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by PrivateButts 978 days 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.
3 comments
hinkley 978 days 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
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scythe 978 days ago
v4 was 32-bit, v6 was 128-bit. I think that 64 bits is a more obvious happy medium.

Conveniently, 2^13 = 8192 allows you to use most of the information available in four decimal digits. And 64 = 13•5 - 1 means that you get a roughly even division into five address tiers (with either the first or last one half the size). 4095.8191.8191.8191.8191 is a bit worse than 255.255.255.255 but not nearly as bad as ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff.

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hinkley 977 days ago
Slightly less annoying than 48 bits, too. Good points.
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hnlmorg 978 days 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
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ianburrell 977 days ago
I am using IPv6 on home network and I don’t know any addresses. Everything picks up the details and assigns address. To access hosts that matter, I use the mDNS names.
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AndroidKitKat 977 days 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!

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