Regular Mario Can’t Jump: The State of IPv6 in 2023 [56]

Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2023
Ned ponders on the state of IPv6, Chris has kind words for Microsoft (sorta), and we both think Elon’s micropayment idea is hot garbage.

Transcript

00:00.10 Ned: Courting. Can you see that louder hint of the microphone pleases. Ah, you’re a liar. You’re a lying liar I Yeah I I too have used the logic tech software. In fact I still have it loaded and all it does is annoy me.

00:02.90 Chris: Um I said flowers are pretty.

00:11.45 Chris: You’re right? They’re just okay.

00:17.89 Chris: 2

00:19.66 Ned: As far as I know like every once in a while it pops up and it’s like hey I need to be updated and I’m like can’t you just do that like you don’t don’t have to ask my permission just update Sco I don’t think I actually need the software at this point because I don’t use that camera for.

00:26.26 Chris: Just go why you always preparing just go.

00:36.95 Ned: Anything except logging into my computer for windows all out which is why I upgraded from was it the 29 or whatever that but it.

00:37.55 Chris: Oh just for hello.

00:44.10 Chris: Yeah, cause only the what’s to Mcca it take respects the who’s and what’s it.

00:51.27 Ned: Yeah, it needs that additional infrared or something to be able to capture that it’s really a human being and not a photo even though you can probably still full it. But allegedly, it’s better. Um, so yeah, that’s really the only thing I use that camera for I Just have it off to the side.

00:56.65 Chris: Great.

01:08.44 Ned: Specifically for that and any other time I Guess it’s just a webcam hooked up to my computer that’s doing nothing. Oh yeah, absolutely, that’s the other reason I want kind of want to uninstall the lotcha tech software because that entirely trust their software supply chain.

01:13.75 Chris: Probably spying on you.

01:27.61 Ned: That sound harsh I don’t think it sounds harsh.

01:29.72 Chris: I Mean it sounds paranoid which excellent.

01:33.10 Ned: Is it though I mean do you really think that their main priority in life is securing the software supply chain for their various random apps and stuff I don’t think so. I Think they’re concerned with just making a more expensive webcam they can somehow convince you to buy and I think they got into audio equipment too. I Think there’s like log tech microphones now for for the podcaster who wants it all but not very good.

02:05.79 Chris: That would not surprise me um, their mouses are excellent.

02:08.22 Ned: Which do not require software I have the logite marathon mouse I think it’s called marathon mouse I don’t know it’s cool though because it’s Bluetooth and it can be connected up to up to 3 devices so I can use this thing mouse.

02:22.67 Chris: Right again. So you can use it for like 2 different computers and also the and nsa. Excellent.

02:27.81 Ned: Yes, absolutely not the s any s because that doesn’t work with a mouse as far as I can tell I’ve tried but I just can’t make super Mario jump with it. It doesn’t work.

02:42.16 Chris: He’s just regular Mario if he can’t jump.

02:44.70 Ned: Wow, that’s really let’s start the show hello alleged human and welcome to the chaos lebra podcast my name is ned and I’m definitely not a robot I am taking multiple medications for seasonal allergies that my aging. Form has somehow miraculously developed hooray what could be more human doctors and medicine and entropy and the heat death of the universe. You know, shared human experiences am I right? The me is Chris who is also here.

03:17.82 Chris: I mean advantage the heat death of the universe doesn’t happen for another 14000000000000 years give or take a couple billion.

03:19.87 Ned: Yeah.

03:25.73 Ned: I mean I will I definitely won’t be there to see it and neither will you fellow human.

03:36.90 Chris: Ah I’m frightened. Oh yeah, oh yeah, my middle name in fact, is allergy.

03:37.50 Ned: Do you have do you have allergies like pollenel. Yeah wow, That’s very ah, perceptive or interesting that your parents chose that or was that self imposed.

03:50.10 Chris: I Know and no I think they planned ahead. Yeah, my mom was like you know what? this will be funny.

03:54.93 Ned: They just know I got you and it was yay yeah, ah up until this year I had no seasonal allergies that I was aware of The doctor said I may have had them but they were never that bad. So I just thought I’m a little stuffy today right? But this is the first year that it was actively uncomfortable to the point that I thought I had clogged ears from like earwax or something so I went to the doctor she looks in. She’s like nope.

04:14.92 Chris: Right.

04:29.62 Ned: You have um, swollen sinuses and ear tubes and that’s why everything sounds weird and feels uncomfortable here’s 3 different medicines for you to start taking immediately and forever. Yeah I mean some of them I can take just around the time.

04:38.57 Chris: And forever.

04:47.17 Ned: But other ones she’s like yeah, you’re probably just going to want to take this all the time. Great I’ll add it to the evergrowing list of medicines that I now have to take on a daily basis. You know it’s funny I go to my in-law’s house and open the cabinet and I see like the stack of different medications they have because they’re in their seventy s and I’m like.

04:54.61 Chris: Up to lucky number 7

05:06.60 Ned: That’s the thing that happens all at once right, you just gradually add another bottle until eventually you’re up to like 12 and you need one of those pill organizers I am like one pill away from the pill organizer home ray.

05:17.24 Chris: Yeah, you you start looking at them and you’re like why am I taking a pill from Menstrual Cramps I think something got mixed up and I just kind of wet with it.

05:26.48 Ned: But on the other hand I don’t get those foot crabs I used to weird Oh my back knees all cleared up hurray. Yeah.

05:38.78 Chris: All right now we need to move on. You made it growth.

