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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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TLD's aren't the limitation... Public IPs are.. If it wasn't for Cloudflared, I couldn't run half the shit I run.
in an ideal world, ipv6 would solve that problem...
😔
I saw the rfc for IPV8 recently... It makes so much more sense than ipv6...and is backward compatible with ipv4...
Basically they're proposing prefacing 4 more octets into an IP address, so 172.16.5.1 would become 0.0.0.0.172.16.5.1
Any existing IPs would just assume the 0.0.0.0 in front of them...
Again...solves the problem on much the same way.
Just fyi IPv8 was written by LLM with full on hallucinated citations and references. It isn’t being taken seriously by anyone.
It didn’t even make sense. It relies on DNS for nat and the like. Deranged networking plans from the non-mind of an LLM.
I recommend taking the time to learn IPv6 properly. It’s actually quite elegant and brings back the peer to peer, endpoint to endpoint connection ability of the old internet.
Oi...well that sucks ass. A good idea, badly conceptualized I guess.
I wouldn’t even say it was a good idea. Like the end to end NAT free internet is the ideal. IPv6 was built for that.
Even if IPv8 was not slop it would reenforce the idea of nat and hierarchy.
IPv6 allows for a democratized internet where anyone can choose to self host. And anyone can connect to anyone who is self hosting.
Because of this it’s a bit more complicated. But ideology it much better than IPv8. It brings us back what made the internet great in the 90s and 2000s, but at scale.
I really like how ipv6 works; the downside is it's way more complicated for humans to understand. But then again all of networking gets complicated fast. I still don't really get what a CGNAT is.
How is IPv6 harder to understand? It's just IPv4 with all the uncommon stuff stripped out and put into optional headers (which IPv4 also has), and a much longer address now written in hex.
CGNAT is just a fancy term for NAT done by a carrier. They get a special private IP address range for doing so, but fundamentally it's still NAT.
Now IP multicast, THAT is complicated for humans to understand. Especially the whole subscriber logic.
I'm taking this as a genuine question, so I'll answer for myself personally. My mental model of IPv4 is quite simple. A computer doesn't have an address unless you configure one for it, or a DHCP server gives it one. If you are on the same network and there's no firewall, knowing the ip address lets you reach the computer. The router has one public facing IP address that all your devices have to share, which is inconvenient.
In ipv6, a computer has two automatic addresses from the MAC address, a link local and a real one, but they aren't interchangeable, and don't always work. Instead of DCHP, there is something else that prevents ip collisions somehow, but dhcp also still exists sometimes.
In my limited experience, i can never count on reaching a device by its hostname, but if i know a local ipv4 address, that's enough, and they're easy to remember since only the last part really changes. With ipv6 the address is too long and incomprehensible to remember.
I love that ipv6 works better for computers, that you don't have to worry about NAT traversal, but i don't think it is too hard to understand why humans find using it day to day more confusing if they're used to ipv4.
IPv4 has this too. It's normally not routable so it's safe to ignore in both IPv4 and IPv6.
The following is a gross simplification, but works for understanding the most common cases:
The original (heavy emphasis on this word) idea of IP is that addresses are unique for every interface. Additionally MAC addresses (48 bits) are also unique for every interface.
In IPv4, you're trying to make interfaces that are unique in 48 bit IDs unique in 32 bit IDs. It doesn't take a pigeon to realize there will be collisions. Therefore you need a person to manually assign addresses. If you automate that person, that becomes DHCP.
In IPv6, you're making a 48 bit unique ID unique in a 128 bit namespace. You literally don't need to do anything and you can still guarantee it's unique. That's how you automatically assign IPv6 addresses without DHCPv6.
As for how MAC addresses are assigned uniquely, the first 24 bits are a vendor prefix. The vendors then ensure each device they produce is unique.
The problem is that nobody should be memorizing arbitrary 128 bit numbers, or even 32 bit arbitrary numbers. Especially since the numbers don't even correspond to a machine, but instead an interface on the machine. Yes, 32 bit IPv4 addresses are easier to memorize, but you shouldn't be memorizing them in the first place. Services run off of names. If the names aren't working, fix the name service.
Ideally NDN solves this problem completely. Every host/packet is identified by a name, not an address. If you need to fetch something, all you need to do is provide the name and somebody (doesn't have to be the original machine) will provide it to you.
So a problem just came up today that encapsulates why IP addresses are still useful.
I have a webservice at http://jeopardy.local:9981/, but typing that into a web browser gives "Server Not Found".
But if I type in http://<ipaddress>:9981 it works perfectly.
It turns out that the problem is that flatpak Web browsers can't resolve mdns names.
The world is full of stuff like this which unfortunately makes ip addresses the most reliable way to reach selfhosted services.
The point I'm making is that IP addresses are useful/used because they are the canonical way of reaching a service. If you have a name (via DNS), it still needs to be translated into an address because routing depends on arbitrary numerical addresses.
But they shouldn't be, and they don't have to be. They identify an interface, not the host. We have services on a single host running across multiple interfaces (multiple ports), or in some cases multiple services running on a single interface (k8s, cloudflare), or even sometimes multiple interfaces/servers masquerading as a single interface (DNS root servers).
The correct way to handle this is to identify services by a name, which means routing itself should be handled via name, not IP addresses. This is one of the things Named Data Networks (NDN) tries to solve. In this scheme, everything has a name. Not a numeric address. Memorizing 10.0.0.1 becomes a lot less important when you can always reach your service at "foo/bar/service".
Needless to say, this is currently not feasible because every single IP router in the world needs to be replaced with a NDN router, in which nobody would do. Vendors have already shown that when they can adapt new technologies or implement NAT, they will implement NAT.
