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noduermetoday at 9:24 AM3 repliesview on HN

I never heard this idea before, but more octets would be a lot prettier!!


Replies

inigyoutoday at 10:53 AM

Are you just talking about how you write the addresses or are you talking about the actual protocol?

The IPv4 protocol has 4 octets each for source and destination address. Period. If you change that, your packets won't work on any IPv4 routers or software any more.

If you want to write IPv6 addresses as numbers separated by dots no one's stopping you but I don't see how it's better. They switched to hex because the old format was too long.

BadBadJellyBeantoday at 9:59 AM

They added 12 more octets. I mean we could have written IPv6 addresses in the old format but I don't think that

42.0.20.80.64.1.192.15.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.113

is easier to remember than

2a00:1450:4001:c0f::71 (or 2a00:1450:4001:0c0f:0000:0000:0000:0071)

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Hendriktotoday at 10:01 AM

You have not heard if before, because that is the most naive and stupid take imaginable. It is the “let them eat cake” of networking.

It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?

You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.

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