top | item 37917819

(no title)

lalith_c | 2 years ago

Move to ipv6 already

discuss

order

PrivateButts|2 years ago

One complaint that I have about ipv6 and mac addresses is that they use hex separated by colons. Not only is it way longer than an ipv4 address, you can't rattle one off using a number pad. Back when I did full time IT, that sounds like a nightmare if in ipv6 land you have to enter addresses as commonly as you have to enter ipv4 addresses.

hinkley|2 years ago

I think 1 IP address per human was short sighted. We ran out before the human population doubled. But I think a billion per human was someone liking powers of two, and nothing more. “Ipv5” with 48 bit addressing would have done pretty well. As 6 octets or 4 base 12. For humans you could reserve all ambiguous addresses and have about 50k times as many addresses while people sort themselves out. You could still be able to see at a glance that they were ipv5 addresses. 1047.258.300.0/24

hnlmorg|2 years ago

While I do agree with you, I do think we should be long past the point of needing to manually enter IP addresses. We have several good service discovery protocols, and DHCP and DNS, which are less great but still has pretty good tooling these days

AndroidKitKat|2 years ago

When I was in a phase of really enjoying IPv6, I went out and bought one of these: https://ipv6buddy.com

I don't type in many IPv6 addresses anymore, so this doesn't see much use anymore. It does make a great desk nicknack, though!

autokad|2 years ago

ipv6 is such a failure. even if it eventually 'takes over', its still a failure. Its over engineered for something customers didnt ask for (an ip address for every grain of sand in the universe).

There's something to be said about a human readable IP address. Where you can't tell a person the address, you have to copy and paste. where you cant infer any information about the IP address just by looking at it. It adds unnecessary overhead to small packets, etc.

overgard|2 years ago

Is human readable IP that important though? I mean even though I know about CIDR it's still hard for me to intuitively think about it, and I will say by far the part of kubernetes I dislike the most is figuring out the networking layer design. I feel like the only reason we need human readable IP's in the first place is for understanding all this NAT stuff that we wouldn't particularly need if we had bigger IP ranges

staringback|2 years ago

> It adds unnecessary overhead to small packets

Are you forgetting that NAT exists? IPv4 is barely functional based on how many workarounds we've had to implement over the years

c22|2 years ago

Customers never asked for ip addresses at all. They're just a technical requirement for networking.

p1mrx|2 years ago

> an ip address for every grain of sand in the universe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe estimates 10^53 kg in the observable universe.

10^53 kg / 2^128 = 10^14 kg per address, though I have no idea what fraction of the universe is sand.

In practice, the number of allocations is much smaller because IPv6 is effectively a 64 bit address space, with the second half reserved for edge networks.

> There's something to be said about a human readable IP address.

Is 2a01:4f8:1c1c:f6aa::1 really so unreadable, given that every device needs a different number?

alphager|2 years ago

The large address space and thus the king addresses are an artifact of optimizing the routing.

I think just saving the endless discussions of "my Xbox only got nat type 2, how do I change it?" alone saves more lifetimes than are lost by c&p adresses (not to speak of the large infrastructure costs of maintaining gcnat at scale).