Developers who don’t care to learn how/why things work, have gone by without it, and are upset that they gotta learn more now because it works differently.
I just hope that people won't repeat the same "I wish IPv6 were just IPv4 with extra octets" viewpoint again...
The use of hex is very helpful when you're calculating subnets. You want a /48 prefix? Just take the first 3 hextets. /56? First 3 and a half hextets. /64? First 4 hextets.
The thread posted yesterday about Czech Republic's IPv4 deprecation plans had at least a comment about IPv4 with extras octets. I am pretty sure that even once IPv4 will be fully dead and replaced by v6, people will still rant about that.
This is an excellent point because entire tools exist with ipv4 to calculate subnets and unless you do base math all the time you’re usually using them to figure out stuff like CIDR overlaps
I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The UX of IPv6 is still decidedly inferior. Typing a curl command etc or in general manually typing and remembering IPs is decidedly more difficult with IPv6 vs IPv4. I think IPv6 needs either a killer command line tool or aliasing scheme to overcome that stigma.
If "IPv6 addresses are harder to type or remember" is the worst thing that happens during the transition to IPv6 then I'd call the whole thing an unquestionable success, given that there were numerous far more important things that could have gone wrong or ended up worse but didn't.
DNS exists to solve the problem of people not having to remember or type IP addresses. This is true regardless of whether you are talking about IPv4 or IPv6.
What problem is not solved by various DNS and local-addressing options, but is solvable by some other aliasing scheme that isn't DNS under another name, and can you outline how a better aliasing scheme would work?
Background and current options, as I'm aware of them:
"IPv6 addresses are too difficult" objectors don't seem to want a solution to the ease-of-use problem that leverages aliases, because DNS is that. They want the ease of typing in IPv4 addresses without any overhead of setting up alias mappings or trusting local hosts' ideas of their own names. That's not possible, in general, with an addressing scheme that's 4x as big. The standard representation has tried to improve things with hex instead of decimal and collapsing the longest run of 0-fields. It could have used a higher base than 16 [1], but that would slow visual spot-recognition of an address. It could have dispensed with all the ':' chars, but that would prevent collapsing addresses and make chunking more difficult.
DNS as an aliasing scheme has many administrative forms. It can be configured per-machine with /etc/hosts (copied around manually, or with scripted or configuration management tools); on a trusted local network with mdns and ip autoassignment, if the network is trustworthy enough; or manually with a full-fledged DNS server, either private or public. More complex network environments leverage tooling to make DNS as painless as possible. The mappings still have to be configured and managed somewhere, even if that's separately per host via what hostname they each think they have.
It's also possible to assign stable, short local addresses that can be remembered and typed easily roughly on par with v4 addresses (10.0.x.1 vs fc00::x:1, which becomes shorter than IPv4 for x==0).
[1] See RFC 1924. Who wouldn't love to use addresses in the form of "4)+k&C#VzJ4br>0wv%Yp" ?
Solved you say? So how do I set up DNS for LAN hosts that under IPv4 would have static private addresses?
Under IPv6, you run into problems long before DNS - trying to assign static addresses as DHCPv6 is an afterthought, also whole setup has to be robust somehow when the whole network prefix changes.
Sounds like adding yet another potentially exploitable service listening on every host? Swell!
Seriously, I have yet to see a good tutorial how to herd IPv6 LAN with reliable local DNS, as is usual with IPv4. Everything is just handwaved away "nah, zero configuration". The reluctance to adopt it could stem from that.
Dude, it actually is zero configuration lol. My devices assign themselves an IPv6 via SLAAC, and they are reachable from other devices via devicename.local.
Macs and iPhones have relied on mDNS for years. Windows supports it. Android supports it since 2022. Linux has avahi.
If people could look a little further than the tip of their nose, they’d realize how much easier it’ll be to explain to people to just type in alices-iphone.local instead of trying to find the IPv4 address first.
..until another Alice joins the network with her iphone. There are plenty of valid reasons to manage names centrally and configure addresses explicitly, but no I'm supposedly a dinosaur that is supposed to get extinct finally :(
