3 ms·
The real problem is that they're just such big addresses. We could totally just rerepresent v6 addresses as 4 sets of 4 octets, but that's basically rememberin
by bane 7y ago
The real problem is that they're just such big addresses.
We could totally just rerepresent v6 addresses as 4 sets of 4 octets, but that's basically remembering 4 ipv4 addresses.
The hex approach used today is a pretty good compromise, but people haven't really regularly operated with hexadecimal digits as a daily representation for a couple decades. Between hex and a direct binary representation there aren't really a lot of standard representations. Even say 16 ASCII characters won't work since there are quite a few whitespace and nondisplayable characters in the set.
- alexeldeib 7y agoI was curious if anyone had tried encoding them in e.g. base64 and found this: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1924 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1924 base85. Still 20 digits...Not much easier to remember. They are truly huge.
- ATsch 7y agoAs bad of an idea as memorizing addresses is, they're only so big if you use all of the bits. If you manually assign addresses, most of the bits will be zeroes or low numbers, which means you can just collapse them. E.g. if you had a /32 and two dns servers, the second one might be reachable at 2400:123:d::2, which is exactly as long as say 143.239.132.2. And because you only get at most one octet to play with on v4, you can't easily make your addresses more memorable either.