05:43.34 Ned: I’m so sorry all right? So today we’re talking about something completely unrelated which is the state of IPV 6 in 2023 you ready good I don’t think that’s true, but we’ll we’ll roll with it. So before we get into IPVSix

05:51.16 Chris: I have never been more ready.

06:02.12 Ned: In general, we’ll do a little history on it. But I’m curious to know what your relationship is with IPVSix have you worked with it in anger or just in a lab or all 3 Okay.

06:13.24 Chris: Or accidentally mostly the mostly the third one. Um as we’ll see the problem with IPVFour is that it’s good enough and it’s just stuck around.

06:27.66 Ned: For.

06:29.67 Chris: Not only is IPV 6 far superior in like almost every way it’s longer makes it something that everybody hates.

06:32.14 Ned: Yeah, it’s longer. Yeah yes, IPVFour is just short enough to be human readable like the way that phone numbers are and IPVSix is decidedly. Not. Even with the way that you shorten addresses It doesn’t matter it does because now I have to like mentally compute how many gaps there are.

06:52.57 Chris: I argue that the shortening makes it worse and to the uninitiated they look. They look at that stuff and just like na the heck with that.

07:06.68 Ned: I still remember the static ip addresses of the 2 domain controllers in my like second job and I will never forget them so that’s that’s what we’re fighting against that kind of ah just rolling forward with that inertia.

07:20.58 Chris: Right.

07:23.94 Ned: So listeners may be surprised to learn how old the ipv 6 standard actually is it was originally drafted by the internet engineering task force also known as the ietf or the if all the way back in 9098 so we’re talking the era of djaco jeans frosted tips and new metal still being somewhat new most of the world was still intensely offline and those of us who weren’t probably had dial up at best I know I didn’t get cable modem until 2001 I want to say yeah and did I have djaco jeans frosted tips and listen to new metal. No comment but the answer is yeah why choose I definitely don’t have the frosted tips because they don’t have enough hair to do that.

08:01.46 Chris: Yeah, that tracks.

08:09.98 Chris: You talking about then or you talk about now.

08:19.80 Ned: But think Jecos are making a comeback which is horrifying. But so anyway, ah there was a working group at the ief who peered into their crystal ball in 98 and foresaw the eventual exhaustion of the public ipv 4 address space. And so they began working on a new addressing scheme that would give us almost limitless addresses while also improving on some of the shortcomings of the ipv 4 standard if we fast forward almost twenty years to 2017 the ipv 6 standard was officially ratified. That’s right until 2017. It was still technically a draft standard. So what the hell took them 20 years good question and was it mean to be ratified. More good questions. My my you are full of all these good questions have a cookie and shut up. Um, let’s start with what ipvsix is in the first place for those who are unfamiliar or uncertain. So ipvsix.

09:17.50 Chris: Oh.

09:31.49 Ned: Sometimes just called v six because we’re lazy is the next and newest generation of the internet protocol its direct predecessor is IPV 4 which might make you wonder hey what happened to v 5 and v 1 through 3 great question. You’re very smart.

09:50.73 Chris: Yay! how.

09:50.87 Ned: Yeah, shut up. Oh the short short version is that all pre v 4 versions were about splitting up the tcp and ip stack into their own protocols prior to V4 tcp and ip were one protocol together and that was not. A great idea so they split him up and then you.

10:11.66 Chris: Right? If for no other reason then if we had left them together then people would inevitably try to pronounce the acronym as Tick Pip it’s not good. No.

10:18.65 Ned: And that’s just not helping anybody no v five was a failed attempt to support voice over I p at the protocol layer which is a bad idea and probably why that version never made it out of draft. If you want the longer version of this story I will link an article in the show notes that sort of runs down into the minutiae of some of the versions. Not really worth getting into here. So ipv 4 is pretty much where we landed in 1981 and it has been chugging along ever since. Ah, there were other competing standards over the years but really the rise of the internet sort of killed off most of these other protocols. Yeah stuff like apple talk ipx was out there I’m sure you can think of a few other ones that fall under this category once the internet took over. It was all it was all over is. IPV 4 or nothing I’m sure someone out there is screwing that Apple talk was superior First of all shut up again and also wrong I am probably I blame I’m going to blame it on my allergies.

11:15.50 Chris: DUN done

11:23.97 Chris: Um, you are very mean today. It’s probably the allergy medication.

11:32.81 Ned: Now I have an out for the next like 3040 years until yes, but when IPV 4 was envisioned about forty years ago the internet was not really conceived of as it is today and the idea that people would have say.

11:34.99 Chris: Forever.

11:50.99 Ned: Multiple devices on their person that all needed network addresses was a laughable concept at best I think most people thought maybe some people might have a personal computer at home but most likely not and yet. That’s the situation. We find ourselves in today. Let’s see I have usually at least 2 devices on me that both have network connectivity my watch and my phone and if I’m carrying a laptop. We’re up to 3 if I have my Nintendo switch now we have 4 and I’m sure if I have my what’s that that my tablet with me. Okay, now we’re up to 5 for one person.

12:29.83 Chris: Yeah, it really doesn’t does not take long for people to start adding to that number sometimes without even really noticing it.

12:34.91 Ned: Right? So and then you add on to that the prevalence of smart devices and internet of things that have sort of exploded into our households and suddenly a 24 address based on your local router. Might not be enough so speaking of that address exhaustion problem the I P V Four Protocol uses a 32 bit address space which has potentially four point three billion unique addresses to give out that might seem like a lot. But unfortunately. When they were creating the standard. They just carved off large swaths of the address space for reasons like documentation the link local space and host networking one of the most egregious is the use of the one twenty seven dot zero dot zero zero eight space for host networking that takes up 16000000 addresses. All of its own totally unusable for anything else. You know we use that for 1 thing. It’s the loop back address. So we have 16000000 typically systems use 1.

