alt Hacker NewsThis has forever been and will forever be the dumbest anti-IPv6 complaint.
How often do you really need to communicate a complete IP address manually, human to human, via voice or handwriting where you can't just copy/paste?
I mean REALLY NEED. Not just "I'm too lazy to set up DNS", not some hypothetical nonsense where you've found yourself on a network that has functional IPv6 but all autoconfiguration beyond SLAAC is disabled, etc. It just doesn't happen at a rate sufficient to justify how much people like you whine about it.
DNS works. You set it up correctly once when you provision the system, it stays working, you never need to think about a raw IP address again until it's time to deploy a new system or something weird happens like changing a NIC. If your DNS is that broken that you can't depend on it, fix that first and stop worrying about trying to remember complete addresses. If you need to tell a colleague what system you're looking at and DNS is not properly configured for that system, "the one ending in 44a1" is more than sufficient 99% of the time in the same way "the one ending in 127" was for v4 and the rest of the time you have computers and copy/paste works.
Replies
When, every single network I've ever used has had a broken mDNS. And there's no way I'm managing a DNS server just to have memorable addrs, especially when it's not my own network.
If you want a real example, I was at a nonprofit event helping with their video livestream. They have a Zowiebox that displays its IP address on a digital display. I reached its web management portal that way on their Windows PC that ofc had no nmap etc installed. Oh and that box is IPv4-only.
> How often do you really need to communicate a complete IP address manually, human to human, via voice or handwriting where you can't just copy/paste?
Uhh, that one time in 2003 over Teamspeek, but it was really cool and really important, I promise! Definitely important enough to justify the horror that is NAT.
Actually yesterday I was at a client doing a demonstration. I am a software developer, but not an IT/network guy, so I just knew to connect to their network, look at ipconfig and tell them the IP of my computer so they could connect to my machine to test the software. I just look at it and said "i'm at zero point fifty four" (it was 192.168.0.54). How would this look in IPv6? (It's a genuine question, because from what I see it would be something like "i'm at f e seven four colon colon colon zero one a", it honestly adds friction.