Re: IPv4 flag day

[borg--- via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

And this hits the nail imo. Lets face it, IPv6 is bloody
overengineered. What world needed in 1997 was IPv4 with just bigger
address space. What have should be done is grab IPv4, extend
its address space to 64bit and call it IPv6. Nothing more was needed.
Adddress space should look sth like this:
- loopback 0:0:0:1/48
- soft LL 0:0:1-ffff:0/32 (Link Local)
- RFC1918 address space 0:1-ffff:0:0/16

Nice and easy, by having address at ::1:4 you immediatly know you are 
dealing with LL address. ::1:0:a means private address space.
Anyone saying this is insignifcant, probably comes from hyperscalers
where AI manage they networks. But this is not MAJORITY of Networks.
Just go away.

IPv4 was well established, pretty much most bugs and problems were fixed.
It just worked nicely. The only problem was too small address space.
If this would be delivered, I strongly think that in 2007, Internet
and most enterprise would be IPv6.


---------- Original message ----------

From: Jay Acuna via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
To: North American Network Operators Group <nanog () lists nanog org>
Cc: Arie Vayner <ariev () vayner net>, Jay Acuna <mysidia () gmail com>
Subject: Re: IPv4 flag day
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:30:35 -0500

On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 4:21˙˙PM Arie Vayner via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> [...] In my view, this is a core reason why IPv6 adoption remains low in the
> enterprise space: it requires fundamental paradigm shifts rather than a
> simple protocol update.

Yes.  And there are many issues with running IPv6 systems.
One of the major problems is there are way too many bits, and they've
created addresses
which simply cannot be typed (practically).

It is as if the designers of the protocol didn't learn from IPv4 and
did not care at all about basic needs of operators.

One of those needs is the capability to look at a System logging
console, and see
an address which can be remembered for 5 seconds and typed into a terminal
in 5 seconds.   In order to troubleshoot or diag some issue.
To identify and group traffic.  To add or remove a single host from a blocklist.

Copy and paste is not always available and not always suitable.
Neither are DNS nor reverse DNS mappings.
In a number of important ways IPv6 was fatally deficient.

I believe a flag day is out of the question.  Perhaps some day
a suitable protocol would be devised to take the place of V6.

> Thanks,
> Arie
--
-JA
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