[justcool393]

not the original poster but i want to chime in, the address is just poor. an IPv4 address is decent to remember and while DNS is useful, the issue sometimes is DNS, in which case you need the IP anyway.

12:141:::2315:14 or whatever is ugly and terrible syntax. firstly...

1. why colons? if you're typing in an IP address, you might also have to type in a TCP/IP port in colon format, why did IETF think overloading this was a good idea? it also makes the address scheme look ugly. the ways of getting around this by using brackets just look plain awful.

2. why do it in hexadecimal format? there are now 16 characters in each IP digit. i'd rather have (if we really need 128-bit addresses, which since we give out /64s, seems not to be the case) it be in dotted decimal. maybe even make the dotted decimals 16 bits if it's really an issue. do get rid of the myraid of other stupid ways to write IPs though, dotted decimal could easily be standardized.

3. DHCP is a good thing, why is it maligned? a central source of truth who is what is great, at the network level I can say "hey this person has the IP of X." it seems like a much better idea than SLAAC ever was.

[p1mrx]

IPv4 allocated prefixes on 8-bit boundaries, so dotted decimal made sense at the time. CIDR in 1993 made the prefix boundaries arbitrary, which required "difficult" math to convert between binary and decimal.

So the point of hexadecimal is to make CIDR easier. Consider the sequence of 1s followed by 0s:

    dec: 0 128 192 224 240 248 252 254 255
    hex: 00 80 C0 E0 F0 F8 FC FE FF

Once you've adopted hex, dots become a problem: is "1.1.1.1.1.1.beef.de" a domain name or an IP address? Perhaps they could've chosen something other than :, but I'm not sure what. Maybe require every IPv6 address to contain .. somewhere?

I don't really have strong opinions on DHCP vs SLAAC.

[justsomehnguy]

> an IPv4 address is decent to remember and while DNS is useful, the issue sometimes is DNS, in which case you need the IP anyway

It's like rambling about absence of crank handle on modern cars.

> why colons

Because dots are in the DNS.

> why do it in hexadecimal format

Because it's shorter than decimal and you can't nest decimal representation without some delimiter, eg 1220 -- is this 12 20 or 122 0 ? Cue in 'but why colons'

> DHCP is a good thing, why is it maligned? a central source of truth who is what is great

No, it's not. And definitely it's not source of truth. A client can ask, DHCP server can provide an address but if you don't have an address in DHCP leases that means nothing. And even if you have that doesn't mean that this is still the same device.