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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I've only worked at one company that had full IPv6 support. Even on my current 1GbE fibre setup with a small startup, they still don't have IPv6 rolled out to residents yet. :(

I feel like one big hurdle is IPv6 usability. You can write down and easily remember IPv4 addresses. IPv6 netmasks can get really confusing. They make sense if you expand out every block, but in reality, IPv6 requires a lot of tooling to chop up and work with address spaces in an intuitive way.

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I love it when people make this argument. The IPv6 adoption hurdle is NOT the usability of v6 addresses. 99% of the world thinks that IPv4 addresses are a horrorshow and would never bother to memorize one or even write one down. They use DNS because they are human beings. The layout of the address behind the DNS they couldn't care less about.

I think you are right, now it would be somehow hard to deny the fact that ipv4 addresses were possible to memorize, ipv6's, quite a bit less so. I agree that it's a non-issue 99% of the time, and the overwhelming majority of lambda users will use DNS anyways - that said, when you don't have DNS, are a sysadmin/engineer or what not, you do feel the pain sometimes :)

I think this is the key point. It's too hard to understand, and adds a lot of what I would consider extraneous and over-engineered guff. People will naturally resist it when what they have, works.

The only thing that needed fixing was the address space (imo, as far as I can see), but if I need to turn it on, I now have to worry about weird routing, special addresses (IPv4 has some, but IPv6 seems to have taken it to a new level), understanding hexadecimal addresses, translation layers etc. What a mess, just extend the address space.

Use DNS. Seriously. We use IPv4 where I work, and we don't use DNS, and it's still a nightmare. There's no good way to refer to a machine, short of an IPv4 address, and that's still painful to speak and hard to memorize.

Life is much easier when you can speak of a machine as "2.dev.awesome-service" (.your-company.com)

Besides, the machines should be ephemeral, and the new ones will likely get new IPs. (Unless you're doing something like EIPs, but just stop that and use DNS. ;-) )

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