13:45.61 Chris: Right.

13:53.40 Ned: And seem smart in fairness.

13:54.76 Chris: Yeah, of all the reserved addresses. That’s the that is definitely the one where you’re just like even in 1980 that should have been like wait a minute.

14:03.15 Ned: Right? They also reserved whole swaths of addresses for use in documentation. So if you wanted an example address you would use 1 of these example documentation addresses which no one uses and they mostly lay dormant but you can’t. Use them for anything else because they’re reserved in the standard for documentation. Yeah, so as ipv four proliferated throughout the world. The public address space reserved for the internet.

14:21.61 Chris: Right.

14:35.18 Ned: Ah, was allocated to various countries companies and organizations. Not realizing that the resource would one day be extremely scarce the iana the internet assigned numbers authority handed out blocks of addresses in what what we you could say generous sizes. Pretty much anyone who asked and showed up at the door so we have universities ending up with slash eights because sure you asked maybe even nicely a little aside when I worked at Villanova University They were still in the process of moving over to private ipo address space because they had it wasn’t a slash 8 but it was something close to that and they just used all these public ip addresses for their internal networking because why wouldn’t you yeah and then they wouldn’t have to Nat which was great.

15:20.35 Chris: Because because they had them.

15:28.62 Ned: So the main challenge with ipv 4 now is public address exhaustion the last block of addresses was handed out I want to say in 2012 to the isps now that doesn’t mean that it’s actually been handed out to someone who’s actively using those addresses that. Took many more years but the actual assignment of those blocks to isps and countries was basically completed ten years ago there’s also other issues with the original implementation of Ipv four that are all improved upon by v six but the main thing that was pushing v 6 forward. Was the lack of available public address space in v four now we probably would have seen mass adoption of v 6 much much sooner if it weren’t for the happy accident that was private address space in V4 and the introduction of network address translation and port. Address translation these 2 technologies allow a large number of nodes on 1 network to use a very small number of addresses and another network for communication. The most common implementation that you might already be aware of is having a gnat between your private home network. And the internet. So your wireless router or just your router is probably using a private ip address space of let’s say one nine Two dot 1 6 eight dot one dot zero slash twenty four can almost guarantee because that’s the default almost every router comes with.

17:03.44 Ned: But it only has a single public ip address that’s assigned from your isp. So the router basically does a mapping between an internal ip address and a particular port on the public ip address and because there’s sixty five Thousand odd ports. That generally works.

17:22.21 Chris: Unless you have a lot of Ipads.

17:28.30 Ned: And if you do somehow exceed that number of ports which is a real thing port exhaustion happens especially in more active networks with lots of devices you can bump it up and get another public ip yeah address and bam you have 65000 more ah potential ports to use.

17:43.00 Chris: Right.

17:45.60 Ned: Also the router is responsible for maintaining sessions between the internal network and the internet with those mappings and it has timeouts assigned to sessions so after a certain amount of time. It will end the session and free up that port for another device to use. So what that means is that Nat and Pat despite the scarcity of public ip addresses allowed organizations of all sizes to run massive internal networks with millions of nodes and only a small number of public ip addresses say a class c block or even smaller. And unless your company merged with another company that used the same private ad ip address ranges which is a whole unbelievable headache. We don’t want to get into um unless you ran to that case, most of the time it was absolutely fine if you did have 2 networks. Use the same private ad p address range. It was probably easier to burn everything down and go live a cabin in the woods with your new best friend Rodney the Cisco router.

18:46.33 Chris: Yeah, you can plant a whole field of spanning trees.

18:50.62 Ned: Watch them grow and tangle with each other I remember the first time I crashed a network spent with spanning tree leaks. It was no I don’t know why this is happening.

19:00.40 Chris: It was never just the 1 time though was it.

19:10.36 Ned: What’s link aggregation I don’t understand oh you know before they put me in charge of Dave set and networking I probably should have passed the ccna anyhow, the what now? Yes, ah so IPVSix was created to solve many.

19:17.75 Chris: Or heard of it.

19:27.90 Ned: Problems but the main one was public ip address scarcity and to solve the address crisis ipvsix uses a 128 bit address space instead of 32 bit when that is a frankly ridiculous number of addresses I’ll give you the number. But. Don’t think it helps with the scope and scale a lot just want want want what want. It’s 3 point 4 times 10 to the thirty eight addresses.

19:55.94 Chris: Can you organize that by bunches of bananas.

20:01.30 Ned: But no, it’s not very like just that number is not helpful at all here’s another way to think about it. There are roughly 2 to the twenty Fourth stars in the universe.

20:07.23 Chris: Um, it’s.

20:16.50 Ned: Every single star could get an address and we’d have a ton left over um you could give every single grain of sand on earth an ip address and still have some leftover It is an embarrassingly ludicrous number. So. We were real worried about running out about out of V4 addresses both in the private and public networks if anybody is worried about running out of a v 6 address space. It’s safe to say they don’t have a great grasp on math.

20:48.20 Chris: So the best way to put this is we have infinity addresses and just moving on forward.

20:53.64 Ned: It’s really close I’m not going to say no one will ever need more than a 128 bit address space because people who say shit like that are inevitably wrong on a long enough time scale. But I feel pretty good saying. For the next like Thousand years were solid.

