Christopher Warner Studies and thoughts, usually in coherent fashion.

IPV6 is a failure – stop wasting everyones time.

Today I can't reach pypi.python.org. Why? Well because of this:

warnerc01:~ cwarner$ telnet pypi.python.org 80

Trying 2001:888:2000:d::a3...

telnet: connect to address 2001:888:2000:d::a3: Host is down

Trying 82.94.164.163...

Connected to ximinez.python.org.

Escape character is '^]'.

What is this horse shit you maybe asking? Well the 2001:888:2000:d::a3 is an ipv6 address and it's looking kind of like, it's unavailable. However after trying the ipv6 address we fall back to the ipv4 address and it WORKS. Why is this a problem? Well telnet is great because it falls back but other programs aren't as capable. Which means they don't fallback, which means I believe pypi.python.org to be completely unavailable. It's not though because we see a connect fine to 82.94.164.163 which is an IPV4 address. Why should we have to fallback anyway? None of this makes any sense.

Daniel J Bernstein, says it best:

It gets worse. The IPv6 designers don't have a transition plan. They've taken some helpful steps, but they typically declare success (``IPv6 support'') when the real problem---making public IPv6 addresses work just as well as public IPv4 addresses---still hasn't been solved.

You can read more here at "The IPV6 mess" which describes the problem in a rational, coherent and logical manner as to why IPV6 is a failure and wasting everyones time.

[1]: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html