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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

We use DNS... Its been around about as long as IPv4

This isn't a great solution. Every IT person knows "its always DNS," and you have to set up IP stuff to bring up DNS in general. DNS is brittle and doesn't deal well with multiple network domains or debugging if the network is down, and those are precisely the situations where one finds oneself typing IPs.

I really think the size of the IPs is a major cause of slow V6 uptake.

Size in which regard though? They're hexadecimals. If they were numbers or letters (0-9, a-z instead of 0-0, a-f) the number of bits would be still high, but with lower amount of characters. You might loose something beautiful as autoconfig but who needs a /64 for one device anyway? Plus, it does not work well for anonymity. You might as well randomize it.

DNS doesn’t help when you’re having to manually enter an IP into a config, which is what the OP implied.

If an application supports IPv6, it should support DNS. If it doesn’t support DNS, that feels like a bug.

The only configuration item that should require manual entry of an IPv6 address is a NIC. Even that has other mechanisms. Everything else should support DNS.

Edit: doh, the second place is the dns zone file

So you gotta log into your registrar and copy paste your IPv6 address and wait god knows how long for it to propagate...

Or you can host your own dns. Or you can get a decent dns host. It doesn’t need to be your domain registrar, much like you don’t need your website or email hosted with your domain registrar.

DNS doesn't actually "propagate", all you're waiting for is the caches to expire, and you can control that by keeping a low TTL on the record.

Again, to me the OP is talking explicitly about places where you have to enter it in. What are the other mechanisms? Let’s forget about situations where you can copy/paste or use DHCP.

My answer would be to use my phone to take a photo of the address (if not easily accessible via web browser), and then use that to manually enter it. Probably not a situation where you can rely on memory, unfortunately.

Outside of the NIC and DNS, where else do you need to enter in an IP literal?

Firewalls, for example. We have huge files containing risk levels for various IP addresses. Most of it is automated, but sometimes we have to tweak something manually. These aren't IP addresses that we control, so DNS isn't helpful. Often we're dealing with ranges as well, for which DNS is also unhelpful.

Technically, you could claim you're authoritative, just hope the assignments don't leak ;-)

Dns resolver Internal IPs

Connecting to things on your local network

My experience is contrary:

Put the “interesting” addresses in DNS immediately upon acquiring/configuring them.

When you need a literal - lookup DNS name, copy-paste from one terminal into the other. I do this for both Ipv4 and Ipv6 addresses.

Turns out the human brain sometimes does also have difficulty figuring the differences between 192.168.129.1 and 192.186.130.1 when one of them is mistyped....

You still need to put that ip address manually into a few places to have that setup (dns, static ip settings, possibly router settings, etc.)

Yeah, but what about ephemeral DNS for your LAN? Zeroconf and NetBIOS work but can be harder to set up than IPv4 (especially if your install media doesn't have it set up by default).

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