21:14.10 Chris: Yeah.

21:15.70 Ned: Yeah, so beyond this ridiculous size address space. What else is v 6 meant to improve upon here’s a quick rundown of the highlights multicasting. So this is the idea that you can send a single stream to multiple destinations v six has that built. Right into the spec so you can just create a multicast address and send to that and all the devices listening on that address will get that stream super convenientnience this is possible with v 4 but it’s an add- on it’s not part of the base protocol. There’s whole Cisco books. Dedicated to just setting up multicast and it makes your eyes go crossed v 6 just has it built right into the addressing plan boom you’re done so that’s nice, especially for screen. Ah the next one is stateless address auto configuration also known as.

22:01.93 Chris: And that’s going to be a that’s going to be a recurring theme I feel.

22:12.49 Ned: Slack though I don’t think anybody says that this removes the need to run Dhcp or assign static ip addresses on your network for things to talk to each other which is why many people end up using IPV 6 without knowing it.

22:13.70 Chris: I Hope not.

22:21.19 Chris: Sure.

22:29.98 Ned: Each interface generates a link local address on its own and then listens for router announcements to figure out how to send traffic outside of the local network segment Dhcp for v 6 still exists when you want to be more stateful about things but otherwise it. Simplifies network addressing and makes renumbering a local network as simple as just updating the router advertisements so it would maintain its link local address. It would just get a new address that it uses for sending traffic outside of the network. Yes v four had something similar.

22:59.19 Chris: So basically it’s It’s an easy button.

23:05.74 Ned: One Six nine address space was originally intended for this functionality but no one ever sets it up so it doesn’t work next good one is Ip sec fun fact IPSec was originally part of the ipvsix spec and then back ported into v four because it was very necessary to have ipsec and v 4 at 1 point ipsec was a requirement for all v 6 communications so we could have had encryption by default not just encryption. But it also.

23:45.53 Ned: Identifies the sender and the receiver as well. So it’s authentication and the encryption which would be really nice but that was a bit aggressive. Not everybody was on board. So the draft changed it to be optional. But. I psec is part of v 6 and it requires using ike v two instead of v one which is much more secure. Good job v 6 also simplifies routing or to be more accurate. The packet header used for routing is much simpler.

24:06.73 Chris: Progress.

24:17.41 Ned: The actual routing and the efficiency is up for debate. But I’d prefer not to wade into those shark infested waters wearing a chumsuit so we’ll move right onto the next one which is the jumbo Graham and I sadly no though.

24:26.93 Chris: Um, fair, any relation to the Jumbo tron.

24:34.50 Ned: Ah, Jumbot Tron could in theory Use Jumbo Grams I think about it So I include this one just because the name is fun. You remember Jumbo frames from like implementing icecuzzy on vmware. That’s how everybody.

24:35.14 Chris: Oh I like it.

24:48.60 Chris: Sadly, yes.

24:51.14 Ned: Are you sure you set the mtu size on all the devices in the path. Are you sure? ah for questionable network performance so you could set it to 9000 or more technically 9012 for the mtu this is similar. But it’s more about the total payload size that’s being carried by the stream. So in ipv 4 you were limited to sixty four megabytes IPV six can handle about four gigabytes as a single payload. That’s more.

25:25.32 Chris: At yeah, yeah, I’m doing the math in my head and it’s a lot. It’s like 5 times as much.

25:26.94 Ned: Yeah, yeah, so if you were streaming like four k images to a jumbot tron Jumbo Grahams might actually be super useful. Look at that I did it did it. So.

25:41.71 Chris: Nailed it.

25:46.15 Ned: Where is IPV 6 today are people actually using it good question and this time I’m not going to tell you to shut up because you’re smart and you’re pretty. Ah so v 6 is overall a better protocol than v 4 hands down it just is but the thing about networking people.

26:05.49 Ned: They’re resistant to change and not without good reason in part because people love blaming the network when shit breaks. That’s the first thing my kids do as soon as their tablet doesn’t work like dad. The internet’s broken.

26:14.73 Chris: It’s one of my favorite things.

26:20.51 Chris: I Did the same thing when my refrigerator stopped working.

26:24.23 Ned: If you might have been right and my crockpot too So Network admins try not to change things if nothing is currently broken even if it’s only slightly broken they still might not want to break not change it because it could be more broken.

26:39.64 Chris: Deal with it.

26:44.50 Ned: Instead they’ll be like I think it’s the storage and move on so for them switching down v 6 seems like a big change that could probably break a lot of things. So unless they have literally no other choice. They’re not going to do it. And this case we’re talking about full move over to v 6 or just doing dual stack. The foreign v 6 the actual chances of breaking stuff in dualstack are fairly low, but it’s a change. They don’t like change and I don’t blame them. The public internet is 1 place where. They no longer have a choice. We’re out of V4 addresses to allocate the number of devices connecting to the internet has absolutely exploded and isps. Don’t want to be running meganats if they don’t have to which is that’s not the actual terminology. They call it something else. But it’s essentially just these massive gnat boxes that have to do a lot of stateful routing and it sucks for them. It’s expensive to run and they don’t want to do it and in some countries they can’t even get enough Ipb for addresses to use with their meganat. It’s just not available so you’ll see a lot of isps mobile carriers and content storage solutions or delivery solutions turn to ipv 6 for a solution. So if you’re able to find it in your mobile devices depending on which type of mobile device you have I can.

