7 ms·

Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.

by apitman 6mo ago

School-Cotton 6mo ago
What would have been your solution to needing more bits? More information is always going to be harder to remember.
- anonym29 6mo ago
  Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day. The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own". CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios. IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with). "Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
  - thfuran 6mo ago
    >"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale IPv6 predates those by decades.
  - teo_zero 6mo ago
    Saying that IPv4 is ok because we have NAT and CGNAT is like saying that spam is not a problem because we have spam filters everywhere.
  - hbogert 6mo ago
    I don't have your problems with ipv6, and I'm actively using it. I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network. I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.
    - anonym29 6mo ago
      The tailscale client and the headscale server are both open source, you don't need to rely on commercial entities.
      - hbogert 6mo ago
        yes you do, the control plane is closed. Only reverse engineered by the headscale project. The control plane is necessary for the peers to find each other. If you need to rely on such a crucial part being reverse-engineered, than yes, I think it's fair to say you are ultimately relying on commercial entities.
        anonym29 6mo ago
        Headscale is open source and it already works. You don't need to rely on anyone to use it, or even to improve it.
  - simonra 6mo ago
RiverCrochet 6mo ago
DNS, Avahi are super usefuler.
- userbinator 6mo ago
  Good luck when you're trying to troubleshoot and DNS not working is one of the symptoms. 8.8.8.8 and 4.2.2.x are easy to remember.
  - flexagoon 6mo ago
    So is 2620:fe::fe for Quad9 DNS
  - miyuru 6mo ago
    DNS should be auto configured and work with multiple redundancy these days. If it breaks, so much that you cannot do a dig, you need to re think your network.
    - gzread 6mo ago
      Oh yes, that's really convenient for home users. "Install this thing on several computers and keep it in sync or you're not qualified to have a network"
      - miyuru 6mo ago
        really home users who mess with DNS settings? Lot of people here are living in a bubble.
      - vel0city 6mo ago
        Home users would ideally be served by things like mDNS and LLMNR, which should just work in the background. If I want to connect to the thermostat I should be able to just go to http://honeywell-thermostat and have it work. If I want to connect to the printer it should just be ipp://brother and I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server.
userbinator 6mo ago
It is notable that an IPv4 address expressed as a decimal number has up to 10 digits, the same as a phone number in many countries.
BenjiWiebe 6mo ago
I've been memorizing and typing IPv4 addresses too, but I have enough devices on the network now that I can't remember nearly all the IPv4 addresses. So then I need to use DNS. At which point it could be IPv6. I have 56 host entries in my dnsmasq.conf.

Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.

by apitman 6mo ago

Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.

School-Cotton 6mo ago

What would have been your solution to needing more bits? More information is always going to be harder to remember.

anonym29 6mo ago
Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day. The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own". CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios. IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with). "Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
- thfuran 6mo ago
  >"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale IPv6 predates those by decades.
- teo_zero 6mo ago
  Saying that IPv4 is ok because we have NAT and CGNAT is like saying that spam is not a problem because we have spam filters everywhere.
- hbogert 6mo ago
  I don't have your problems with ipv6, and I'm actively using it. I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network. I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.
  - anonym29 6mo ago
    The tailscale client and the headscale server are both open source, you don't need to rely on commercial entities.
    - hbogert 6mo ago
      yes you do, the control plane is closed. Only reverse engineered by the headscale project. The control plane is necessary for the peers to find each other. If you need to rely on such a crucial part being reverse-engineered, than yes, I think it's fair to say you are ultimately relying on commercial entities.
      - anonym29 6mo ago
        Headscale is open source and it already works. You don't need to rely on anyone to use it, or even to improve it.
- simonra 6mo ago

RiverCrochet 6mo ago

DNS, Avahi are super usefuler.

userbinator 6mo ago
Good luck when you're trying to troubleshoot and DNS not working is one of the symptoms. 8.8.8.8 and 4.2.2.x are easy to remember.
- flexagoon 6mo ago
  So is 2620:fe::fe for Quad9 DNS
- miyuru 6mo ago
  DNS should be auto configured and work with multiple redundancy these days. If it breaks, so much that you cannot do a dig, you need to re think your network.
  - gzread 6mo ago
    Oh yes, that's really convenient for home users. "Install this thing on several computers and keep it in sync or you're not qualified to have a network"
    - miyuru 6mo ago
      really home users who mess with DNS settings? Lot of people here are living in a bubble.
    - vel0city 6mo ago
      Home users would ideally be served by things like mDNS and LLMNR, which should just work in the background. If I want to connect to the thermostat I should be able to just go to http://honeywell-thermostat and have it work. If I want to connect to the printer it should just be ipp://brother and I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server.

userbinator 6mo ago

It is notable that an IPv4 address expressed as a decimal number has up to 10 digits, the same as a phone number in many countries.

BenjiWiebe 6mo ago

I've been memorizing and typing IPv4 addresses too, but I have enough devices on the network now that I can't remember nearly all the IPv4 addresses. So then I need to use DNS. At which point it could be IPv6. I have 56 host entries in my dnsmasq.conf.