Comment by benjiro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjiro | Hacker News Reader

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> It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses.

Never understood why they decided to include letters instead of keeping it numeric.

Hell, going from 199.120.121.122 to 199.120.121.122.123 will have expanded IPv4 by 254 times. It took us, what? 40 years to exhaust Ipv4... Just increasing it by 254 alone is insane large amount.

Belgium used this solution for their number plates They used to have a 6 letters/digit mix. Like abc-001 type of number plate. It started to run out, so they simply created a expansion, so new number plates started with 1-abc-001 in 2010, ... and in 2021 did 2-abc-def ( they did not run out of 1, they seem to simply use the first number to indicate the decade more and more). At that rate, Belgium will run out of numbers in they year 11990 ...

Ipv4 is easy to work with, easy to remember, write down, read ... Ipv6 is always a struggle. And yea, the idea that every device may need its own IP from your provider, is just insane.

I have so much more issues configuring things with IPv6, vs just basic IPv4+NATS. Its simply, its easy...

And maybe some people do not have this issue, but our provider gives DYNAMIC IPv6, so the pre-fix keeps altering! What makes configuring things on a NAS even more hell.

O and that :: range modifier is so fun. And the whole pre-fix and post-fix structure...

I hate it. Its complex for my little brain as i do not work daily with it, and whenever i need to deal with Ipv6, i need to relearn the quirks of it every time because of issues like the whole pre-fix/post-fix, dynamic pre-fix etc. Where as IPv4 ... so easy.

> Hell, going from 199.120.121.122 to 199.120.121.122.123 will have expanded IPv4 by 254 times. It took us, what? 40 years to exhaust Ipv4... Just increasing it by 254 alone is insane large amount.

In it's original design, SIPP, the design that was chosen for IPng had 'only' 64-bits, but it was decided that it would be impossible do another transition, and going to 128 would be better future-proofing:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752#section-9

So 199.120.121.122 could have grown to 199.120.121.122.152.183.166.197, which I do not think would have made a practical difference to those who complain about "hard to remember" addresses.

And it took 40 years to exhaust IPv4 because NAT was invented (RFC 1631), and now we're stuck with that kludge and have to have all sorts of workaround for it (ICE/TURN/STUN). IMHO it has also has contributed to the centralization of the Internet because doing P2P is just a pain in the ass.

I think that hex digits are inherently hard to remember also because they are unpronounceable.

The letters are hex digits, and make it more compact, regular. That’s the good part.

But I agree, using a reserved byte to select internet, say 0 for original, next two hundred for each region, with the rest for planets/moons/nearby stars, would have been easier to understand.

> That’s the good part.

Disagree. We are trained on numbers from kindergarten. It's used everywhere (e.g. see a number, store it in short-term memory and input it into calculator). Hex digits are completely different and we don't have developer neural paths for that. They are also unpronounceable.

I have developed neural paths for them. 00 is black, 80, grey, FF white. They can always be two padded digits instead of one to three, therefore more regular and compact. Letters are pronounced just fine.

For example, I'd prefer c0a8.0001 to 192.168.0.1/16 notation. The limitation is that the netmask delimiter can only split by nibble.

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