28:17.39 Ned: Guarantee that the ip address you’re getting from your mobile carrier is a v 6 address I looked it up. My phone has 3 v 6 addresses. 1 of them be just repun well one of them is the link local address which allows it to talk to other devices on my local network.

28:25.52 Chris: Just for fun.

28:34.15 Ned: Which is running ipvsix even though I never configured that magic The other thing is that v six has been fueled by the explosive growth of content and streaming on the internet so cdns like cloudflare have v 6 enabled by default. And it is the preferred protocol whenever it is available content providers like Netflix and Youtube also prefer v 6 and if we’re looking at a mobile first world streaming using v six is quickly becoming the majority adoption on private networks however has been a lot slower. Usually starts in the data center and then branches out from there although v 6 has found some adoption in settings and settings that have say a ton of devices like an industrial internet of things machinery shop or factory or something like that where you’re going to have. Potentially thousands of devices trying to stream telemetry and they all needed an address to do that.

29:35.64 Chris: Right? Or for example, the 15000000 mini computers that make up modern say self-driving cars.

29:44.27 Ned: Oh another good point using v six is a great use case for that and they get all the benefits of easy local discovery and security on by default sounds good to me. So let’s check out some of the recent numbers when it comes to adoption. Ah, Google keeps track of but pretty much everything including v 6 traffic usage on the internet as of January Twenty Twenty three 43% of all traffic was using v six and if the trend line is to be believed and we assume somewhat linear growth. AhV six should overtake v 4 sometime next year in 2024 so that will be the majority of traffic will be v 6 on the internet according to data from Akamai Bahrain and India top out the country’s adopting v 6 at 100 % and sixty seven point five percent respectively now. Bahrain’s not very big. So I guess they they somehow figured it out India however is big and has a large population. So for them to already be at basically 2 thirds of everyone using these six. It’s a lot and. If you look at the adoption rates many of the top countries arrived late to the whole distribution of Ipv4 address base from I a and so they ended up with a lot less addresses than say I don’t know the United States so in effect these late arrivals.

31:21.98 Ned: Tend to adopt mobile at much higher rates to begin with and skip whole swaths of the tech journey that the us had to let’s say wallow through now I tried to find some data on the internal use of v 6 and it was hard to come by. There’s just not a lot of information out there anecdotally the ripe labs v six report indicates that v 6 readiness and usage actually dropped in the last year now. The reason they say that and their their theory behind it is that during the pandemic people were ordered to stay at home. And a lot of those people at home were using v six without knowing it and then when people started coming back to the office last year now they were working from the office and so the amount of v 4 traffic actually went up and v six dropped a little bit. But if you look at the daily trend. It’s actually interesting. You can see v 4 traffic is higher during the workday in whatever country, you’re looking at and then v 6 traffic goes way up after the workday when everybody gets home and they fire up the old Netflix box and browse Facebook and. Live stream tiktokers or whatever you do at home I’m I’m not judging you Chris with who I mean I’m judging a little bit I saw your Tiktok.

32:43.46 Chris: No, you didn’t nobody did.

32:49.84 Ned: Have one view and it’s my mother Ah now let’s turn our gaze over to the public clouds. How are they doing this whole v 6 thing surely. They’ve had plenty of notice and they built the cloud from the ground up. You’d think that they would be capable of running ipv 6 only right now now. So the short answer as far as I can tell looking through the documentation is that the big 3 all allow you to spin up a bpc.

33:12.64 Chris: A.

33:25.15 Ned: Or a virtual network in dual stack mode meaning run v four and v 6 but none of them allow you to run the entire network as v 6 only Aws announced general availability of v 6 only subnets and e c two instances. But the vpc they’re in is still dual stacked and that’s probably because there are some services in Aws that don’t support v 6 meaning if your e c two instances want to talk to that service. They’re going to need a V4 address so sorry over in the azure world. Things are a little more restrictive. Azure virtual machines need to be dual stacked. They cannot run in a v six only mode There’s also a lack of support for v 6 in a lot of their platform as a service components and the irony here is that Microsoft itself has been quite the champion of v six since the very beginning I remember. Learning how to how to configure dhc p v 6 on a domain controller for my mccse back in 2003 did you have a similar experience.

34:33.64 Chris: Um I don’t remember that but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

34:36.94 Ned: It may have been removed from some of the training materials later on but at the time that I was studying for the tests v 6 in there and you had to know at least the addressing scheme and how Dhc P V 6 worked at the time which is actually different than how it works now. But that’s.

34:47.13 Chris: Um, yeah I.

34:56.62 Ned: We don’t need to go down that rabbit hole. Also fun fact. Microsoft Exchange I think starting in 2013 was using v six and it had to use v 6 and fun fact. Lot of admins had this horrible habit of going into the tcp ip settings of their network cards and unchecking the v 6 box because that made the card work faster which first no, it didn’t and second it broke exchange that was.

35:26.98 Chris: Is that bad it would it would explain why I got so many less calendar invites.

35:31.10 Ned: I Mean if you really hate your email I Guess it’s fine.

35:39.57 Ned: Yeah, and before anybody sends me feedback. It might have been exchange twenty Ten I don’t remember exactly which one it was I just remember dealing with the problem we would go to client sites to be like our exchange servers weird I’m like yeah because you disabled all these things that it uses anyway. Ah. Azure unfortunately did not prioritize v 6 so many of the services launched without support and now they have to backport it in and it really just never hits the top of the priority stack if we’re being honest, go for. Ah. Google cloud’s part dual stackck is also the flavor of the day. Although it does appear that more of their paas services support v 6 than azure. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you need to use v 6 or you’d prefer to use v 6 in the cloud go with Aws or Gcp Azure is going to catch up eventually. But. It doesn’t seem to be their priority because people are not paying to have v 6 they’re paying to have new features so that’s where all the development effort goes now what about on-premises support if you purchase network gear in the last ten years it’s probably supports v 6 all modern operating systems also support v 6 most applications can also support it. Especially if they don’t dip too far down into the protocol stack if they’re staying at like layer 4 they’re not even aware that b six is in play and if they dip into tcp they still don’t know so it really has to be.

