Comment by flumpcakes
4 days ago
I'm very surprised by the questions in this thread. There are some extremely basic things people are just not understanding. I suspect people hating on IPv6 have not spent the time with it. There is a difficulty in that it does behave quite differently to IPv4, and the lack of private addresses are also probably a shock.
The basic thing proponents don’t understand is that nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer. And there are infinitely more people with home routers and a few dozen devices than there are people running ISPs, fortune 500s, and data centres. Play with your convolution all you want, in 20 years the rest of us will still be happily assigning 192.168.x.x and ignoring it. V4 space running out is no more the average persons problem than undersea cables or certificate authority.
> nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses
If someone can't understand "it's longer" then what is wrong with them?
And using hex instead of decimal for magic computer numbers should be more intuitive, not less.
Also structure-wise the first half is the subnet and the second half is the host. That's much more intuitive than IPv4.
> absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer
If you do anything peer to peer at all, calls or file transfers or games, there's a benefit. And the typical benefit grows over time as more and more ISPs install CGNAT.
> And using hex instead of decimal for magic computer numbers should be more intuitive, not less.
How? Why is using hex any more intuitive than binary or a md5 hash for anyone who doesn’t do networking for a living?
>If you do anything peer to peer at all, calls or file transfers or games, there's a benefit. And the typical benefit grows over time as more and more ISPs install CGNAT.
Again how? I’ve been doing all of those without issue for nearly 30 years. What measurable benefit does the user see that hasn’t been a solved problem since Windows XP?
Will my teams calls suddenly stop saying “poor network connection” on my 1000/1000 rock solid fibre connection? Will torrents suddenly find more seeds and peers? Will my games… have lower latency? Because I can’t think of another way anything networking related could be solved that wasn’t decades ago.
When you say benefit, it should probably be noticeable or measurable in some way that doesn’t involve dashboards and millions of dollars in rack mounted gear.
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> Also structure-wise the first half is the subnet and the second half is the host. That's much more intuitive than IPv4.
This only applies to /64 blocks, which are by no means standard. For instance, tunnelbroker.net will give you a /48 for free. This means IPv6 addresses are essentially free by the billions, but it's difficult to figure out how big of a block they belong to from the outside.
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> intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type
I have north of 500 IPs I have some relation to. No way I would be bothered to remember them. Typing? Do you type IPv4s all day long? And it's still copy-paste 99% of times.
> for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer
Non-network engineer should work with names. And non-engineers don't 'work' with IPs at all. Look at your granpa - he's typing 'bbc' into the search form in the browser to get to bbc.com.
> nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses
And 99% of so called engineers can't understand even IPv4. So this is a moot point.
I agree.
It's easy to tell someone to connect to something like 203.0.113.88. Many of us here, and also normal folks, have been saying dotted-octets like that for decades, now, and there's a familiar patter to the way that addresses like this flow off of the tongue.
It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. It's literally difficult to say, like saying it is intended to be some kind of test. And on the other end? Sure, we "all" "learned" hexadecimal at some point in school, but regular humans don't use hex so it sounds like missile launch codes (at best) or some kind of sadistic prank (at worst) to them. It reeks of phonic unfamiliarity and disdain.
(This is the part where the DNS folks invariably show up to announce that I'm holding it wrong. And I love DNS; I do. But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.)
(After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with.)
> It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e.
If you would like your IPv6 addresses to be more human-friendly, you could use DHCPv6 (in addition to/instead of SLAAC) and end up with addresses like 2001:db8:3c7:4f80::123. Sure, it's 5 groups of e.g. 3-4 hex digits rather than 4 groups of up to 3 digits, but I think it's much easier than your example. You might set your router to use <prefix>::1 and/or fe80::1 (see OpenWRT's ipv6 suffix/ip6ifaceid option).
DNS servers (that you might occasionally have to type into config by hand) tend to have "nice" IPv6 addresses, e.g. Quad9 apparently uses 2620:fe::fe [1].
> But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.
I think dnsmasq can these days create AAAA records for local machines whose hostnames it learns via e.g. DHCP.
If you have a public server on the internet and your provider gives you a random-looking address using all 128 bits (and no /64 prefix for example) perhaps using (public) DNS is fine.
Opinions my own.
[1] https://quad9.net.
> After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with
Ok, I'll bite. Why exactly do you not have the ability to select the address?
As a general rule, if you care about an IPv6 address enough that you have to type it in somewhere, you should be assigning it manually, and if you're doing that you can make it a lot friendlier than 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. The whole second half of the address can be shortened to ::<digit>, where the length of <digit> scales logarithmically to the number of memorable addresses you want in that network.
My network at home uses ULA addresses for everything, and I just use my phone number in the first half, so the address of my router at home is e.g. fd21:2555:1212::1, my NAS is fd21:2555:1212::a, etc. The global (GUA) address is something like 2601:abc:def:1201::a, which isn't that bad.
Hell, if you don't care about the potential of conflicts if you ever merge networks with someone else, you can just use fd00:: as your ULA prefix, and your router can be fd00::1, your NAS box can be fd00::2, etc. Shorter than IPv4 addresses!
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> There is a difficulty in that it does behave quite differently to IPv4
Which can be fine if you have a /solid/ transition plan to move networks wholesale from v4 to v6. They absolutely failed on this point and almost purposefully refused to carry over any familiar mechanisms to make dual stack easier to manage.
It's a University protocol that escaped into commercial usage based mostly on false fears of global routing table size becoming unmanageable or impossible to store in RAM. The results are absolutely predictable.
I haven't spent a lot of time with my power grid either, but I do expect the light to go on when I press the switch.
(Needing to dedicate time for it is, to some extent, either a failure of the protocol or at least a contributor to the lack of adoption.)
In my experience IPv6 has always "just worked" for me in the consumer space. The only difficulty I have found is when implementing it into an existing managed network. Most organisations will not touch it, they're too comfortable with IPv4, unfortunately.