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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

You go ahead, and try relaying an IPv6 address over the phone from one of your end users.

Sure, the IPv6 address of my server (vsza.hu) is 2a01:270:2016::1, which is 2-A-0-1-colon-2-7-0-colon-2-0-1-6-double-colon-1 over the phone. Many people seem to forget that leading zeroes within 16-bit groups and one contiguous block of zeroes can be omitted.

That's why you need a solid solution for DNS, though from my experience, mDNS does a decent enough job to solve it.

Instead of the numbers you type in the hostname of a device. IPv6 encourages to improve on the current lackluster DNS solutions some routers have.

Here, the linux routers are way ahead of you. Odhcpd used to handle ipv6 delegations for normal users can coordinate with dnsmasq (often used for ipv4 assignments and dns proxying) or unbound - to assign nice local names.

Three trouble begins at internet scale where mDNS just does not work due to collisions. And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.

I use Pfsense which communicates DHCPv6 leases to Dnsmasq/Unbound fairly easily.

>And ISPs do not want to give you free domain names and especially free dynamic subdomain delegation.

Probably not but for internal resolution a .local or similar TLD is sufficient.

Yes. The thing is, this would be super easy for the ISPs as they already have to maintain reverse DNS for dynamic IPv4 most of the time, so modifying it to also allow delegating to an authenticated DNS secret should be trivial. Eslecially now that ISPs are so fond of giving you big routers.

"Sir, please type this into your browser to get to the router web interface: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. I repeat 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334."

"Server IP address could not be found."

5 minutes later...

"Now could you please tell me the IPs of all connected devices?"

Customer hangs up and cancels his subscription.

Wasn't a similar problem solved by services like URL shorteners? I had to work occasional technical service for products where I was one of the embedded engineers and I leaned heavily on bit.ly at the time to get URLs back and forth from customers and it worked exceedingly well.

So, with that in mind, what would be the major drawbacks to IPv6 address shorteners? You'll always have a certain class of issues such as transcription errors, of course.

Problem with URL shorteners is ones that use characters, especially of varying cases. Relaying letters across a telephone sucks, I often resort to NATO codes, and now you'll have to distinguish capitalization.

Yeah, actually I guess that I was spoiled in that regard. I worked for an RF company when I had that experience and, also having a military background myself, the NATO phonetics were used naturally when communicating with our customers.

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