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0 pointsavidiax13d ago0 comments

It's not that they loaded it up with features, it's that elegance was prized over practicality.

Simplifying address space assignment is a huge deal. IPv4+ allows the leaves of the network to adopt IPv4+ when it makes sense for them. They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space, they don't have to upgrade to all IPv6 supporting hardware, there's no parallel configuration. You just support IPv4 on the terminals that want or need it, and on the network hardware when you upgrade. It's basically better NAT that eventually disappears and just becomes "routing".

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lxgr13d ago

> They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space

What investment? IP addresses used to be free until we started running out, and I don't think anything of value would be lost for humanity as a whole if they became non-scarce again.

> they don't have to upgrade to all IPv6 supporting hardware

But they do, unless you're fine with maintaining an implicitly hierarchical network (or really two) forever.

> It's basically better NAT

How is it better? It also still requires NAT for every 4x host trying to reach a 4 only one, so it's exactly NAT.

> that eventually disappears

Driven by what mechanism?

pocksuppet13d ago

>> They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space

> What investment? IP addresses used to be free

Well they're not now, so it's an investment. Any entity that has IP addresses doesn't want its competition to get IP addresses, even when this leads to bad outcomes overall.

lxgr13d ago

And would you say this is a dynamic worth preserving by policy?

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0 pointsavidiax13d ago0 comments

It's not that they loaded it up with features, it's that elegance was prized over practicality.

0 comments

lxgr13d ago

> They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space

What investment? IP addresses used to be free until we started running out, and I don't think anything of value would be lost for humanity as a whole if they became non-scarce again.

> they don't have to upgrade to all IPv6 supporting hardware

But they do, unless you're fine with maintaining an implicitly hierarchical network (or really two) forever.

> It's basically better NAT

How is it better? It also still requires NAT for every 4x host trying to reach a 4 only one, so it's exactly NAT.

> that eventually disappears

Driven by what mechanism?

pocksuppet13d ago

>> They don't lose any investment in IPv4 address space

> What investment? IP addresses used to be free

Well they're not now, so it's an investment. Any entity that has IP addresses doesn't want its competition to get IP addresses, even when this leads to bad outcomes overall.

lxgr13d ago

And would you say this is a dynamic worth preserving by policy?

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse