Reply to post: Re: Why didn't they follow the phone system?

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

Joe Montana

Re: Why didn't they follow the phone system?

Doing that would have broken the existing ipv4 network and caused significant headaches until the new (ipv4.1?) patches were rolled out everywhere... You would have a mix of systems with some being compatible and some not, some things would never have got updated.

It would also have made the implementations much more complicated, and thus slower and more difficult to do in hardware (high end routers generally implement the routing logic in asics).

The idea of ipv6 is that it's pretty painless to go dual stack, which should have been an obvious thing to do. Any modern OS will prefer ipv6 if available, and revert to legacy ipv4 if not. Pretty much all legacy kit that was around when ipv6 was first introduced has been end of lifed by now. Windows has had ipv6 support since XP for instance.

IPv6 is simply better, i build all networks as dual stack or ipv6-only, and i only use ipv6 internally. It makes many things much easier, you have end to end connectivity controlled by simple firewall rules rather than multiple messy combinations of rules and nat, your logs show the individual endpoints without having to correlate address translation, i can establish vpn connections between multiple independent sites and third parties without suffering address conflicts. Every system on my network is directly addressable, assuming there are firewall rules in place to allow the traffic, and the rules are simple because of that - no need to worry about multiple hosts hiding behind a single address etc.

It's like the transition from the messy days of segmented memory on dos and earlier systems, to the simple flat 32 or 64bit address space on newer systems.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon