| From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses look nasty. IP addresses are supposed to be used by machines, not humans (considering network administrators are not humans). Humans should deal with domain names. They vary in length, IPv4 addresses also do. strlen("10.1.2.4") == 8; strlen("192.168.123.234") == 15. The physical addresses don't vary in either case. IPv4 is always 32 bit, IPv6 is always 128 bits. they're hard to remember, As an administrator, you can make the particular addresses that you need to remember simple. The last 80 bits of the address are entirely yours, and the first 48 bits are fixed for your entire organisation. With IPv4 you end up having multiple very different /24s dispersed through your organisation, and having to fit your important servers in whatever free address space you can find. So, for example, you know that 2001:db8:1245::/48 is the prefix for your organisation. It is only one you have to remember. Then you can set your DNS to 2001:db8:1245::1, your web server to 2001:db8:1245::2, etc... Not hard to remember. they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s This is the sort of problem that you have to solve only once (and it was already solved), then use that function/library wherever you want. See inet_ntop(3) and getnameinfo(3) (as a bonus, these functions work identically to both IPv4 and IPv6, the application becomes agnostic to the address class being used). |