The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)

What a great post, about something I've been working on almost as long as Avery. I'm sad I missed it the first time it came around. I was going to write a long response here, but I think I'll save that for a blog post (short summary: I disagree vehemently with what I believe the premise here to be, think that people shouldn't be waiting for the IETF to give them permission to build new network layers, am fairly certain…

Our world. It was a good design in our world. I don't think v6 is the absolute pinnacle of protocol design, but whenever anybody says it's bad and tries to come up with a better alternative, they end up coming up with something equivalent to IPv6. If people consistently can't do better than v6, then I'd say v6 is probably pretty decent.

I have several times cited it as a key article, more insightful than almost anything else I've ever read about IPv6, but I concede it is overlong and unclear and needs more illustrations. (Which, as a technical writer myself, I generally regard as a crutch.) I think the core argument can be summarised as this: 1. IPv6 is flawed because it has 2 main layers, but it needed 3. 2. It understands physical addresses, and it has its own logical…

Don't miss a followup https://tailscale.com/blog/two-internets-both-flakey/