6 ms·

I said this in a previous post and was shot down hard. I think you are right. Every time I look at a ipv6 address my brain goes “fack this”.

WarOnPrivacy 9mo ago
> Every time I look at a [long] ipv6 address my brain goes “fack this”. I do get that but I also get 'There are so many I could have all I wanted ... or I could if any of our fiber ISPs would support it, that is'
- hdgvhicv 9mo ago
  I finally clicked when I worked out it was 2^64 subnets . You have a common prefix of you /48, which isn’t much longer than an ipv4 address - especially as it seems everything is 2001::/16, which means you basically have to remember a 32 bit network prefix just like 12.45.67.8/32. That becomes 2001:0c2d:4308::/48 instead After that you just need to remember the subnet number and the host number. If you remember 12.45.67.8 maps to 192.168.13.7 you might have 2001:0c2d:4308:13::7 So subnet “13” and host “7” It’s not much different to remebering 12.45.67.8>192.168.13.7
  - WarOnPrivacy 9mo ago
    > especially as it seems everything is 2001::/16 I was sort of expecting that this week. I had to transcribe a v6 addy for a WAN-WAN test (a few mi apart). That's when I noticed that Charter (Spectrum) had issued 2603:: for one WAN and 2602:: for the other WAN. ref: https://bgp.he.net/AS33363#_prefixes6 https://bgp.he.net/AS33363#_prefixes6
  - themafia 9mo ago
    The current global unicast space is actually limited to just 2000::/3. https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-add...
mike_d 9mo ago
IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems. IPv6 was designed by political process. Go around the room to each engineer and solve for their pet peeve to in turn rally enough support to move the proposal forward. As a bunch of computer people realized how hard politics were they swore never to do it again and made the address size so laughably large that it was "solved" once and for all. I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago. My personal preference would have been to open up class E space (240-255.*) and claw back the 6 /8s Amazon is hoarding, be smarter about allocations going forward, and make fees logarithmic based on the number of addresses you hold.
- shawabawa3 9mo ago
  Imo they should have just clawed 1 or 2 bits out of the ipv4 header for additional routing and called it good enough
  - immibis 9mo ago
    This would require new software and new ASICs on all hosts and routers and wouldn't be compatible with the old system. If you're going to cause all those things, might as well add 96 new bits instead of just 2 new bits, so you won't have the same problem again soon.
- throw0101c 9mo ago
  > IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems. IPv4 was not designed as such, but as an academic exercise. It was an experiment. An experiment that "escape the lab". This is per Vint Cerf: * https://www.pcmag.com/news/north-america-exhausts-ipv4-addresses https://www.pcmag.com/news/north-america-exhausts-ipv4-addre... And if you think there wasn't politics in iPv4 you're dead wrong: * https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes > IPv6 was designed by political process. Only if by "political process" you mean a bunch of people got together (physically and virtually) and debated the options and chose what they thought was best. The criteria for choosing IPng were documented: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726 There were a number of proposals, and three finalists, with SIPP being chosen: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752 > I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago. The primary reason for IPng was >32 bits of address space. The only way to make them shorter is to have fewer bits, which completely defeats the purpose of the endeavour. There was no way to move from 32-bits to >32-bits without every network stack of every device element (host, gateway, firewall, application, etc) getting new code. Anything that changed the type and size of sockaddr->sa_family (plus things like new DNS resource record types: A is 32-bit only; see addrinfo->ai_family) would require new code.

WarOnPrivacy 9mo ago

> Every time I look at a [long] ipv6 address my brain goes “fack this”. I do get that but I also get 'There are so many I could have all I wanted ... or I could if any of our fiber ISPs would support it, that is'

hdgvhicv 9mo ago
I finally clicked when I worked out it was 2^64 subnets . You have a common prefix of you /48, which isn’t much longer than an ipv4 address - especially as it seems everything is 2001::/16, which means you basically have to remember a 32 bit network prefix just like 12.45.67.8/32. That becomes 2001:0c2d:4308::/48 instead After that you just need to remember the subnet number and the host number. If you remember 12.45.67.8 maps to 192.168.13.7 you might have 2001:0c2d:4308:13::7 So subnet “13” and host “7” It’s not much different to remebering 12.45.67.8>192.168.13.7
- WarOnPrivacy 9mo ago
  > especially as it seems everything is 2001::/16 I was sort of expecting that this week. I had to transcribe a v6 addy for a WAN-WAN test (a few mi apart). That's when I noticed that Charter (Spectrum) had issued 2603:: for one WAN and 2602:: for the other WAN. ref: https://bgp.he.net/AS33363#_prefixes6 https://bgp.he.net/AS33363#_prefixes6
- themafia 9mo ago
  The current global unicast space is actually limited to just 2000::/3. https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-add...

mike_d 9mo ago

IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems. IPv6 was designed by political process. Go around the room to each engineer and solve for their pet peeve to in turn rally enough support to move the proposal forward. As a bunch of computer people realized how hard politics were they swore never to do it again and made the address size so laughably large that it was "solved" once and for all. I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago. My personal preference would have been to open up class E space (240-255.*) and claw back the 6 /8s Amazon is hoarding, be smarter about allocations going forward, and make fees logarithmic based on the number of addresses you hold.

shawabawa3 9mo ago
Imo they should have just clawed 1 or 2 bits out of the ipv4 header for additional routing and called it good enough
- immibis 9mo ago
  This would require new software and new ASICs on all hosts and routers and wouldn't be compatible with the old system. If you're going to cause all those things, might as well add 96 new bits instead of just 2 new bits, so you won't have the same problem again soon.
throw0101c 9mo ago
> IPv4 isn't perfect, but it was designed to solve a specific set of problems. IPv4 was not designed as such, but as an academic exercise. It was an experiment. An experiment that "escape the lab". This is per Vint Cerf: * https://www.pcmag.com/news/north-america-exhausts-ipv4-addresses https://www.pcmag.com/news/north-america-exhausts-ipv4-addre... And if you think there wasn't politics in iPv4 you're dead wrong: * https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes > IPv6 was designed by political process. Only if by "political process" you mean a bunch of people got together (physically and virtually) and debated the options and chose what they thought was best. The criteria for choosing IPng were documented: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726 There were a number of proposals, and three finalists, with SIPP being chosen: * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752 > I firmly believe that if they had adopted any other strategy where addresses could be meaningfully understood and worked with by the least skilled network operators, we would have had "IPv6" adoption 10 years ago. The primary reason for IPng was >32 bits of address space. The only way to make them shorter is to have fewer bits, which completely defeats the purpose of the endeavour. There was no way to move from 32-bits to >32-bits without every network stack of every device element (host, gateway, firewall, application, etc) getting new code. Anything that changed the type and size of sockaddr->sa_family (plus things like new DNS resource record types: A is 32-bit only; see addrinfo->ai_family) would require new code.