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Comment by uxcn | Hacker News Reader

The majority of people will use IPv6 transparently through DNS. I'm not sure why typing an address into a browser or even a terminal seems like the more common use case.

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Hear, hear.

The fact that IPv6 addresses are so unruly is a blessing in disguise. Use DNS, /etc/hosts, bonjour, .ssh/config, whatever. Use names, stop using addresses directly, even with IPv4.

Sadly, it's a lot easier to have my router always always assign my NAS 192.168.0.2 than it is to configure DNS

Make a homelab and setup local DNS. It's not that complicated if you don't want to get fancy. You can also team it up with DHCP using tools like dnsmasq which is lightweight and works on everything from raspberry pis and routers with flashed firmware to a whole computer or VM on a larger host.

You can do it. You should do it. Why haven't you done it yet?

Because it is work, and then it will require administration. Which is more work. Computers are smart enough to handle this, why can't everything on a subnet just have (for example) zeroconf?

Not saying what I'm doing is right, but giving my NAS a static IP works on any device connected to the network. My router doesn't support manual DNS entries and I don't want to go through the trouble of flashing OpenWRT just to do something.

You can name off tools that make it easier all you want, but how is the average user supposed to know that? When I set up my NAS, I wanted it to be accessible from the same address no matter what. I knew (at the time) about static IPs and manual DNS entries. So I went to my router's configuration and it didn't support manual DNS entries. So I opted for a static IP, and it worked. Sure, it's a kludge and not future proof, but I don't care. That's the problem. The "solutions" only work if you both know about them and care enough to do it the right (instead of the easy) way

We have a Macs so I just use zeroconf/Bonjour names. Never had to configure anything.

From personal experience, most home routers today take the computer name and add that to a .local DNS entry only valid for the local network (meaning that .local is a reserved TLD).

With IPv4, if DNS isn't working, it is very useful to be able to enter an IP address directly to check if the problem is with DNS or with the network.

(But then again, that is no reason not to adopt IPv6! Some things are going to get harder, but so many, many things are going to get easier that it is easily worth the tradeoff.)

And for those few times, you can still enter an IP directly. :)

For those who like to memorise IP addresses, my favorite ping in ipv4 is 8.8.8.8, but in IPv6 I like using 2600::1. Shorter, and more fun! (2600 as in the Hacker Quarterly/Hope.net or the old 2600 mHz hack, although the netblock is owned by Sprint, but I guess that is à propos..).

Yes, you can. But it is hard to deny that if there is a specific server/host you are trying to access, its address is likely to be a lot harder to memorize than that.

(And like I said, that should not be considered a reason to avoid adopting IPv6. The only thing I currently dislike about IPv6 is that my ISP does not give me a static network address.)

That's odd. What ISP is it? This goes against RFC recommendations (ex: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6177 - assign between /64 to /48)

My ISP (DSL with teksavvy.com in Canada) offers a dynamic-ish /64 with SLAAC, then a static /56 subnet over DHCPv6. I know some people who had issues with their /56 subnet resetting, but that was usually solved by contacting tech support.

Hmm, realized this after posting: my comment on /64 to /48 is rather off-topic, and the reason why the ISP allocates dynamically might be that they are using 6rd [1].

From what little I understand of it, 6rd calculates an IPv6 subnet by using the IPv4 address. So unless your v4 adress is static, your v6 subnet will be dynamic. Some cable providers are using this in Canada (Videotron). I hope they get rid of it soon, because it's really clunky!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_rapid_deployment

Seems Google have been able to snag some easy to use IPv6 addresses for their DNS servers as well.

    2001:4860:4860::8888
    2001:4860:4860::8844

Sprint.net has the IPv6 address 2600::, which responds to ping. It's super helpful for testing v6 connectivity, as well as being an awesome reference.

/etc/hosts and .ssh/config scale very, very poorly, whereas the raison d'etre of ip6 is that it is there to scale very, very well.

Those are for "home use", for other stuff you use DNS. DNS is what they call "internet scale".

Interestingly, perhaps ironically in this context, is that the original HOSTS.TXT was the "internet scale" solute of the time in that it powered names for the entire network: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

The majority never see IPs at all, in which case this is a non-issue. This is an issue for network people and developers.

All the alternatives are either unreliable and slow (bonjour/mDNS) or require manual setup prior to use. Given that machines, networks, routes, etc. are all becoming increasingly ephemeral in the end all you end up with is a DNS, .ssh/config, or hosts file with hundreds or thousands of stale entries for things that existed for five minutes. In some environments there are nice systems for naming things and IP address management but these are hard to set up and maintain and aren't feasible in really heterogenous settings.

I guess Martin Fowler was right: there are two hard things in CS, cache invalidation and naming things. This is naming things.

“All the alternatives are either unreliable and slow (bonjour/mDNS)”

I’ll agree with you on that, in certain cases. In my experience, OS X-to-OS X always works seamlessly, but Windows-to-OS X is much more annoying. It works around 70% of the time.

Say the hostname of the Mac on the local network is lorems-mac-mini.local. Then say I want to connect to this Mac over various services from my Windows computer (file sharing via Windows Explorer, vnc via TightVNC, nx via NoMachine, etc.). 70% of the time, providing lorems-mac-mini.local as the hostname works. The other 30% of the time, the same programs which worked just fine with the hostname as lorems-mac-mini.local all of a sudden won’t be able to find it on the network anymore unless the same hostname is entered without the .local part. Then, sometimes, neither solution works and the Windows computer can’t find the Mac at all unless I enter its IP address, which magically works.

Frankly, it became annoying enough that I now just enter the IP addresses of devices on my local network that I want to connect to now instead of their hostnames, since I know it’ll always work.

…in that sense, I guess I have to agree with your overall sentiment.

> This is an issue for network people and developers.

So, the problems mentioned in the post essentially were...

    * ambiguity specifying ports

    * software not recognizing addresses

    * length to type (3-32+7 characters)

Looking past DNS, the first is only really an issue in web browsers, which I would doubt most people will actually use. The second is arguably a software issue, not a format issue. The third genuinely seems marginally debatable. Still, it seems like the amount of code needed to translate from one format to another would be trivial. In the amount of time it took to write the post, someone could probably have just written the code instead. There are tons of plugin mechanisms for stuff (shell, editor, browser, etc...)..

> Given that machines, networks, routes, etc. are all becoming increasingly ephemeral

MPTCP addresses some of these issues.

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