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Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable than
by omeid2 3y ago
Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable than IPv4.
You can't find me a single sysadmin or casual user who would look at an IPv6 and say, nice, I prefer that one over an IPv4 or find it easier to type or communicate.
You can argue about merits of IPv6 and very reasonably so all day long, but this fact remains.
I don't think governments or other institutions can strong-arm IPv4 out of existence. I don't know what the long term solution would look like, but I strongly doubt it will be IPv6-only. Ever.
- notatoad 3y ago"IPv6 addresses are ugly" is only an argument for as long as ipv4 addresses don't cost anything. as soon as they put a price on it, nobody's going to care.
- omeid2 3y agoArguing that "we can price IPv4 out" only reinforces my point; of course, ignoring the fact that it is a pipe-dream. But the fact remains, no one really prefers IPv6 over IPv4.
- imoverclocked 3y agoI do.
- Faark 3y agoJust like users prefer domain names over ip's. But they are necessary.
- timthelion 3y agoI started to prefer it after I foundout that with IPv6 every Docker container can have its own IP address and this can be used to solve the hairpin NAT problem.
- crotchfire 3y agoThat happened a long time ago. And yet still, nobody cares.
- notatoad 3y agoAWS starting to charge per-address next week is making a whole lot of people start caring.
- omeid2 3y agoThere is over 1 billion users with less than 5% on IPv6 in China alone. Some 200 million users in Indonesia with less than 15% on IPv6. Hundreds of million of users in Africa that are growing at a very fast pace, still on IPv4. In Europe outside Germany and Belgium, the IPv6 usage is between 5-20% max. Millions of people. There is also millions of industrial systems, ATMs (heck, some of them still run XP!), and whatnot that will not get IPv6 short of complete replacement. You can't price IPv4 out with that kind of numbers combined with the fact that it is an extremely open market.
- colonwqbang 3y agoIPv6 adoption is low now, but the answer isn't to just give up and stick with IPv4 forever. As the extra cost of IPv4 keeps rising it will sooner or later outprice the cost of moving to IPv6. Similar as with fossil fuel cars -- super convenient, there are petrol stations everywhere. But as the price started rising (assisted by very harsh taxation) suddenly the idea of switching to electric didn't seem so bad.
- orangeboats 3y agoWhere are you getting the numbers from? According to APNIC, >30% of China is on IPv6 right now. There is a very sizable IPv6 population in Asia. https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
- omeid2 3y agoCISCO and Google, I am not sure what kind of sampling APNIC uses but that does seem pretty off. https://6lab.cisco.com/stats/cible.php?country=CN&option=prefixes https://6lab.cisco.com/stats/cible.php?country=CN&option=pre... https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
- darren_ 3y ago> Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable than IPv4 What? This comes up in like 95% of ipv6 threads on HN (see also: ‘they should have just added an extra quad to v4 addresses’)
- justsomehnguy 3y agoMy grand father used the dots in the address! My father used the dots in the address! I used the dots in the address! Henceforth every human being should use the dots in the address till heat death of the universe!
- Aeolun 3y agoI'm certain the issue here isn't the dots. 123.123.238.217.110.100.1.1 would still have been perfectly readable. fdd2:1228:3372:1sdf meanwhile is pretty unreadable even at IPv4 length.
- throwaway71271 3y agoipv6 is 16 bytes, so more like 123.123.238.217.110.100.12.255.123.123.238.217.110.100.242.176
- Aeolun 3y agoTrue, but we probably don’t actually need enough bytes to address all the atoms on the surface of the earth a hundred times over.
- Dagger2 3y agoGood! If we did then we should've made it bigger. We don't know exactly how many address bits we're ultimately going to end up needing. Our only options are to go for "too big" or "too small". Giving how much effort it takes to deploy a new IP protocol, we should err on the side of having too many addresses rather than too few.
- dn3500 3y agoThe original idea was that configuration would be so automatic that humans would never see the addresses. Instead of an admin assigning a name and IP address to each host, the admin would only assign the name. The host would figure out its local topography from Neighbor Discovery then tell the dns where it's connected. I'm not sure how well that worked out in practice.
- speeder 3y agoIt didn't work in practice. In many situations names don't work. One example would be games with local lan support, and you use IP addresses to make sure you are connecting to the right server. Other would be tiny embedded devices, that are not powerful enough to scan the network and need a hard-coded or user configurable IP address to connect to the right place.
- sgjohnson 3y ago> that are not powerful enough to scan the network just look at the ND table. Nobody is ever going to scan a single /64 of v6, ever.