37:10.17 Ned: Down it like layer 3 for it to start noticing something weird is going on so end map would be aware and should be yeah or if you’re running like a hypervisor or a container platform or something else. That’s super low level.

37:13.86 Chris: So like end map 1 would hope.

37:28.71 Ned: Your mileage may vary read the documentation, etc, etc. Kubernetes for its part fully supports ipv 6 since 21 but you should also check the Cni that you choose to use with Kubernetes and make sure it also has that support calico for example. Not only supports v 6 but also supports v 6 in a non dual stack setup. So if you want to run v six only you can do that with calco how about that now everybody’s sitting out there going what does this mean for me, it’s all about me.

37:54.55 Chris: How about it.

38:05.92 Ned: Greedy little buggers. Wow as an I t pro who might need to dabble with networking on occasion. What does that mean for you from an internal networking perspective probably not a hell of a lot the main use cases for moving to v 6 on your private networks are one supporting a massive. Number of devices 2 is simplified m and a with network rationalization also known as no private network overlap which is nice or 3 your content or service provider running infrastructure and if that’s the case.

38:34.95 Chris: Very.

38:43.52 Ned: You already know who you are and you’re probably already using v six. Otherwise if you’re on the private network side. You should be aware of v 6 and have a loose idea of how it works but chances are it’s going to be another decade before your organization gets around to adopting it internally. Did someone say the same thing about a year ago yes yes they did is it the year of vdi yes is low cost fusion 5 years away again. The answers always yes, the answer is yes.

39:12.40 Chris: What about the year of the linux desktop ooh that’s exciting.

39:19.42 Ned: We’re very positive now if you’re say hosting websites or you have other public facing content then v 6 adoption is an absolute must remember that like 2 thirds of all traffic from India is using v six. Yeah. You probably want to have a v six compatible version of your website so that they can get the best performance can they still get to your website if it’s served up through v four yes is the performance worse. Also yes, wow again. I’m so positive today. If you don’t mind availing yourself of a Cdn like cloudflare you pretty much switch to supporting v 6 easily just let them do it for you. They sit on the frontend they handle all of the v 6 traffic and if it needs to go back to your V4 only website it will pull the content and serve it through its endpoints. That’s convenientnience if you’re hosting your website on a static site generator hoster of some kind most of those also support musics that is the yeah you know like 1 of those things like how chaos lever is.

40:23.54 Chris: Set that the technical term the site generator hoster thing.

40:32.67 Ned: Hosted out of azure static web apps. Yeah, we could support v 6 Unfortunately, it’s not available for free because reasons I don’t I don’t know you have to pay for like the enterprise grade tier which annoys me mold.

40:47.36 Chris: Ah.

40:49.94 Ned: If you’re an organization and you want your own block of v 6 addresses. You can go to Aaron they’re the ones who handle that sort of thing and you can request one if you meet their criteria. They’ll issue one to you we of course you have to pay for it and it’s like a thousand bucks a year or something. What’s actually much much much easier is just asking your isp for a block of addresses. They’ve got plenty trust me, they’ll probably hook you up with the slash 64 at the smallest which is many times larger than the entire of the D4 address space.

41:27.27 Chris: Exponentially larger.

41:28.50 Ned: Yes, this is not a doubling. It’s It’s an exponential growth curve. So yeah, you’ll you’ll probably be okay with that number of addresses for like have now that’s for the I T professional What about the home user.

41:36.27 Chris: Ever. Yeah.

41:46.54 Ned: But the average average consumer. You’re already using v 6 on your mobile devices as I mentioned before just go in and look in wherever it is in your settings for Android it’s under system settings for iphone. It’s probably under something stupid with the bad name for your home network. You’re probably also using ipv 6 and you may even have a public ipv 6 address from your Isb Verizon files is slowly rolling out v 6 and other isps have already done so once v six is enabled on the provider side. You’ll have to update the configuration of your local router to get that external address through a router announcement after which it’ll negotiate for a block of addresses to distribute via DhcPVSix internally so your internal devices that support v 6 will get. That address which is basically a public address in addition to their link local address and after that they can talk to b 6 services without a nat. Yes, without an that does that none.

42:51.96 Chris: We and that’s the important part is that you never ever have to have 2 ah 2 names for the same device in the networking perspective you use the IPV 6 address everywhere.

42:58.35 Ned: Exactly.

43:06.30 Ned: Everywhere and it just works. It’s magic I mean it doesn’t just work but there are other systems in place that let it work that you don’t have to deal with and that’s the important part. Um now rest assured even though there’s no nat.

43:13.92 Chris: Right.

43:22.28 Ned: Some people get a little squirly about they’re like oh no people can just talk to my ah my devices because they have a public ip address. It doesn’t work like that your router still acts as a firewall. It’s still only going to use established sessions that started from inside your network. Now you just have the ability to publicly address stuff that’s on your internal network if you want to and that seems pretty useful now if you do that your isp might protest. Because you’re not using a business class service and they don’t want you running a whole bunch of servers on your internal network if you’re paying for the consumer grade internet. But that’s between you and your Isb. Um, you’ll still need a public Ipv for address. And natting for services on the internet that don’t support v 6 so you can’t just go v 6 only yet. But at least you can get the best performance available for sites and content that have turned v 6 on. Do you have any questions or comments that’s fair. Were you streaming something on Tiktok.

