Business Schmooze 101.

          ¹ Except Ismay, the White Star chairman, natch.

    2. Nanashi

      Re: Why?

      "IPv6 has no business benefit." -- I take it you've never been through a company merger or split, and have never had to deal with RFC1918 clashes.

      Those are a massive, ongoing headache. Not having to deal with them absolutely should be considered to be a benefit.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Why?

        " never had to deal with RFC1918 clashes."

        Or worse - someone who's pulled numbers out of their arse for internal usage "because we'll never connect to the Internet so it doesn't matter"

        cue calls a few months after being connected "We've been hacked, our internal logs show mountains of connections from berkeley.edu (when they were using berkeley's IP ranges and an external IP resolver)

  1. JassMan
    Joke

    You have to admit...

    that it is much easier to type 121.234.56.24 than 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329

    which may have something to do with slow uptake by the rulers of the interweb. Obviously once the techies have done their bit and sorted out all that hex, Joe Bloggs shouldn't even see the difference.

    1. JohnFen

      Re: You have to admit...

      You joke, but like all good jokes, there a kernel of truth there. IPv6 pretty much makes DNS mandatory.

      1. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: You have to admit...

        >. IPv6 pretty much makes DNS mandatory.<

        And my Name Server provider still doesn't provide IPV6, and my WWW host still doesn't provide IPV6.

        No reason I suppose for my host to privide IPV6 when there is no way to link to it, and no reason for the Name Server to support IPV6 when there is nothing to link to. But since that's the case, no wonder my ISP provides routers that don't do IPV6.

    2. JimC

      Re: You have to admit...

      But as a techie too, its much easier to work with 12 digit decimal numbers than 32 digit hex. You can fix the one in your mind, less so the other. But it was RFC1597 that killed fast IPV6 adoption. RFC1597/1918 also forces a number of convenient security practices, and also effectively prohibits a number of foolish practices, which is a useful weapon for techies seeking to impose good practise on management. So all in all sticking with IP4 generally suits the techies as well as the suits.

      1. Nanashi

        Re: You have to admit...

        Have you worked with v4 and v6 networks? v6 networks are way easier to work with than v4 networks (which are inevitably NATed).

        Even v6 addressing is easier, because hex lines up with subnetting boundaries better than decimal does. It's also possible to arrange for your v6 addresses to be more memorable than your v4 ones (compare 2001:db8:42::1 with 203.0.113.42+192.168.0.1 -- which of those is shorter?), although you don't need to most of the time because you generally work with hostnames, not IPs.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: You have to admit...

          Who gives a soaring screw about boundaries and all that? It's still a lot easier to remember 24 digits than 32 alphanumerics, especially since we've spent decades memorizing telephone numbers which are practically all numeric. About the only random alphanumeric we encounter every day is the license plate, and who remembers any given license plate, let alone their own? Plus numbers are easier to convey orally, especially if you only lifeline is inconsistent.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: You have to admit...

            Your whole argument is basically "We want more addresses, but we don't want longer addresses"

            Grow up. The DNS handles all that for casual use, and if techies can't handle it, maybe we should change to a 16 bit addressing scheme! Even less to remember!

          2. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: You have to admit...

            "Who gives a soaring screw about boundaries and all that?"

            Anyone who has to route that shit.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              128 bits is too many

              I've always thought it would have been better if IPv6 was 64 bit instead of 128 bit. I mean, we went from a 32 bit to 64 bit address space in our computers , and there are no CPUs actually capable of utilizing all 64 address bits yet - even in a virtual address, let alone physical!

              But yet someone thought we needed 2^64 more potential IP addresses than we need potential bytes in the largest possible servers?

              These stupid IPv6 addresses would be a lot easier to work with / remember if they were only 64 bits, and you wouldn't have to worry about the ::: stuff because you wouldn't have all that wasted space in the middle that's so trivially zeroed.

              Maybe someday in the far future, after most of those reading this are dead, 64 bits might become a bit tight. I highly doubt it, but I accept the possibility. OK then, decades later we will probably want new features for IPvNEXT and can go to 128 bits at that time. We will hit the need for 128 bit CPUs long before this day might arrive though.

              1. Nanashi

                Re: 128 bits is too many

                Better too many than too few. It'd be really stupid to go through all this effort, only to need to go through it again in the future just because people hadn't heard of DNS the first time around.

        2. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: You have to admit...

          >Even v6 addressing is easier, because hex lines up with subnetting boundaries better than decimal does.

          Different design philosophies, with IPv4, it was to make things easier for human users before the days of DNS and real-time auto-lookup/complete of web addresses...

          What is going to be interesting is how vendors get around default configurations. Suspect even after the world has gone IPv6, vendors will still use the IPv4 192.168.1.1 address (or similar) for the out-of-the-box default.

    3. onefang

      Re: You have to admit...

      You do know that you don't have to type all those zeros, right?

      1. Doctor_Wibble
        Facepalm

        Re: You have to admit...

        > You do know that you don't have to type all those zeros, right?

        I think this 'convenience' is one of the things that puts people off as it results in what always looks like an inconsistently presented notation that on the face of it is less clear than the thing it's supposed to be an improvement on.

        It's already a difficult sell and I'm wondering if they should have just left that out - we are not incapable of dealing with long numbers, even ones with letters in them.

        And more emphasis on likening the prefix to country/area codes as a familiar concept would have helped, perhaps even without the apparent randomisation of prefix length and its representation.

        At the most basic level it's a new numbering system that just looks too weird and quirky to enthuse people.

        1. Nanashi

          Re: You have to admit...

          I don't think "inconsistent notation" is a problem for v6. I sat down and worked out sixty-six different ways to write a single v4 address, without even relying on padding zeros. If having multiple ways to write a single address was a problem then it's a problem that v6 actually improves on.

          "But," you're thinking, "we never write v4 addresses like that.". Yeah, well, you don't ever write v6 addresses with leading zeros either; people who write them like that don't have much, if any, operational experience with v6. It's seriously not a problem in practice.

          Here's the full list of v4 variations, for the interested. Sorry the list is a bit ugly, but I don't really have any way to make it look better in an El Reg comment. Every single one of these represents the same address, and they all work perfectly, at least on Linux with any program that uses getaddrinfo(). If we can handle v4 supporting all of these, then we can handle v6 supporting a few leading zeros in each field.

          10.24.42, 10.24.0.42, 10.24.052, 10.24.0.052, 10.24.0x2a, 10.24.0.0x2a, 10.030.42, 10.030.0.42, 10.030.052, 10.030.0.052, 10.030.0x2a, 10.030.0.0x2a, 10.0x1a.42, 10.0x1a.0.42, 10.0x1a.052, 10.0x1a.0.052, 10.0x1a.0x2a, 10.0x1a.0.0x2a, 10.1572906, 10.06000052, 10.0x18002A, 012.24.42, 012.24.0.42, 012.24.052, 012.24.0.052, 012.24.0x2a, 012.24.0.0x2a, 012.030.42, 012.030.0.42, 012.030.052, 012.030.0.052, 012.030.0x2a, 012.030.0.0x2a, 012.0x1a.42, 012.0x1a.0.42, 012.0x1a.052, 012.0x1a.0.052, 012.0x1a.0x2a, 012.0x1a.0.0x2a, 012.1572906, 012.06000052, 012.0x18002A, 0xa.24.42, 0xa.24.0.42, 0xa.24.052, 0xa.24.0.052, 0xa.24.0x2a, 0xa.24.0.0x2a, 0xa.030.42, 0xa.030.0.42, 0xa.030.052, 0xa.030.0.052, 0xa.030.0x2a, 0xa.030.0.0x2a, 0xa.0x1a.42, 0xa.0x1a.0.42, 0xa.0x1a.052, 0xa.0x1a.0.052, 0xa.0x1a.0x2a, 0xa.0x1a.0.0x2a, 0xa.1572906, 0xa.06000052, 0xa.0x18002A, 169345066, 01206000052, 0xA18002A

          1. Doctor_Wibble
            Facepalm

            Re: You have to admit...

            > I don't think "inconsistent notation" is a problem for v6.

            It is when you are trying to convince people that it is an improvement, and no amount of 'operational experience' willy-waving is going to matter if you can't convince people to take up v6 in the first place.

            It's not the specifics, it's the lack of overall consistency of presentation of it, as I said in my remarks about the way it is put forward, and already being a difficult sell, i.e. to people not already using it.

            Perhaps weirdly the inclusion of zeroes would probably be better because then the audience can be sure you didn't do a typo on the slide. There could even be a 'this massive set of zeroes is due to be split/used for x' remark to hint that there's an actual plan beyond just adding more numbers.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: You have to admit...

        "You do know that you don't have to type all those zeros, right?"

        That people actually do leave out those zeros makes the problem worse, by increasing human cognitive load; It's a deviation from the addressing pattern.

    4. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: You have to admit...

      "it is much easier to type 121.234.56.24 than 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329"

      It's much easier to remember or type frobuzz.com than either of the above.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: You have to admit...

