Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

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> IPv6 is intimidating to work with, even for experienced engineers, but I don't believe that "just because it's different" is the reason that people don't like working with it.

No, it's not. It has been around, in production, for TWENTY YEARS. If you didn't learn about it when you were learning IPv4 you're either old and should already have enough experience to know that new things come up, or you should've listened when everyone told you that attending ITT wasn't a good idea.

"But MY company never deployed it!" Bad excuse. Your phone started using it years ago. If you're a network engineer and didn't realize that, nobody is going to feel bad for you.

Not intuitive? The same can be said about most technologies. Without real examples, this means little.

Can't phone a friend and give an IP address? I've literally never done this. We all use SMS, Messages, email, whatever, and anyone who does anything like run gaming servers knows about dynamic DNS services.

Come up with some better complaints, please.

> No, it's not.

Apparently it is if we are still having this conversation after "TWENTY YEARS".

Is there a particular reason that every aspect of your comment is toned with subversive rudeness and you made zero actual good points? Making snide comments about being "old" or how I "should've listened" and "no one is going to feel bad" really doesn't help anyone understand why IPv6 is all that great.

> Come up with some better complaints, please.

The author already listed several frustrations with the protocol. Feel free to read the article again if you'd like some examples.

Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did.

Also, mentioning dynamic DNS services at all in regards to trying to send an IP address to someone is yet another point to support why IPv6 is not an intuitive protocol to work with, even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends.

> Twenty years of poor adoption world-wide demonstrates its lack of easy integration. I don't need to argue this, you just did.

This isn't down to the design of v6 though, it's down to two things: the design of v4, and human laziness.

v4 isn't forwards compatible with a larger address space, so there's no way to magically integrate a larger address space with existing v4 nodes. All of the possible ways to make cross-compatibility easier are already available in v6. Updating the internet's L3 protocol is simply a hard problem with no real shortcuts.

As for human laziness: v6 deployment didn't really start until 2013. Deployment was at 1% in 2013, and is at 30-35% today. People put it off until after the RIRs started running out of addresses to allocate, even at the cost of paying extra money to keep v4 working. This isn't a technology problem, it's a human problem.

> even for something as simple as setting up a gaming server with a few friends.

This isn't even possible in v4 for a lot of people today, due to v4 exhaustion. It's going to become less and less possible over time, as v4 exhaustion gets ever more acute. Even if we took at face value your claims that v6 is unintuitive (which I would disagree with), surely it's better to be able to set a gaming server up with v6 than to not be able to do it at all?

> dynamic DNS

The fact that IPv4 is reasonably usable by itself and IPv6 is not (it basically requires DNS) is a completely valid point against IPv6. Also, the joke about "it's always DNS" is there for a reason; depending on that makes it less resilient.

>Your phone started using it years ago.

But I hate my phone.

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