44:26.98 Chris: Oh I’m sorry I wasn’t listening.

44:33.22 Chris: I was I was watching a live stream of someone on Tiktok watching Netflix via Twitch.

44:41.21 Ned: I’m not sure if that’s a joke or not that might be a real thing I don’t know I don’t think you can live stream on Tiktok actually isn’t it just like short videos. You can.

44:48.57 Chris: No, you can It’s yeah oh yeah I mean I don’t know what what was question lightning round chat Gp T continues to generate both positive and negative publicity.

44:58.23 Ned: Lighting round.

45:06.66 Ned: Um, we.

45:07.26 Chris: Couple of chat Gpt thingies came through the news this week first in a narrow test. It seems that chat Gpt has given better results to humans that. First in a narrow test. It seems that chat Gpt has given better results than humans to people asking medical questions to a hospital help chat this is good and it’s a great example of how and where to use this generative technology. It is narrowly focused. Narrowly trained relying only on vetted medical answers to previous similar questions and crucially when it responds it doesn’t get tired thus it doesn’t get snippy which is good second.

45:52.72 Ned: Then.

45:56.58 Chris: Europe appears to be adding legislation to force ai companies to publish a quote sufficiently detailed summary quote of their sources. This is bad. So chatchipe tea is trained generally. On billions upon billions of inputs and we still only kind of understand how it comes to its conclusions. There is a real question as to whether or not ai like this can be properly programmed to give sources which is bad. Finally.

46:25.41 Ned: Um, and.

46:27.40 Chris: Chat Gpt has been working to allow users to opt out of letting inputs be used for further training. It’s in there now just a little simple little slider button just a little guy in settings. It’s literally the only setting under data management. Um, and allegedly if you flip that switch.

46:34.26 Ned: Um.

46:36.37 Ned: Are.

46:46.17 Chris: All of your inputs. Don’t go anywhere once your question gets answered which is good.

46:52.81 Ned: Yay I feel like we need to have another longer chat Gpt episode to dig into a lot of those and other things that are going on so you now have an assignment for next week congratulations the last version of windows gets its last feature. Update it was the summer of 2015 uptown funk was another so nope did that all wrong. So this is’s going to be that sort of going to be that sort of lightning round huh. Yeah, it was the summer of 2015 Uptown Funk was smoother then a fresh jar of skippy Christopher Lee shuffled off this mortal coil to join his friends in Tira Lean or valhaa or valanor or whatever it is in the wheel of time and windows ten was released to wash the slate clean of windows eight and be the final version of windows. At least that was the idea and what was in the marketing rather than having a major version upgrade every four or five years windows would instead receive regular feature updates every quarter if you bought windows 10 you would never have to buy another version right. Wow no quarterly feature releases slipped several times and soon became semi annualual releases and then in October of 2021 windows eleven dropped thereby becoming a new version of the last version of windows. What’s weird.

48:25.46 Ned: Is that if your pc was running windows 10 and met the hardware specs the upgrade to windows ten was free which makes the question why give it a new version number and the answer is of course money and marketing windows 10 is now at the end of its update road with version 2020 22 enty two h two being the final update with no more feature releases to come security updates will keep flowing until windows 10 hits end of service life in October Twenty Twenty five but if you want new and cool features switch to linux or upgrade to windows 10 whatever. Not your dad or am i.

49:07.90 Chris: Yikes elon musk proposes new Twitter feature micro payments to read news articles. Do I need to read it I mean that was a good summary.

49:16.21 Ned: Um, thanks and go ahead. You wrote a whole thing.

49:21.82 Chris: This just in from the far too overworked section of the chaos lever news desk that covers Elon’s bad ideas now he thinks that Twitter can be a news hosting aggregator that will entice people to buy access to articles on a per click basis. Let’s see if we can hit all the reasons this is dumb. In 1 quick, go one Elon has consistently and needlessly antagonized news outlets to the point that they’re using Twitter less and in some cases not at all 2 Twitter has fired most of their engineering staff.

49:43.11 Ned: Let’s go.

49:57.51 Chris: So it’s unlikely that this feature would even be feasible. Let alone stable three Elon apparently has no idea that the micropayment model of news consumption has been tried over and over and over again and nobody has been able to really make it work 4 elon has forgotten that people don’t go to Twitter to read the articles studies going back as far as 2016 have consistently shown that less than 40% of people ever click the articles that they’d retweet about.

50:18.94 Ned: Ah.

50:31.92 Chris: They just react to the headlines and gadget who listed out all of these fun exciting things and will be linked in the show notes reached out to Twitter for clarification about this business model and the technical capabilities of enacting this by the alleged may of 2023

50:32.23 Ned: Um, and.

50:49.54 Chris: Release date which if you’re doing the math at home is now. But of course you remember that Twitter doesn’t have a press team anymore. All emails to the previously working press addresses return and auto reply poop emoji because Elon’s hilarious

50:52.53 Ned: Um, yes.

