[JohnFen]

> the main barrier to IPV6 is just that people don't want to re-learn anything.

I disagree, actually. I think the main barrier is that networking folks have been pretty bad at explaining this to non-networking folks. IPv6 isn't exactly simple to understand.

I'm a reasonably network-savvy guy, and I'm sure that I understand less about IPv6 than I think I do. I just don't know what parts I'm not understanding properly, and what parts I just don't know about.

It's pretty hard to find good explanations of this stuff that aren't aimed at networking experts.

[harry8]

It's terrible isn't it. I'm not a network specialist yet have a reasonable enough understanding of ipv4, nat etc that I think my home network is, at least ok. Can look at ip addresses in logs and know what machines most of them are etc.

I get tired of this "I'm an expert you're an idiot" trope that comes up about it. Here on this damn website you have people who hack kernel, people who manage massive databases, people who hack front end stuff that scares me, experts in functional programming, language designers, fpga designers... In short it's very, verry flipping technically adept crowd. You didn't reach them.

Networking "experts" who want to blame everyone else for a lack of understanding need to look in the damn mirror and ask themselves "How did we fail so very, very hard at explaining this stuff?" "Why are we not able to provide a link to an article with an estimate of time taken for everything you need to know about ipv6 to use it exclusively?" "Why don't we want to make this easy for everyone?" "Why can't we be minimally polite?"

I'm an expert in being a jerk on occasion and this occasion the "Everybody else is stupid and lazy because they don't understand it's not us at all" trope is definitely being a jerk. And I'm jerk enough to point it out.

[JohnFen]

The hostility is what I think is more damaging than anything else. When people have an objection to something that is resulting from them misunderstanding the thing, telling them they're stupid, lazy, or even malicious just makes them disengage (and correctly so).

The end result is that they will continue to object to the thing, but won't raise their objections to the experts anymore. And why would they? Nothing good came from it the first time.

It turns what should be a cooperative relationship into a combative one. I see this happen in pretty much every discussion of IPv6 around, including this one.

The other issue is that the subject matter experts rarely actually explain anything. They just toss out acronyms and buzzwords and consider the matter corrected. But it's not -- they're talking as if their audience is another subject matter expert, when it's usually not. Acronyms and buzzwords mean little to them.

And telling them to "google it" likewise does little good. The audience isn't a subject matter expert, doesn't want to be, and shouldn't have to be. If IPv6 really is so complex that you have to be an expert in order to use and configure it properly, then isn't that a problem with IPv6?

My assumption is that's not the case (but I'm not sure on this point), but instead, the experts are failing to actually teach people about this stuff.

In the end, I blame the rollout of IPv6 itself. Exactly zero attention and effort was paid to evangelizing and educating people about it. There was no gradual rollout plan put into place and encouraged.

The IPv6 rollout effort failed to do the things that are necessary to facilitate a shift of this magnitude. This makes the whole thing very confusing and leads people who aren't elbows deep in the topic to lean toward "I don't feel that I can do this safely, so it's better that I don't do it at all". Which is not an unreasonable stance.

The tragedy is that it all could have gone so much better than it has. It could have been a thing everyone unified about rather than a thing that is rapidly becoming a kind of holy war.

[harry8]

yeah or just what about an article or even a whole book on the subject of:

"You're gonna move your home network to ipv6, here's what you need to know to not f&^k up hard and get pwned" At the level like we know for ipv4.

Right now, I actively disable ipv6 in devices on my network because I don't have a clue about how it all works. Am I making something addressable from the public internet? Am leaking every mac address I have? So much more I'm sure I havent even considered.

Then when you look at ipv6 tutorials you see nuts things like each octet containing a zero value can be shortened to just a single zero :00000000: becomes :0: ok fine, but consecutive octets of zero are removed so :00000000:00000000: becomes :: swallowing a delimiter so programming this stuff you can't even just split on the delim and /know/ what octet is where. Now maybe theres a good reason for that but where is the explanation? Not in any of the tutorials that have to explain how this stuff works rather than something, you know, useful. As presented it's pure additional, utterly meaningless, learning overhead.

So yeah. I'm too stupid to run ipv6 and I know it. But I'm not nearly as stupid as those who claim it's ready for prime time because it damn well isn't.

Anyone thinks it is. Link the document with a time estimate on running a home network with ipv6 knowing what you need to know (and know already for ipv4) to not do something idiotic.

In this crowd, we'll learn stuff just because it looks cool and you can't reach us? Get outta here.

[lamontcg]

Yeah as an old former-system admin its kind of amusing to be on the receiving end...