1. legacy ip allocations are a huge mess, largely due to growth - mirroring that haphazard, patchwork allocation model for ipv6 would be obscenely inefficient & make the v6 dfz table as bad as the legacy ip counterpart
2. as much as 41% of the world already has ipv6 - why should they not continue what they’re doing?
3. “Not only is v4 still around, but the phrase "IP address" is generally understood to mean v4.” no, that’s really not a thing.
4. “Say a device's IPv4 address is 71.177.17.171 (seriously I used to have this one). Maybe I also get v6 address 2345:0425:2CA1:::0567:5673:23b5.” …what? how did you get from point a to point b? i would have expected something containing 47 b1 11 ab but…what?
5. “Even making it a longer octal like 71.177.17.171.77.111.11.11 would've been easier for most people.” that’s…not octal. an octal representation of that ip would be 107 261 21 253 which is…not really an improvement, i don’t think?
6. “When I mentioned this to some network expert colleagues over lunch (I'm no expert), they each said, the human-unfriendly v6 addresses are a feature to encourage use of DNS within an enterprise system.” the idea of hexadecimal addresses is intended to be more user-friendly than a long string of unnecessarily verbose octets like 251.82.40.105.0.49.61.129.87.46.0.0.31.96.255 . should you be using dns? sure - but you also should be using it for legacy ip. can you memorize legacy ip addresses? yes. can many ppl also memorize ipv6 addresses? also yes. should either of those things be standard practice? no - there are better uses for brain cells.
7. “The common enterprise workaround is predictable.” no, it’s not. nat46 is rarely used. nat64 is much, much more common. (the common enterprise “workaround” is “stonewall on ipv6 as long as possible.”)
8. “Humans should even represent such padded v6 address in the v4 octal notation;” oh. there’s the problem: legacy ip addresses aren’t octal, they’re decimal. have you genuinely never seen a legacy ip address containing an 8 or 9? wait. do you know what octal is? (also, there’s an octet missing from my example two points above. did you notice?)
9. “Slow adoption has usually been blamed on old systems, but I'm getting tired of that explanation.” i’m getting tired of harebrained THIS IS HOW WE SHOULD OF DONE IPV6 theories that are 20+ years too late, but here we are.
1. Yes, it'd be a compromise, for a future of having v6 actually adopted. I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned that it'd burn ~32 bits of the v6 address space just for v4 addresses. Once your network is all-v6 and nothing is relying on the mapped addresses, you drop this.
2. Because a bunch of those are also stuck running v4 on the side and would probably love for v6 adoption to move forward so they can drop the technical debt.
4. My v6 addr is different from my v4, is what I'm saying.
5. My bad, I mixed up "octal" and "octet." It's decimal notation, which is made of octets.
6. Yeah, idk, it's what they said. Do people memorize IPs, probably not, except for local 192. or 10. ones. Do people note them in short-term memory while debugging, yes. The colon-separated hex is more annoying to me, maybe because I'm used to decimal, but then again so are most people.
7. I would say then, common workaround for enterprises that actually need/want to use ipv6 sooner or later.
8. Gee, I'm sorry for the mixup. Seems you got which one I meant anyway.
9. It probably is too late to do this everywhere. Maybe ISPs could hand out 4-mapped v6 addresses at least, idk if that's possible.
6. that people are “used to” dotted decimal ip addresses just means ppl can learn arbitrary things. there’s nothing inherently more natural about legacy ip addresses than ipv6 addresses.
7. enterprises that need/want ipv6 are deploying ipv6. source: my job
1. Once the world collectively moves on from v4, you stop assigning v4-mapped v6 addresses. And nothing stops you from assigning two v6 addresses to a single iface in the meantime.
3. Yeah, it shows my ipv4 only, and I have both. Do you not have a v4?
6. No, there's not, but the reality is everyone you're trying to switch over to v6 is already used to v4, and it's like herding cats.
hey, sorry i didn’t respond. i may have read the reply & gotten drunk. hard to say.
1. why would you add the extra step of using a “v4-mapped v6 address” if you’re just going to end up using regular ones?
3. if you have ipv6 but that google link shows a legacy ip address, your ipv6 connectivity is broken somehow. you’re not behind some sort of weird nat66, are you?
6. that’s getting less true with every passing year, thankfully
2. as much as 41% of the world already has ipv6 - why should they not continue what they’re doing?
3. “Not only is v4 still around, but the phrase "IP address" is generally understood to mean v4.” no, that’s really not a thing.
4. “Say a device's IPv4 address is 71.177.17.171 (seriously I used to have this one). Maybe I also get v6 address 2345:0425:2CA1:::0567:5673:23b5.” …what? how did you get from point a to point b? i would have expected something containing 47 b1 11 ab but…what?
5. “Even making it a longer octal like 71.177.17.171.77.111.11.11 would've been easier for most people.” that’s…not octal. an octal representation of that ip would be 107 261 21 253 which is…not really an improvement, i don’t think?
6. “When I mentioned this to some network expert colleagues over lunch (I'm no expert), they each said, the human-unfriendly v6 addresses are a feature to encourage use of DNS within an enterprise system.” the idea of hexadecimal addresses is intended to be more user-friendly than a long string of unnecessarily verbose octets like 251.82.40.105.0.49.61.129.87.46.0.0.31.96.255 . should you be using dns? sure - but you also should be using it for legacy ip. can you memorize legacy ip addresses? yes. can many ppl also memorize ipv6 addresses? also yes. should either of those things be standard practice? no - there are better uses for brain cells.
7. “The common enterprise workaround is predictable.” no, it’s not. nat46 is rarely used. nat64 is much, much more common. (the common enterprise “workaround” is “stonewall on ipv6 as long as possible.”)
8. “Humans should even represent such padded v6 address in the v4 octal notation;” oh. there’s the problem: legacy ip addresses aren’t octal, they’re decimal. have you genuinely never seen a legacy ip address containing an 8 or 9? wait. do you know what octal is? (also, there’s an octet missing from my example two points above. did you notice?)
9. “Slow adoption has usually been blamed on old systems, but I'm getting tired of that explanation.” i’m getting tired of harebrained THIS IS HOW WE SHOULD OF DONE IPV6 theories that are 20+ years too late, but here we are.