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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

> anyone who thinks "ipv6mess" is still relevant in 2022, doesn't understand the problem space it describes.

It was relevant then -and it is relevant now- because there are good lessons in how to migrate from thing A to thing B, even if some of the then-missing necessary bits are in place now.

Still, it's almost certainly the case that DJB's rant had no real effect, and that the necessary steps were bound to be taken as the cost of sticking with IPv4 rose. Also, a significant period of time was always going to be necessary for software and tooling to catch up -- perhaps there wasn't much to be done about improving the transition 20 years ago. Yet DJB's rant isn't wrong or devoid of value -- it's mostly right and entertaining (still!), even if there just wasn't enough IETF and dev oomph to do better at the time.

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I'm not sure it was ever relevant. All it does is describe the problem, which was already well-known at the time by the people working on v6. It doesn't give a fix for it.

It doesn't give a fix because no fix is possible. Because the problem comes from the design of v4, not from v6.

For some reason djb wasn't able to get his head around that, and people have been pointing to that damn page as if it's some big gotcha ever since. No, it's just the situation we're stuck with, thanks to the people that designed v4.

I mean, v6 is still mostly a failure, so (rightly or not) the situation is going to be blamed on the people that have been pushing v6. That's just the cost of trying to push the entire world towards a new standard.

(I know that v6 has been a success within datacenters and such.)

by what definition would you call ipv6 "mostly a failure"? 30-40% global eyeball network (to the end user) adoption after ~10 years of active deployment, against very vocal opposition seems commendable enough to me.

More like 15 years of active deployment, and I'd expect levels at 90%. The world changed after IPv6 with smartphones that are controlled by a select few carriers, so it's easy to deploy IPv6 in which they're in dire need.

But the rest of the networks: enterprises, hosting providers, cloud providers, ISPs really don't give a shit. It's merely a cost centre or a burden.

Actually, aws and the big cloud providers are only now starting to release ipv6 aware services.

If close to half of US traffic to google transits over ipv6 is considered a failure, I would hate to see “success”.

If it describes problems we're still struggling with, it's still relevant.

It talks quite a bit about how to tackle migrations. It doesn't specify specific solutions for IPv6, no, but it does talk about what doesn't work and what should be looked into. It's a blog, not an Internet-Draft.

> It was relevant then -and it is relevant now- because there are good lessons in how to migrate from thing A to thing B, even if some of the then-missing necessary bits are in place now.

it's irrelevant now because there are smoother approaches to migrating to future-proofed networks than existed at the time. the fact that it persists on the internet, unamended, to be regularly presented (two decades later) as some semblance of current realities of the challenges to ipv6 deployment is a disservice to the internet.

> Still, it's almost certainly the case that DJB's rant had no real effect, and that the necessary steps were bound to be taken as the cost of sticking with IPv4 rose.

i would maintain that "ipv6mess" had a NEGATIVE impact on ipv6 adoption overall, as people who saw djb as a tech god accepted his word as gospel, despite it fundamentally being a crybaby rant, & proliferated the misconceptions & opposition therein.

the fact that he explicitly rejected ipv6 patches to qmail & djbdns (resulting in a fork to at least qmail) should not be understated - he didn't just complain about ipv6, he actively sought to undermine its adoption.

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