        "It's much easier to remember or type frobuzz.com than either of the above"

        True, but what about when you're not using DNS?

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: You have to admit...

          Not use DNS? But ... but ... but that would mean getting ones & zeros under your fingernails! Sounds too much like work to the millennials where the general attitude is "I don't have to know that, the computer does it for me." There's your "lost generation" ...

  2. jake Silver badge

    Sorry, Vint.

    I lost all respect for your opinion when you sold out to the gootards. I don't trust anything that comes out of Alphabet as far as I can throw it. Come back when you've been independent again for a few years.

    IP6 capable here, see no need, IP4 works just fine for my needs.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Yawn.

    <EOM>

  4. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    You mean that in the early days somebody actually seriously proposed 16-bit networking addresses for a networking protocol that exited a building?

    1. Ptol

      "You mean that in the early days somebody actually seriously proposed 16-bit networking addresses for a networking protocol that exited a building?"

      At the time, there were probably only 50 institutions in the USA that might have a big enough budget to buy a computer, so using the second byte was considered future proofing, 4 whole bytes was exceptionally extravagant!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        There's also less need to future proof the fewer hosts you are concerned with, all of them professionally managed. That's why the NCP to TCP/IP transition took place in a single day, and the IPv6 transition is taking decades (and potentially may never be completed)

  5. John Savard

    South Korea?

    I thought I had read somewhere that South Korea led the world in IPv6 adoption, being almost 100% IPv6, which would have put it ahead of both India and the United States. I must be mistaken.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Roll on IPv8, which works alongside IPv4 and IPv6 seamlessly.

    I can dream. Seriously, though, who thought this kind of network breaking upgrade was a good idea?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Seriously, though, who thought this kind of network breaking upgrade was a good idea?

      Nobody thought it was a good idea, but it was considered the least disruptive with the most benefits of all the alternatives.

      And if you look at the history of some of the more common protocols you can see the problems associated with maintaining backwards-compatibility for too long: SSL springs to mind.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "Nobody thought it was a good idea, but it was considered the least disruptive with the most benefits of all the alternatives."

        In 1993 at the NANOG meeting there was a meeting to try and get IPv6 finalised and deployed before "the killer app" came along that drove usage sky high.

        2 meeting rooms along at the same time, a presenttation was being made about NCSA Mosaic.

  7. localzuk Silver badge

    Internal fun...

    "Hey, yeah, can you tell me your IP address"

    "Errr... Have you got 20 minutes?"

    That's my only concern with IPv6 stuff. The risk of errors goes up as well. But its a minor issue.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Internal fun...

      That's a really poor excuse. Why would you need to?

      In my entire network, I "know" two IP addresses. One is the gateway. One is the DNS. The gateway is also a DNS server. Everything else is in DNS.

      Hence, no matter what I do, I never need more than those two. And I need those precisely when: Setting up some brand-new, from-scratch settings for, say, DHCP. Which happens, what? Once in each job? Maybe once every few years at best?

      Literally the last time I read out an IP address? I can't remember. Machine imaging? No address needed. Configuration? No addresses needed (it pulls from the image or the DHCP or the network in some way). Giving remote access to someone? Cool... remote1.domainname.com (which is the first external IP address... remote2 is the other one... I have LITERALLY no idea what they are, and don't need to know. They are documented somewhere, but I've never had to type them or read them out except to create that DNS entry). Printers? Nope. All DNS nowadays (and no user needs know the IP and I don't WANT them to know, and knowing doesn't even help them, as they are VLANned and go through the print management system anyway - which is only thing that actually talks to a printer direct - and the IP of the print management that shares out all the user-visible printers? Yeah, that's in DNS somewhere).

      Hell, I don't WANT to hard-code IP's into the system (into devices may be different, but you can usually always let them get a DHCP allocation and then just reserve it). It makes replacing a machine so much more tricky. Wanna take serverA offline? Okay, spin up serverB. Make sure it's working and synced.

      Change serverA DNS record to point at serverB instead (hell, you can CNAME it, still no IP address!). Hey presto, done. Did it all go wrong? Remove the CNAME. Did it all go right? Retire serverA. What their IPs were is literally unnecessary for anyone to know.

      And I've yet to deploy a service where it demanded an IP address and wouldn't accept a fully qualified domain name instead (an IP range might be asked for, but I can't think of anything I'm deploying that requires a specific IP address - and if you have half a brain, your IP range is easily discernible from your any of your IPs and your subnet - and you use, say, the first address as the gateway, the second as a DNS, etc. so it's easy to set up anything you do have to touch).

