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IPv4 Declared Historic – Draft

by nyan4 on 3/15/16, 11:55 AM with 36 comments

• by azdle on 3/16/16, 8:46 PM

  Everyone take note that this is an individual v0 draft, it says "Type: Active Internet-Draft (individual)" and "Intended status: Standards Track". Before this becomes and RFC (if it ever does at all) it has to go through discussions as an individual draft, then it has to be voted to become standards track, at which point it will become a working group draft where it goes through more comments, editing, and waiting, and only then does it become an official RFC. To give you an idea of the time scale this is talking about, see that this version of this draft expires in September.

  This is in no way some proclamation that IPv4 is no more, it's more like the obituaries that news papers have sitting around for public figures just in case they die. The IETF isn't quick at getting RFCs published, and it definitely won't be with something as big as this.

• by forgottenpass on 3/16/16, 8:16 PM

  Good. The longer we build as if v4 isn't legacy support, the more drawn-out and uglier the already uncomfortable transition will be.

• by betaby on 3/16/16, 10:35 PM

  IPv4 reminds me non-Unicode applications from 90s Or ATM, or frame-relay or IPX, or SNA, or 16bit DOS apps. All above were gone eventually. SAme going to happen with IPv4, but I guess at slower rate.

• by __david__ on 3/16/16, 11:28 PM

  It's interesting to see this looks like it was drafted by a Time Warner Cable employee, and yet my twc internet still doesn't support IPv6. Though it gives me hope that maybe it's coming soon?

• by sparky_ on 3/16/16, 8:36 PM

  This feels optimistically premature.

  Sure, it's been superseded, and it's great to move the ball forward. But somehow I think this legacy technology will be in use for a long, long time.

• by sergioocon on 3/17/16, 8:00 AM

  Wow, I released and RFI 12 years ago on IPv6 when I was working in a Telco, and every vendor talked about it as a reality... I am still waiting for that reality to be an actual one. I am still waiting for my ISP to activate IPv6 in my WLAN at home... after all those years

• by kazinator on 3/16/16, 9:33 PM

  > Current and future work builds on IPv6, making it better for every purpose than the old protocol.

  Not for purposes like:

  * I want the IP header I'm transmitting between these two nodes to be as small as possible

  * I want a CPU and memory efficient TCP/IP stack for an embedded system.

  Pretty much no successor of anything is better than its predecessor for "every purpose", just every purpose that the speaker happens to care about.

• by chatmasta on 3/16/16, 9:04 PM

  I know it pains neckbeards to hear this, but IPv4 is not going anywhere, as long as it remains in the business interests of major cloud providers, and as long as people continue to deploy NAT based firewalls as a security feature.

  Re: business interests: Cloud businesses can acquire IP addresses at price points far higher than the average developer can. Now that the ARIN address space is exhausted, cloud providers will begin to buy more and more IPv4 space until they have a complete monopoly and large portions of IPv4 are controlled by just a few companies. This will price other companies out of offering cloud services that are IPv4 compatible.

  Re: security: Sure, the original intended purpose of NAT was not security, but people use it for that, and will continue to do so. If you want to put multiple boxes behind a single IP address, IPv4 is the easiest way to do it. In fact, IPv6 seems to be a step backward in terms of security. Every device does not need to be openly addressable from anywhere on the Internet, and developers will always choose the path of least resistance, especially when it's more secure.