Edit NDN wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking
That is pretty cool!
Probably true...but I just don't see it taking off...
IPv6 is now peaking over 50% of all internet traffic globally and trending up. IPv4 is today the minority of internet traffic.
In some countries like France IPv6 over 85% of all internet traffic. In Germany over 75%. USA 57% of all traffic. India 76% of all traffic.
Not a fan of Google but they keep statistics on adoption.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
I literally just got the notifiation from Verizon today that IPV6 was now supported by their network... Ubiquiti asked me if I wanted to enable it, my response is basically not until I understand it...
Then again, it took me 20 years to really understand IPv4, so it's likely I'm going to be decaying before I get v6. ;-)
Have faith in yourself. I bet you could get things in a few hours with focused study if you have a deep understanding of IPv4.
LOL....my ADHD has gotten much worse with age... "Focus" is a fond memory. ;-}
Ok. Then a week of passive absorbing at worst. You got it. IPv6 is more complicated but not that much more complicated. You already know IPv4.
That was probably a good call, firewalling and (lack of) DHCP especially is quite different so just trying to use v4 concepts on v6 addresses/networks is almost a guaranteed bad time
I’m okay with IPv6, if I can get a hexadecimal keypad. I know, DNS solves it to a degree, but just pumping in link-local can be a keyboard dance.
Unfortunately, my ISP doesn’t yet offer IPv6 due to PPPoE to authenticate and authorize subscribers.
Humans shouldn’t really be typing in IPs. Why not just use localhost for localhost and dns / mdns for lan machines? It’s such a nicer experience.
mdns works with link-local in the case of a private non connected lan.
Dns doesn't always work, and seeing if you can connect via IP is often a troubleshooting step
True. But pinging IPs directly should only be done as a debug step when dns / mdns does not work. Aka extremely rarely.This all being said mdns is extremely reliable on lan. It’s literally just multicast dns on lan.
On my personal home network I have never had mdns fail in 5-ish years. FQDNs yah. DNS can break. But mdns has been solid.
I would like to know more about this mdns.
In my experience, the following are unreliable, and it's unclear which one is supposed to work under which context:
While pinging the ipv4 address is reliable; if the device is reachable on the network, it should respond.
Happy to help.
You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
You can learn how to configure it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi
I see why some people can be confused though. In some distros it needs to be configured. Once you configure it though it should be rock solid.
There is no reason why an ICMP packet would be more robust than a multicast udp packet.
The traditional nomenclature is myhostname.local
Just make sure that the system firewall is configured to allow mdns. That’s the biggest issue. Once you have e that and you have mdns set up it’s good to go.
That's not how header backward compatibility works. IPv4 routers would discard the packet, not prepend zeroes.
it would obviously involve code updates for compability, and I don't pretend to know how it would work long term, but it makes the most sense.. By prepending the zeros, you expand the number of networks dramatically.
I would guess that no matter what, everything gets an upgrade... But I think this might make it more seamless.
Everyone seems to think that IPv6 is a complicated solution to a simple problem, it's not. If you want to learn more, I managed to track down an article I read a while ago from one of the original IPng engineers. https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introduction%20and%20Foreword/Why%20IPv6%20is%20so%20complicated.md
we both thought of the same article haha
Networking researcher here chiming in.
All IPv4 addresses can already be represented in the IPv6 address space, by the same method you describe here.
As for "backwards compatible with IPv4", I'm afraid that's not possible for the same reason IPv6 isn't getting major traction. Right now, we literally CANNOT upgrade our entire networking infrastructure. What you're proposing requires updating every switch and middlebox to support routing using additional bytes, which is physically impossible. The biggest problem would be middleboxes, which includes NAT router, firewalls, etc. For context: most middleboxes drop anything that is not IPv4/TCP or IPv4/UDP. This is why QUIC is encapsulated inside a UDP header (and funny enough, these vendors STILL didn't learn, trying to match a "QUIC header" despite Google themselves saying there is no fixed QUIC header), and RoCEv2 using a header that looks like UDP. There is absolutely no way a new L3 protocol that is not IPv4 (and in some cases, IPv6) can be supported by these boxes.
The only time we successfully replaced the L3 protocol was with the adaption of IPv4. In which networks were much smaller, and networking research was under the US DoD. The DoD basically gave an ultimatum that "if you don't switch to IP by this date we will cut your funding". That won't fly now that the Internet is managed by a cluster of ISPs.
Also: IPv6 is stupid simple. It's basically IPv4, with everything not commonly used stripped out (and added back with "optional headers", and a much larger address field. Since the address field is much larger, it is recommended to write them in hexadecimal, which looks more scary than IPv4.
Side note: I don't think any of these IP protocols is the solution here. If you only keep extending the address field, you're still gonna run into IP problems (routing, ddos, caching). The future of the Internet should be something like NDN. But for the same reason I described above, I don't think that's going to happen unless the Internet is a pile of smoldering ruins.
nitpick, but I would say "an RFC", as there's been a number of these over the years
you've gotten a couple responses so far, but I think the central issue is that "complexity" isn't the problem with IPv6 (and one could certainly argue that IPv6 is actually simpler)--the problem is compatibility. This article lays out the issue very well, and also links to this article (which is a more specific look at the IPv8 proposal you refer to). Both point to the same conclusion, which is that fundamentally--on first principles--existing hardware does not know how to handle the upgrade, which will require some sort of dual-stacking, which is the issue IPv6 currently has. (Not its technical merit.)
True, good point. AN RFC...
To be fair, I never got IPV6... was too confusing. I've always been able to rattle off IPv4 addresses in my sleep. IPV6 just wasn't as natural.
I have a whole /56 of public IP addresses 😉