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Comment by dn3500 | Hacker News Reader

The original idea was that configuration would be so automatic that humans would never see the addresses. Instead of an admin assigning a name and IP address to each host, the admin would only assign the name. The host would figure out its local topography from Neighbor Discovery then tell the dns where it's connected. I'm not sure how well that worked out in practice.

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It didn't work in practice. In many situations names don't work. One example would be games with local lan support, and you use IP addresses to make sure you are connecting to the right server. Other would be tiny embedded devices, that are not powerful enough to scan the network and need a hard-coded or user configurable IP address to connect to the right place.

> that are not powerful enough to scan the network

just look at the ND table. Nobody is ever going to scan a single /64 of v6, ever.

Then why do I still have to see the addresses?

...

how would configuring DNS even work without having to see the addresses, and how would SSH'ing to a device on the LAN work without seeing the addresses

NetBIOS/WINS protocol could discover names -> IPs by broadcast, more modernly Zeroconf/Bonjour can do it, and if there's some organization then DHCP servers can register hostnames in DNS when handing out addresses.

That requires every device to be given a LAN-unique name...

...which a local IP address is, conveniently

ipv6 is so design by commitee that it's ... not worth the trouble ... as a hobbyist. You just described a scenario where you need 3 services for the machines in the same local network to talk to each other.

I'm not willing to spend the time to set it up on my internal network until I start to lose connectivity to some places, sorry.

To be clear, I'm not defending it, just describing it. I was at the IETF meetings where all this was being discussed and remember thinking it would never work.

When people tell me ipv6 is already widely used, I ask them what name I should use when I want to ssh to their ipv6 device, their phone for example. People don't notice ipv6 isn't working because the Internet has evolved into a world of two classes of people, the rich and powerful like Amazon with addressable IP endpoints, and the second class citizens like you and me who can only connect to the rich and powerful, not to each other.

Technically I have a business connection going into my home with a public fixed ipv4 and probably a fixed ipv6, if only i could be bothered to configure pppd and whatever 5 other daemons i need to install.

Problem is, that's not my only fiber. I have two from different ISPs (Romania, so they're cheap). With ipv4 i only need to change the default route to the other router to choose which ISP i use. With ipv6 where my internal machines get an address from the ISP, i don't know where to start.

And I definitely don't want to spend a couple thousand on an "enterprise" multi home router that will do it for me...

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