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What an unfortunate side effect of switching to IP6. It's not that big of a deal but I'll miss being able to remember and type IP4 addresses or ask someone to t

What an unfortunate side effect of switching to IP6. It's not that big of a deal but I'll miss being able to remember and type IP4 addresses or ask someone to tell me their current IP. How are others handling this migration? What's the process for getting someone's IP6 over a phone call?

SwellJoe 9y ago
I avoid phone calls for anything technical because even without IPv6 it results in stupid misunderstandings at a rate of several per minute. I don't even want to think about the number of times I've had to explain the difference between a backslash and a forward slash multiple times in one phone call. But, I would imagine you'd want a set of auto-generated names in your DNS zone for your organization. That's how I'd handle it anyway. e.g. if I had a few thousand IPv6 addresses, I'd generate a few thousand word-based subdomains in my second level domain. If you wanted to get fancy, you could make them pronounce-able (e.g. two words could easily represent thousands of IP addresses). I dunno if people do this, but it's technically easy enough, requiring only a few lines of code to generate a zone file, and solves the problem of sharing it over the phone. I've noticed most hosting and cloud providers provide names for all of their IPs; so even if your own DNS isn't working yet you can usually contact your IP addresses using the name the provider has assigned (it's usually somewhat clunky, like "sw-48he839.pool.domain.tld", but more humanly usable than an IPv6 address). Of course, if you were trying to get it from someone outside of your org where those names don't exist, it'd be ugly. But, maybe it'll finally make people stop thinking you can solve any technical problem with a phone call. That'd be a win for my happiness, anyway. But, really, we should just accept that we shouldn't deal with addresses directly. Once we got a naming system we didn't need to remember a string of numbers, anymore, even though it was possible with IPv4 (and I'm guilty, too; I used to have several of the servers I managed IPs memorized...a dozen or more of them). And, with cloud-based infrastructure, the IP of your host might change all the time. I don't know or care what the IP of any services I have running in AWS or GC might be (except the frontend EC2 of GCE instance).
- MichaelApproved 9y ago
  You made some great points and laughs :) Thanks for the insight!

SwellJoe 9y ago

I avoid phone calls for anything technical because even without IPv6 it results in stupid misunderstandings at a rate of several per minute. I don't even want to think about the number of times I've had to explain the difference between a backslash and a forward slash multiple times in one phone call. But, I would imagine you'd want a set of auto-generated names in your DNS zone for your organization. That's how I'd handle it anyway. e.g. if I had a few thousand IPv6 addresses, I'd generate a few thousand word-based subdomains in my second level domain. If you wanted to get fancy, you could make them pronounce-able (e.g. two words could easily represent thousands of IP addresses). I dunno if people do this, but it's technically easy enough, requiring only a few lines of code to generate a zone file, and solves the problem of sharing it over the phone. I've noticed most hosting and cloud providers provide names for all of their IPs; so even if your own DNS isn't working yet you can usually contact your IP addresses using the name the provider has assigned (it's usually somewhat clunky, like "sw-48he839.pool.domain.tld", but more humanly usable than an IPv6 address). Of course, if you were trying to get it from someone outside of your org where those names don't exist, it'd be ugly. But, maybe it'll finally make people stop thinking you can solve any technical problem with a phone call. That'd be a win for my happiness, anyway. But, really, we should just accept that we shouldn't deal with addresses directly. Once we got a naming system we didn't need to remember a string of numbers, anymore, even though it was possible with IPv4 (and I'm guilty, too; I used to have several of the servers I managed IPs memorized...a dozen or more of them). And, with cloud-based infrastructure, the IP of your host might change all the time. I don't know or care what the IP of any services I have running in AWS or GC might be (except the frontend EC2 of GCE instance).

MichaelApproved 9y ago
You made some great points and laughs :) Thanks for the insight!