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0 pointsjerf13y ago0 comments

"Ipv6 is Ipv4 with bigger addresses,"

Yeah, I used to think that, then I participated in some IPv6 conversions and watched some others. I don't think that any more. IPv6 may not be the Glorious Solution to All Network Problems Ever, but it's not just the obvious incremental improvement on IPv4 either. It's a new protocol.

(I do sometimes wonder if an IPv4.1 that simply set a flag and used 8 bytes instead of 4 was proposed right now if it could still beat IPv6 out to the field even with IPv6's head start. Note, I'm not saying this would necessarily be a good idea, I just find myself wondering if IPv4.1 could still hypothetically beat IPv6 to deployment.)

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romaniv13y ago

What practical problems, aside from address range exhaustion, does it solve? I've read some technical articles about benefits of IPv6, but most of them keep returning to address size problem.

AnIrishDuck13y ago

I think a big part of this is address range exhaustion is the root cause of many other problems. For example, IPv6 effectively obsoletes NAT, which removes all kinds of complexity from many protocols (off the top off my head: IPSec, many P2P protocols).

IPv6 also brings saner (IMO) protocol headers, and introduces a variety of other incrementally improved protocols (see ICMPv6, DHCPv6) that have been tweaked with the benefit of years of deployment experience.

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