Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

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In practice I haven’t ever had a problem memorising IPv6 addresses. The significant proportions of any address you might type manually are 48 bits long at one end and a few bits at the other.

An example IPv4 address is 8 to 12 digits:

  10.30.115.5

A memorable IPv6 address at a /56 site — the prefix and then one or two digits — isn’t much longer:

  2001:db8:404:14::42

If you’re with a reasonably clued in ISP you probably get a /48 for your site by default:

  2001:db8:404::42

If you’re enumerating your own /64 prefixes then it’s not much more complicated than:

  site 2001:db8:404::
  net              :14::
  host                ::42

This is the first time I read about someone actually trying to remember IP6 addresses, maybe I should try that, because it’s really easy to remember IP4. For me, the problem is that there’s hex numbers, which are harder to remember and missing zeros, so you need remember the colons. If IP6 would just be 6 decimal numbers and this would be the default way of writing them, this would not be a problem. But it feels to me that the cryptic way IP6 is written is to make it hard for humans to remember it.

>the prefix and then one or two digits — isn’t much longer

I'd argue it's just enough to make the difference though.

The problem is that people got used to being able to rely on memorizing IP addresses. IPv6 does its best at making IP addresses both harder to memorize, and completely dynamic, going so far as to change the IP on a fairly regular basis. It's antithetical to some very core qualities that an IP address is supposed to have in the minds of many.

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