IPv6 Pain Experiment

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Fri Oct 4 22:26:27 UTC 2019



> On Oct 2, 2019, at 17:54 , Matt Hoppes <mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
> 
> I disagree on that. Ipv4 is very human readable. It is numbers. 
> 
> Ipv6 is not human numbers. It’s hex, which is not how we normally county. 
> 
> It is all water under the bridge now, but I really feel like ipv6 could have been made more human friendly and ipv4 interoperable. 
> 
>> On Oct 2, 2019, at 8:49 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 10/2/19 3:03 PM, Naslund, Steve wrote:
>>> The next largest hurdle is trying to explain to your server guys that you are going to go with all dynamically assigned addressing now
>> 
>> Completely false, but a very common misconception. There is nothing about IPv6 that prevents you from assigning static addresses.
>> 
>>> and explaining to your system admin that can’t get a net mask in v4 figured out, how to configure their systems for IPv6.
>> 
>> If they only need an outbound connection, they probably don't need any configuration. The instructions for assigning a static address for inbound connections vary by OS, but I've seen a lot of them, and none of them are more than 10 lines long.
>> 
>> Regarding the previous comments about all the drama of adding DNS records, etc.; that is what IPAM systems are for. If you're small enough that you don't need an IPAM for IPv4, you almost certainly don't for IPv6.
>> 
>> IPv6 is different, but it's not any more difficult to learn than IPv4. (You weren't born understanding IPv4 either.)
>> 
>> Doug


OK… Let’s talk about how?

How would you have made it possible for a host that only understands 32-bit addresses to exchange traffic with a host that only has a 128-bit address?

How would you have made a 128-bit address more human-readable? Does it really matter?

IPv4 is not particularly human readable. How many hosts do you keep IPv4 addresses in your head for? How long does it take you to get someone at the other end of a support call to correctly transcribe an IPv4 address?

All of this is mostly absurd as DNS names are human readable regardless of whether they point to A, AAAA, or both records.

Owen




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