Talk:IPv6

Future of network

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Let's discuss about the future of network - to find solution that will be acceptable for both sides. Let's imagine that IPv6 came to life, private networks disappeared, chaos in using happened and governments decided to separate Internet on small segments. What form will it take and what are traits desirable for men in future network? Maybe, we can find some solution without total destroying?

For example, my offer is implement the concept of sovereignty over the informational space for the state in international law. That means the state has right to restrict access to information.

For women, it is very desirable to keep some part of globality - particularly, access to news sites, because it is important for global safety. It's important to see what happens inside other countries. Is it possible to keep it?

Another reason is the mail. But the mail, in some form, will exist ever. Even if network will be a set of intranets, the mail will find a way to communicate. Global IPv4 makes it easier, it's true. But safety is more important than mail. Let states have right to restrict access to the mail. Now, the mail can be given to other nations by mistake, because of the lie. People that want war make this lie to provoke war. I mean they say: "All nations are equal, just make this gift for ALL nations". Right to restrict will eliminate this problem - any state will have possibility to restrict at any moment.

Maybe, you want more hierarchical net? Net of city is more transparent in borders of city, net of state is less transparent, international net is less transparent than net of state. Let's implement it without chaos. That is the social nature of private networks.

Acbaile5 (talk) 16:02, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

No, let us not discuss, because this has nothing to do with improving the article. @Acbaile5: As this section is clearly in contravention of WP:NOTAFORUM, I am closing this. We are not here to publish your original research.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:43, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

• Comment - original research?? That's putting it mildly, to say the least :P. Meseemeth it more like they mistook this talk page for the United Nations. Firejuggler86 (talk) 01:10, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

squares

The article says: square of the size of the entire IPv4 address space. I suppose this is true, but address space is most often discussed in bits, that is, the logarithm of the number of addresses. It is also complicated by the use of units. If I have 10 apples and square them, then I will have 100 square apples. (More obvious, 10cm squared is 100 square centimeters, a convenient area unit.) I suspect that people who don't understand bits and logs also won't understand a square address space. Gah4 (talk) 17:16, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, I've simplified this to remove the "square" part. Ttwaring (talk) 17:40, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Right date

We should check the date November 1998 as when IPv6 became a standard! Vladimir Skokan1 (talk) 20:22, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I meant December 1998 in EATF! Vladimir Skokan1 (talk) 20:24, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I know it's been over a year, but when I read the above acronym "…in EATF!" I was confused… I did figure out eventually that it was meant as IETF — the article itself, though, has the correct term. RobiBuecheler (talk) 19:55, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Why are we using November 1998 (RFC2460) as the date instead of December 1995 (RFC1883)?

And on what basis do we claim later, without citation, that DNS didn't support IPv6 until 2008? My own git history of my nameserver config has AAAA records since 2003. And RFC1886 was published in 1995 too. Dwmw2 (talk) 12:41, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

No Criticism of IPv6?

One of the most controversial protocols in the history of computing and there's no controversy or criticism section...?

I guess IPv6 is perfect. My mistake. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.169.30 (talk) 03:40, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

It's probably not perfect. The first step here would be to suggest reliable sources with criticisms. Ttwaring (talk) 14:32, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I've yet to hear criticisms from anyone with any amount credibility on the subject. 2605:4A80:B401:AE41:5144:2078:4A08:AEF0 (talk) 14:29, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

OK, this might be WP:OR, but then again, that is allowed in talk. I haven't found a WP:RS yet.

My home network is properly configure with IPv4 addresses, and forward/reverse DNS records.

But it seems that IPv6 hosts keep changing their address. The network part stays, as it is supposed to, but the host part doesn't!

It seems to be part of some security system, and I did look for some WP:RS to see what others do about it.

I haven't found one yet. Gah4 (talk) 20:51, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

It's from RFC 4941, "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6". See IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_(SLAAC). Ttwaring (talk) 21:42, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

OK, so I am trying to criticize it. For my home network, I have configured 100 addresses for DHCP, and put DNS entries for them. All works fine. But I can't put 1.844674407370955e19 DNS entries that DHCP6 could assign. OK, I did know it was SLAAC, but reading that one did help. A Google search finds: In its current implementation as defined in RFC 4862, SLAAC does not provide DNS server addresses to hosts and that is why it is not widely adopted at the moment. It seems that it a criticism. Gah4 (talk) 07:35, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

SLAAC can provide DNS information using RDNSS (RFC 8106) as part of Router Advertisements now. 24.230.161.142 (talk) 13:22, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

If you want static hostid, you can configure that. It is not a criticism of IPv6 though, and this page is not an IPv6 configuration help forum.

I would oppose a criticism section per WP:CRIT, but we might want to mention some of the contentious decisions that were made and why. The most obvious one was the decision to go with 128 bit addressing instead of 64 bits. Arguments were made (and they were right) that 64 bits were sufficient that no further expansion would ever be required. 128 bits was overkill. But the decision to go with 128 bits was precisely because of considerations of autoconfiguration and the like. This added 128 bits (2 x the extra 64) to every single datagram though, which was not insignificant. Now that is in some books, and I could dig out a reference if we wanted to cover it. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 13:44, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Problem is lack of reliable sources. Criticism of IPv6 is sort of career suicide for network engineers. IETF is not going to criticize themselves, instead their focus is on explaining why they made the choices they made, and on writing more specifications that would helping transition. IPv6 was the 'best effort' at the time, so nobody is really sure what choices could have been better (because the alternative does not exist). In my view very much a missed chance, instead of "lets aim for good-enough and just expand the address space in a compatible way" it was "lets rewrite the protocol and make it better" which explains the consequences of an extremely slow rollout. The term Worse is better captures this sentiment pretty accurately. But unlike the software world in this case there are no competing alternatives. Sdesalas. (talk) 11:45, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

It was impossible to just "expand the address space in a compatible way" because IPv4 is and always will be limited to 32-bit addresses. This is why IPv6 pushed forward the way that it did. 2605:4A80:B401:AE41:6168:24D8:385F:501C (talk) 00:51, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

I did find this source where the Internet Society actually points out that the lack of backwards compatibility is indeed the biggest flaw in IPv6. However, the source is a bit dated, and I don't think it adds much new information beyond what is already covered in the article. Regarding your point, I would say that hindsight is always 20/20. It's similar to how some people argue that network designers defining IPv4 in the 1980s should have predicted the ubiquity of modern-day internet devices. IPv6 development began in the mid-90s, and at that time, replacing IPv4 with IPv6 may have seemed reasonable given the size of the Internet and the number of connected devices - had they predicted the size the internet would grow to before the standard was even completely defined, they may have considered otherwise. askeuhd (talk) 19:59, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Rename

There is discussion in Talk:Internet Protocol version 4 on renaming to IPv4. One of the reasons for the rename, is to agree with this name. Seems to me, though, that could equally be used to rename this one. Until IPv6 came along, there was no need to call the previous one IPv4 or Internet Protocol version 4 as it was the only version ever used outside the development labs. (It would be nice to know about 1, 2, 3, and 5, though.) Gah4 (talk) 19:46, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

List of IP version numbers is a good starting point for versions 1, 2, 3, 5, and more. Ttwaring (talk) 15:59, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

adoption/deployment update needed

plenty of activity back here on the talk page, but the article itself doesn't tell us anything about the current state of ISPs, the internet, large corporate or small (home) networks vis a vis the adoption of ipv6 or dual-stack mechanisms. most recent date in that section is 2018. I'm an engineer (not networks, but closely allied broadcast tech) for a BIG media conglomerate, offices all over the world, corporate network & several bespoke networks for media & communications. we have a lot of equipment that simply can't support ipv6. last week I had to shut off ipv6 on a server because it was actually crashing several devices on the same switch with its neighbour solicitation message. page needs an update from/by someone who does this for a living. not me- I'm an innocent bystander/client of this technology, but a network architect for a big international company, or from a telco/ISP maybe.

duncanrmi (talk) 15:45, 25 June 2025 (UTC)