quietly....

Mon Feb 7 00:13:35 UTC 2011

On 2011-02-03, at 18:37, Paul Graydon wrote:

> On 02/02/2011 06:31 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> 
> 
>> I, personally, have been waiting to hear what happens when network techs
>> discover that they can't carry IP addresses around in their heads anymore.
>> 
>> That sounds trivial, perhaps, but I don't think it will be.
>> 
> 
> Absolutely, it's certainly one thing I'm dreading.

I'm not sure this is the nightmare people think it will be.

In my (admittedly fairly small-scale) experience with operating v6 on real networks, being able to figure out a prefix from a schema such as

 ARIN:ARIN:SITE:VLAN::/64

makes things a lot easier. Having to remember ...::1, or ...::2, or ...:3 for the statically-numbered routers on the VLAN doesn't exactly make things much harder. Mix in some special cases (e.g. VLAN=0 for loopbacks) and you have a recipe that's pretty trivial to remember.

[This is how Stephen Stuart and Paul Vixie set things up within 2001:4f8::/32 back when I was chasing packets at ISC, and I've followed the model ever since.]

It's easier to figure out 2607:f2c0:1::1 in these terms than it is to remember 206.248.155.244. For me, at least :-)

I appreciate the full mess of EUI-64 for devices using autoconf requires cut and paste, but that's why you hard-wire the host bits for things you refer to frequently.

Joe