[Witarea] Re: [v6ops] Re: How to make an elegant IPv4 outage

On Fri, Jun 12, 2026 at 9:53 PM Brian E Carpenter <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Erik,
>
> On 13-Jun-26 02:19, Erik Nygren wrote:
> > + v6ops
> >
> > On the topic of the original draft (
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-martin-retry-over-ipv6-01 <
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-martin-retry-over-ipv6-01>):
> >
> > 1) I wonder if this is pointing towards a desire to either start sunset4
> back up again, or to charter work within some existing WG (v6ops, 6man,
> others?) to pick back up on where sunset4 left off, specifically looking
> for technology solutions and operational recommendations to provide a path
> towards phasing out IPv4 in various environments.
>
> I really hope not. I think we have learnt that attacking currently working
> solutions is self-defeating, which is ultimately why sunset4 failed.
>

Exactly. The problem I have seen all along is that what the Internet users
need is a mechanism that allows them to interact in a larger Internet
without any impact on their user experience whatsover and this has been
interpreted inside the IETF as 'force everyone to transition to IPv6 for
everything, everywhere'.


My experience deploying a high end prosumer network in the house tells me
that IPv4 is never going to go away and it is futile to expect otherwise.

The border gateways have a capacity of ~1000 client devices, I am currently
using 72 IP addresses after a purge but don't anticipate using more than
250 in the near future.

All the interior routing of addresses uses private addresses. I could wire
a static IP address direct to an internal host but since I have to pay
$20/mo for each block of 4 static IPv4 addresses, that would be a waste and
limit internal administration. In 1995, a DNS server was a specific host,
now it is one virtual machine floating around a cluster of Proxmox hosts.

So instead, I have rules that map split the ports out to the hosts that
service them. And here we get to the part that makes transitioning to IPv6
on the Internal network highly unlikely: 10.x.0.y is so much easier to
remember than anything in IPv6 space.

My internal network is segmented into a series of VLANs so that the IoT
devices cannot touch the production network. Each VLAN has a separate
prefix 10.x.*.*. If a device has IPv6 service, the IPv6 address will be in
a /24 with the lower 32 bits being its net 10 suffix.

And this isn't just some scheme PHB thunk up, it is pretty much the way
people deploy the hardware just as named.config.local is the place most
people list out the zone files for their local domains.


The mental model I think appropriate is IPv4 is high level language and
IPv6 if machine code.

Yes we are going to be using IPv6 in the Internet to come. But the reason
we haven't run out of IPv4 addresses so far is that most of the devices are
mobile clients and those work just fine on an IPv6 connection with a
carrier grade NAT to talk to legacy IPv4 only sites.

I will be making my services available over IPv6 as soon as I can find an
ISP that will give me the necessary static IP/64. But my expectation is
that I won't ever need to interact with them directly as an administrator
on the internal network, it will be purely limited to the network gateway
interface.

The net is that while IPv6 will gain deployment, IPv4 will retain its
mindshare and I do not expect that to change for at least another century.

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