

IETF working on IPv4.1 as alternative to IPv6 - trotsky
https://packetlife.net/blog/2011/apr/1/alternative-ipv6-works/

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jerf
I might have made it 64-bits, but I've certainly had this thought before on a
non-April Fools basis. A long time ago I thought IPv6 was pretty much just
IPv4 with more addresses. Then I found out that was wrong, and I thought it
was IPv4 with more addresses and a couple of tweaks. Then I found out _that_
was wrong, and IPv6 is more like "we polled every network protocol designer to
find out what features they liked in a protocol and took the set union of
them".

I now consider IPv6 to be a textbook example of how not to design a protocol.
It would have been hard enough to advance us all to IPv4.1, but transitioning
your stuff to IPv6 is terribly harder than it should be. For any serious
network program it's like ripping out your spinal cord and putting a new one
in. It's no wonder it has basically failed to date, it has proved much more
work than I would have expected to actually convert software to use it, let
alone use it properly.

It might _still be faster_ for the Internet to actually create IPv4.1 right
now, get to consensus, and fully deploy it, than to fully deploy IPv6 from
where we are. Probably a close thing.

~~~
wmf
I'll just repost my disagreement from last time: It seems like the base cost
of adopting any new protocol is pretty high, so simplifying IPv6 wouldn't have
reduced the transition cost much. Given the high base cost, it actually makes
sense to pack in as many fixes as possible IMO, especially since this is our
one chance for the next ~25 years or so. (Some people are complaining that
IPv6 didn't solve enough problems, like routing scalability.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929871>

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mgkimsal
I hope this isn't an April 1st joke, but it probably is. Really, this is what
should have been attempted 10 years ago.