51:05.33 Ned: I think my original reasoning of still stands quantum may be coming for your crypto but not just yet at the annual rsa conference a D Shamir and Clifford Cox participate participated in a panel. Making the argument that defending against quantum computers breaking encryption is a bit of a wild goose chase. The simple fact is most encrypted communications are useless drak and decrypting it efficiently is not even in the realm of possibility with current quantum computers. Asked whether folks should adopt quantum safe cryptography for future communications and dames from Ibm agreed that our fears are overhyped but the longer and more secure the keys the better now there is a real computing cost involved with using longer keys. So that should be balanced against the sensitivity of your communications of much greater worry is protecting against insider threats where all the encryption in the world won’t save you if they already have the keys to the castle rather than tilting at quantum windmills that may or may not be there. Organizations should instead invest their time and effort into protecting against more mundane and realistic threat vectors Carl and accounting dammit Carl.

52:30.42 Chris: Kind of everything Microsoft Pivots announces support for a right to repair bill now the idea that you should I don’t know be able to fix the devices you paid for. Also known as the right to repair is for some reason a very controversial idea at the state and federal level wait. no no I I got that wrong. It’s ah its actually a super known reason quote despite dozens of state legislatures taking up right-to-re repair bills in recent years

52:55.52 Ned: Um.

53:05.82 Chris: Very few of those bills have passed due to staunch opposition from device makers and the trade associations representing them unquote this used to include Microsoft recently. However, they have been changing their tune.

53:13.61 Ned: Um.

53:20.83 Chris: The fair repair act a Washington State bill that attempted to force this reasonable request to be possible died in committee but not before Microsoft was able to make a public statement supporting it. This has been an evolving position for Microsoft.

53:33.14 Ned: Um.

53:36.71 Chris: With them trying to be quote part of the conversation rather than outside it since 2021 this also included efforts to open up their own device repairs. Ah first for a major manufacturer tough to say if this.

53:48.90 Ned: Oh.

53:54.20 Chris: Pivot is simply a cynical shot at Apple bandwagoning because they see the writing on the wall or a sincere belief in what should be an uncontroversial concept.

54:03.87 Ned: Why choose advertising company Google turns a profit on something that’s not advertising shit does that mean I have to stop calling them advertising company Google.

54:13.70 Chris: But what.

54:23.50 Ned: Wait. What’s that 78% of their revenue and 99% of their net income is still from ads oh good. Never mind for q one Twenty Twenty Three Google cloud brought in seven point four billion dollars in revenue an increase of 28% year over year more impressive is that they had operating income of one hundred and ninety one million dollars that’s the very first time Google cloud has ever been profitable and that’s not net income. It’s operating income. So it’s kind of dicey but still. Profitable I should point out that there is a vague corporate costs unallocated line that had three point three billion dollars in losses if I wanted to make my cloud seem like it was finally in the black I might shove some of that cost into a. Poorly defined category that serves as a catchall for whatever I don’t want to include in cloud costs I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here I’m just saying some of that cost is paying out severances and surely some of those people laid off worked for Google cloud that’s it I’m not saying anything else heavily implying. Of course saying no never well hey thanks for listening or something I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end so congratulations to you friend you accomplished something today now you can spend the rest of the day avoiding making that doctor’s appointment because.

55:54.85 Ned: Who knows what weird maladies you’ve developed in the last year you don’t and you don’t want to you burned it. You can buy me or Chris on Twitter at ned 1313 and at hayner 80 respectively or follow the show at chaos underscore lever if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Show notes and the sign up for our newsletter are at chaoslever.com if you like reading things we’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us ta-ta for now that that bill was called the fair repair act and I think because it rhymes it’s it’s a good bill That’s how it works right.

56:29.14 Chris: I mean 1000000 voters in Washington that didn’t get a chance to vote on this can’t be wrong.

Hosts

Chris Hayner

Chris Hayner (He/Him)

Our story starts with a young Chris growing up in the agrarian community of Central New Jersey. Son of an eccentric sheep herder, Chris’ early life was that of toil and misery. When he wasn’t pressing cheese for his father’s failing upscale Fromage emporium, he languished on a meager diet of Dinty Moore and boiled socks. His teenage years introduced new wrinkles in an already beleaguered existence with the arrival of an Atari 2600. While at first it seemed a blessed distraction from milking ornery sheep, Chris fell victim to an obsession with achieving the perfect Pitfall game. Hours spent in the grips of Indiana Jones-esque adventure warped poor Chris’ mind and brought him to the maw of madness. It was at that moment he met our hero, Ned Bellavance, who shepherded him along a path of freedom out of his feverish, vine-filled hellscape. To this day Chris is haunted by visions of alligator jaws snapping shut, but with the help of Ned, he freed himself from the confines of Atari obsession to become a somewhat productive member of society. You can find Chris at coin operated laundromats, lecturing ironing boards for being itinerant. And as the cohost on the Chaos Lever podcast.

Ned Bellavance

Ned Bellavance (He/Him)

Ned is an industry veteran with piercing blue eyes, an indomitable spirit, and the thick hair of someone half his age. He is the founder and sole employee of the ludicrously successful Ned in the Cloud LLC, which has rocked the tech world with its meteoric rise in power and prestige. You can find Ned and his company at the most lavish and exclusive tech events, or at least in theory you could, since you wouldn’t actually be allowed into such hallowed circles. When Ned isn’t sailing on his 500 ft. yacht with Sir Richard Branson or volunteering at a local youth steeplechase charity, you can find him doing charity work of another kind, cohosting the Chaos Lever podcast with Chris Hayner. Really, he’s doing Chris a huge favor by even showing up. You should feel grateful Chris. Oaths of fealty, acts of contrition, and tokens of appreciation may be sent via carrier pigeon to his palatial estate on the Isle of Man.