      About the only thing I know that might demand IP is things like HA heartbeats and stuff but even then I'm pretty sure you can just use DNS addresses. I very much doubt that Google are sitting them coding in thousands of individual IP addresses.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: Internal fun...

        "That's a really poor excuse. Why would you need to?"

        Both at my workplace and in my home LAN, I use raw IP addresses every day. DNS is not always an option.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Internal fun...

          Yep, when I consult I see internal corporate networks ALL THE TIME that don't have proper DNS. The need to type IP addresses is constant. Sure, that can be fixed (would have to be) if they go IPv6, but it is just another in a long list of barriers.

          But mostly, what the heck benefit is there for a company to run IPv6 in their internal network. They have a whole /8 to themselves. If the IETF wants to push IPv6, assign the 10 net and require routing it on the internet. That'll get action (of course the action might be burning at the stake whoever approved that RFC, but still)

          1. tip pc Silver badge

            Re: Internal fun...

            But mostly, what the heck benefit is there for a company to run IPv6 in their internal network. They have a whole /8 to themselves. If the IETF wants to push IPv6, assign the 10 net and require routing it on the internet. That'll get action (of course the action might be burning at the stake whoever approved that RFC, but still)

            its called Unique Local Address in IPv6 and its address is fc00::/7

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_packet#IPv6

            1. jake Silver badge

              Re: Internal fun...

              The adults in the room who pay little or no attention to Wiki might want to read the relevant RFC, that being RFC-6890.

      2. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Internal fun...

        do you just have 1 giant subnet with all your systems in it?

        you will see significant benefits by subnetting. Even if you just have the 3rd octet for different systems than users things will be better as you cut out all the broadcasts being sent to systems that don't need to see them.

  8. Adam 52 Silver badge

    Standard for how long?

    Vint:

    "It's certainly been a long time since the standards were put in place"

    Internet Society:

    "On 14/07/2017, the IETF with the publication of RFC8200 announced that the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) had become the latest Internet Standard."

    Less than a year doesn't seem a long time to me.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Frustrating for him

    It must be frustrating for Vint Cerf to have fathered the internet yet be unabled to really influence what people are doing with it. I think Tim Berners-Lee must be feeling the same with respect to the WWW.

    Respect to both for their visionary ideas and what they've given us, but I don't think even they could have seriously imagined that in such a short time we would be in a world where people can own and use multiple independent and separately- addressable devices.

    This world has grown from people running with what they invented and isn't (was never) controllable by them.

    As with real fathers, they ought to be listened to with respect, but they shouldn't expect to have too much influence - they have to let go of their children eventually.

  10. Gordon Pryra

    Cost

    I'm a contractor

    I get paid through projects

    What project gets financed when there is no need to implement it?

    IT department, we need money to implement IP6 and there will be downtime for users and customers.

    Board - Do we need to do this?

    IT Department - No, not for ages, and even then probably we can get away with NATing stuff

    Board - F**k O**f

  11. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Why fix it if it ain't broke?

    We routinely use IPv4 on our sites.

    I expect we will continue to do so - and just have a firewall NAT'ing between IPv4 and IPv6 should all the ISP's go over to IPv6 anyway.

    Will have to wait and see what happens. Until then I'm not going to break anything yet.

  12. Vanir

    But ...

    There will come a point in time when there will be no more v4 addresses availble. Won't there?

    So, businesses, old and new will not be able to expand if any part of their business, and any business plan, requires new IPv4 addresess on the assumpton that they cannot access v6 addresses.

    It seems to me that being prepared for this scenario is common sense.

    I remember working on C code bases for the Y2K problem in 1998 onwards.

    It had to be done. Or else what have been the consequences for not doing the preparation?

    'If it ain't broke don't fixit' is sometimes used as an excuse for the lack of courage to tell some other person that doing something will cost money now.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: But ...

      Sure they can. They'll just go into the address market and say they're seeking an IPv4 address of a certain range and see if someone's willing to sell it. Simple supply and demand are why people aren't absolutely forced into an IPv6 address even now.

      "'If it ain't broke don't fixit' is sometimes used as an excuse for the lack of courage to tell some other person that doing something will cost money now."

      Which could STILL mean someone's not that willing to jump. After all, aren't there tons of firms on razor-thin margins that still use lots of IPv4-ONLY equipment, meaning jumping to IPv6 isn't an option? And unlike with Y2K, a lot of the problem is hardware in basis for performance reasons, so they're basically stuck.

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