- mort96 3y agoThen why do I still have to see the addresses? ... how would configuring DNS even work without having to see the addresses, and how would SSH'ing to a device on the LAN work without seeing the addresses
- jodrellblank 3y agoNetBIOS/WINS protocol could discover names -> IPs by broadcast, more modernly Zeroconf/Bonjour can do it, and if there's some organization then DHCP servers can register hostnames in DNS when handing out addresses.
- mort96 3y agoThat requires every device to be given a LAN-unique name... ...which a local IP address is, conveniently
- preisschild 3y agoI'm a sysadmin and find IPv6 easier to use. You can easily make short ipv6 address just by having a larger prefix and then omitting zeroes (with `::`) in your host-part that you don't need. Take `2001:db8::1`. Here `2001:db:8` would be your network address and `1` your host-id. For example, a router. `2001:db8:2` could be a server and so on.
- jl6 3y agoI don't imagine it's easy to get a global /32, so do you mean for purely local networks? In which case why not use 1::1?
- preisschild 3y agoIts easy to get a global /44 - /48, which is not that much more.
- magicalhippo 3y agoThe prefix I get from my ISP is a complete 56 bits, more or less. Thus even if I use ::1 on the inside, it's very long and tedious to type. ULAs are better but are still supposed to be 48 bits[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address
- loup-vaillant 3y ago> Something that isn't talked much about IPv6 and I believe has subtle and indirect influence on it's adoption is that it is far far far less human-readable than IPv4. No shit Sherlock: an IPv4 is 4 bytes. An IPv6 requires 16. This is four times as much data, it has to be less readable, that’s just the price of a bigger address space. Now one could have argued that 8 bytes, heck, even 6 bytes, would have been enough. I guess it would have, but having a /48, or even a /64 range, per user, is quite convenient: we can ditch the NAT (we probably won’t, but we can). But even then, 8, or even 6 bytes, remain harder to read than 4.
- vasco 3y agoThe number of bytes isn't what makes it hard, "habanero eardrum" is 16 bytes and much easier to remember, there probably is a way to make ipv6 addresses easier to use, but hard to do now.
- porbelm 3y ago[prefix]::1 [prefix]::2 ... [prefix]::ffff Or if you want mnemonics on your /64: [prefix]::dead:beef:1 [prefix]::b00b:1 [prefix]::b00b:2 etc
- Jenda_ 3y ago"habanero eardrum" is actually less than 4 bytes -- let's say 12 bits for a common word (eardrum) + 16 bits for an uncommon word (habanero). If it were 16 bytes, the other options from the same 16-bytes space would be, for example, "\xa3\x80W%\xa3\x82\xa1\xea\x10\xf9\x8b\x07'\xf93J" or "\xf0\xef\x9b\x8f[0\xe5\xb9,\x0b\xd4^\xb00\xed\x00" (chosen by a fair /dev/urandom roll). If you want to convey 16 bytes using similar encoding, you need to use about 10 to 12 human words -- see for example Bitcoin wallet 12-word seed phrases or https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ (xkcd correct horse battery staple). For IPv6, if your addresses are not SLAAC, but DHCP or manually assigned, you can go with half of it - the "random" part is the 64bit network prefix.
- jusssi 3y agoWe just need to agree on a 2^16 word dictionary, each 16-bit segment gets it's own word. Then we can write addresses such as correct:horse:battery:staple::one .
- t0bia_s 3y agoHoe does it affect DNS adblocking?
- geraldhh 3y agoipv6 should render any use of static blocklists moot, but i would not hold my breath for blocklist vendors to go out of business
- porbelm 3y agoAs a private user, as long as I remember the prefix assigned to my connection I much prefer having a stable [prefix]::dead:beef or ::f007:1 and ::f007:2 etc compared to the ever-changing 85.nnn.nnn.nnn v4 address. Or simply just /think/ of it as a /112 subnet with [prefix]::0001-ffff available - still room for 65535 addresses in that one, more than I'll ever need. No need to rely on long autogenerated SLAAC addressses if you don't want to, you can have whatever you want after your prefix and you don't have to pad it out with garbage random-ish values. A sysadmin can get creative :) Of course your ISP will need to have proper v6 support.
- shaunpud 3y agoI thought the whole purpose of DNS was to avoid having to deal with IP addresses?
- omeid2 3y agoAnd how do you configure your DNS and network subnets?
- dubcanada 3y agoHow often are you communicating IP addresses? Is that not the point of domains, because humans are rather terrible at remembering sequences of numbers?
- ssebs 3y agoSure, if DNS was always reliable 100% of the time. Also, in our desktop/laptops, we set the DNS servers to an IP address, not to a hostname.
- hbossy 3y agoI believe it's more about using :: as separator instead of dot. There must be a reason why no one wanted to copy it from C++.