IPv6-only has become a thing | Hacker News Reader

IPv6-only has become a thing

howfunky.com

Great. After today's blows against open Internet (Reddit, Twitter, YouTube) I started to consider IPv6 as a necessary enabler of truly decentralized (as in p2p or POSSE) social networks.

IPv6 is a lot more address space; does that mean it's easier to host static routes and therefore servers, making it easier to self-host things?

The main thing is, I was thinking, there's no^W less NAT so you can host those 140 character entries directly from your devices and you can avoid things like DHT. Now we can start solving other problems like masses having to own domains or that interactivity is orders of magnitude less efficient than using a traditional database.

Maybe like an appliance, like a toaster? Minimal maintenance, easy to get started out of the box, and just enough friction to tempt competition.

A video call, an extra latop, guidance as straightforward as installing a web browser--but now 140 chars (or video from camera) go to that self-hosted server.

> It also means the timeframe to perform a merger or to integrate an acquired company drops dramatically. This has profound impact on the financial structure of the deal which is something that should not be overlooked.

I haven't heard of this issue before. Does anyone know the details? It seems like something a startup would want to consider to make it easiest and quickest to be bought out.

What happened for the past decades is that every company used 192.168.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/16 for their internal networks, because that was the prescribed private IPv4 space. But if everyone's using identical private address space, on physically separate networks, then you can't merge and route between those networks unless you NAT or renumber everything on them.

The equivalent mechanism in IPv6 is Unique Local Addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address and theoretically there should be no overlap or conflict with these addresses, that they can be safely merged together. In fact, some of the impetus has been removed to even use private network space in the first place, such as address space exhaustion, so if a company has been provisioned enough public IPv6 space for their whole network, they didn't even need to use NAT or ULA in the first place.

A new thing was rolled out at work last month, and while it cured a few headaches and support issues, it created some new ones. Not the least is the fact that its web interface has no AAAA record and no IPv6 support, and so users who may perhaps be inadvertently IPv6-only or whose IPv4 stack is acting up, were mysteriously unable to access the system at all.

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