Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

They are unfortunately and shockingly common.



(Cough) AWS? (cough)

What's up with that anyway?


As someone who is responsible for protecting networks for large data centers the biggest issue I see with adopting IPv6 is the overhead required. I took a job with another company this last year and while I thought the asset tracking was bad my previous company, I found it can get much worse. I have clients whom we host servers for that I have no clear method of determining what their IP space is.

System Admins routines make mistakes with complicated host names and trying to acquire an accurate inventory is an absolute nightmare. This ties into IPv6 because why would anyone take that disfunctional system, which barely works with 'easy' IPv4 addresses, and make it even more complex? We would have to support both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and firewall rules would get much more complex initially and they are already a huge issue for me to get changes made.

At my old job this was similar. Even though it was in the financial industry and that particular company was rolling in profits it couldn't keep enough network engineers around to save it's life. The turnover was high, documentation was horrible and projects to make things better languished on in the ether.

No no no, forget the whole IPv6 thing, just run IPv4 for all things internal and gratuitously support IPv6 outside if you really have to. I jest of course, but that is the reality of my corporate life in the last 6 years in two fortune 500 companies.


The way I think about IPv6 is that it's an entire second network which happens to frequently coexist on the same layer 1 and layer 2 equipment.

That said, I think there's often a strong argument for only using IPv6 for the internal parts of a network. IPv6 actually simplifies things, and where IPv4 remains needed, it can be encapsulated and routed over a v6 network.

But it takes a team which understands the v6 world and is able to take advantage of the benefits for this to become a reality.


Amazon built all their own networking hardware and routing protocols and didn't include support for V6.


And I am saying that it's a very bad thing.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: