[autokad]

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]

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

[HumblyTossed]

> Is human readable IP that important though?

It kind of is, yes.

But at this point I'll take what I can get. Just give it to me already.

[autokad]

the short answer is yes. the long answer is: are humans involved? yes, then yes.

[staringback]

> 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

[autokad]

NAT means we can work with IPv4 already and makes IPv6 moot. you just supported my argument.

Honestly, all they had to do was add alpha characters. Just doing so would have gave us more IP addresses than we ever needed while keeping it human readable.

[chungy]

IPv6 standard notation already uses alpha characters. Some notations of IPv4 use them too.

"Just adding characters" isn't a solution on its own. IPv4 is 32-bit addresses, IPv6 is 128-bit addresses. That's all there is to that.

[icehawk]

Source and destination IP addresses are 32 bit fields in an IP packet.

Where do you propose they put these alpha characters?

[Minor49er]

I change my default gateway from 192.168.0.1 to C0.A8.00.01. Is the problem fixed yet?

[c22]

So use onion routing.

[autokad]

you are missing the forest from the trees. the point is, simpler solutions were available.

[c22]

I'd argue it's you who are focused on trees. Use DNS if you prefer.

[c22]

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

[p1mrx]

> 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]

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).