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Comment by jauer | Hacker News Reader

I’m a NetEng for a large (>1M servers, >100 POPs) network that is IPv6-only internally.

It’s not hard to remember IPv6 addresses for DNS servers assuming your addressing plan reserved the right subnets for anycasted services.

Remembering IP addresses stops being a thing pretty quickly. If anything the challenge shifts to remembering airport codes.

If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation.

I think it’s more that small and medium organizations just don’t have any incentive to change (and plenty of incentive to not take the risk of change) leading to the numbers we see at https://ipv6-in-real.life/

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> If you are typing them by hand that often even in IPv4 networks I'd be worried about typos and insufficient automation.

Automation is all very well once the network link is up and working so you can reach the automation

But the reality is you put someone who knows what they're doing in front of a machine where the network connection isn't working, the first things they're going to be doing is ifconfig and ping 8.8.8.8 - which they'll be doing from memory, because you can't google anything when your network connection isn't working.

The fact that IPv6 will deprecate both ifconfig and 8.8.8.8 to me seems emblematic of why the adoption has been going so badly.

ifconfig is deprecated for years, and this has nothing to do with ipv4 nor ipv6 Checkout iproute2 and its impressive feature list

2600:: is shorter than 8.8.8.8 and iproute2 is much more pleasant to use than ifconfig.

ifconfig got deprecated because it didn't match how networking worked in the kernel.

If you're using ifconfig on linux[1] for the last 10 years, I'm going to negatively look on your claimed expertise

As for point-to-point links, that's what simple link-local addresses are, added in ipv6. And why IP-IP is superior to OSPF, both because it doesn't hardcode address sizes and because it runs on Layer 2.

[1] ifconfig on other systems might be the right command

> Automation is all very well once the network link is up and working so you can reach the automation

With properly constructed automation and modern* hardware, you don’t need to do any manual config on-box for automation to be reachable. Zero-Touch Provisioning is a wonder to behold.

Modern being relative. I saw this work on routers terminating telco circuits nearly 20 years ago and had servers netboot and install the OS with basic config before that (though automation was far more tedious back then)

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