IPv6 Pain Experiment

Thu Oct 3 15:34:20 UTC 2019

>Another misconception. Humans (by and large) count in decimal, base 10. 
>IPv4 is not that. It only LOOKS like that. In fact, the similarity to familiar decimal numbers is one of the reasons that people who are new to networking stumble early on, find CIDR challenging, etc.

Go ahead and read your v4 address over the phone and then do the same with your v6 address.  Which is easier?  I do understand all about these addresses both being binary underneath ( I've been doing this for over 30 years now).  However it is much easier to communicate using four decimal octets.

>I do understand that the hex thing presents a (small) learning curve. 
>But work with it for a little while and it will become familiar, just like IPv4 did.

The question here is how do I convince an enterprise of the need to feel the pain of learning it and do I want to be the guy going under the bus the first time someone screws up and takes some business critical system down.  People generally do not like change and being forced to learn something new.  That is just human nature.  You have to give them a reason to want to do it (more money, better service, less long term cost, etc.).  It is hard to make the case to eliminate v4 in use cases where it is working perfectly fine (especially RFC1918 inside an enterprise).

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL