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I am absolutely convinced that the main thing holding V6 back is not even that it’s a full shift rather than an incremental upgrade. It’s that the addresses are
by api 2y ago
I am absolutely convinced that the main thing holding V6 back is not even that it’s a full shift rather than an incremental upgrade. It’s that the addresses are too long to easily remember or type and the text representation is unwieldy and aesthetically ugly.
Anyone who has ever done net stuff for a living knows that you type or copy paste addresses constantly. Whenever I say this to V6 evangelists they say “we’ll use DNS” which is “tell me you’ve never been a net admin without telling me.”
I’d love for V6 to get traction but I think something needs to be done about the usability issues before it will happen.
Even little details like the fact that in no terminal does double clicking on a V6 address properly select it is a huge problem. Yeah you might be able to change that but that custom config won’t be there on the next machine, etc.
Even seemingly simple usability problems are death to adoption.
- jauer 2y agoI’m a NetEng for a large (>1M servers, >100 POPs) network that is IPv6-only internally. It’s not hard to remember IPv6 addresses for DNS servers assuming your addressing plan reserved the right subnets for anycasted services. Remembering IP addresses stops being a thing pretty quickly. If anything the challenge shifts to remembering airport codes. If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation. I think it’s more that small and medium organizations just don’t have any incentive to change (and plenty of incentive to not take the risk of change) leading to the numbers we see at https://ipv6-in-real.life/ https://ipv6-in-real.life/
- michaelt 2y ago> If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation. Automation is all very well once the network link is up and working so you can reach the automation But the reality is you put someone who knows what they're doing in front of a machine where the network connection isn't working, the first things they're going to be doing is ifconfig and ping 8.8.8.8 - which they'll be doing from memory, because you can't google anything when your network connection isn't working. The fact that IPv6 will deprecate both ifconfig and 8.8.8.8 to me seems emblematic of why the adoption has been going so badly.
- JackSlateur 2y agoifconfig is deprecated for years, and this has nothing to do with ipv4 nor ipv6 Checkout iproute2 and its impressive feature list
- oofabz 2y ago2600:: is shorter than 8.8.8.8 and iproute2 is much more pleasant to use than ifconfig.
- p_l 2y agoifconfig got deprecated because it didn't match how networking worked in the kernel. If you're using ifconfig on linux[1] for the last 10 years, I'm going to negatively look on your claimed expertise As for point-to-point links, that's what simple link-local addresses are, added in ipv6. And why IP-IP is superior to OSPF, both because it doesn't hardcode address sizes and because it runs on Layer 2. [1] ifconfig on other systems might be the right command
- jauer 2y ago> Automation is all very well once the network link is up and working so you can reach the automation With properly constructed automation and modern* hardware, you don’t need to do any manual config on-box for automation to be reachable. Zero-Touch Provisioning is a wonder to behold. Modern being relative. I saw this work on routers terminating telco circuits nearly 20 years ago and had servers netboot and install the OS with basic config before that (though automation was far more tedious back then)