Tailscale's DNS IPv6 spells out "Tailscale"
reddit.com
reddit.com
Many puns and easter-eggs in both! Recommend giving it a quick glance, some are pretty fun. Some examples include 'fable' as a 'tail' (IE 'tale'), and 'universe' as a 'scale'.
Words can be present in both lists when the entity is applicable to both a tail and a scale, so a tailnet named `koi-koi.ts.net` is theoretically possible too.
Found out about it after I randomly lucked into rolling 'miku' as my 'tail' when first creating my account :)
Perfect level of apparent sketchiness too.
You have to go to the DNS pane in the console dashboard[1] and click "Rename tailnet..." to get presented with 4 randomly-selected combos you can choose from, or re-roll for 4 more (infinitely).
Potentially not worth it if you already have an established tailnet with many nodes, its better to do it when first creating it.
I think they make named tailnets opt-in rather than the default to reduce wordspace exhaustion from users that create an account and poke around the dashboard for a few minutes and never visit again.
$ dig +short AAAA facebook.com
2a03:2880:f10e:83:face:b00c:0:25deIt is theoretical possible because many IP address parsers accept not only a.b.c.d form of IPv4 address, but also a.b.c (8 bit a, b, 16 bit c) and a.b (8 bit a, 24 bit b). (Also a, with 32 bit a).
For example on MacOS and Debian pinging these all ping the same thing: 1.0.0.1, 1.0.1, 1.1, 16777217.
If your US phone number has an area code and prefix that each fit in 8 bits and the area code doesn't match one of the first bytes that has a special meaning in IPv4 then you could have phone number areacode-prefix-number also work as IP address areacode.prefix.number.
It would be nice if local ipv6 spelled out "local"
imagine this: local::homelab in your url-bar just working
edit: Yes I know DNS solves this problem, but it would be very neat non the less, making 128bits of packet overhead actually serve a purpose without any software glue.
Mostly for us humans of course.
IPv4 addresses are generally in base-10, but binary and octal can also technically be used (on the CLI).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Reserved_doma...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-use_domain_name
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-davies-internal-...
Not sure how important that is.
Seems like you want to repurpose them to something completely different (what exactly)?
And what is “interpret this part of an IPv6 address completely differently than in all other contexts” if not software glue?
Also, link local is almost always `fe80::` [0]. Today for privacy (and simplicity) reasons most devices pick a random address under that like `fe80::6923:83ab:201:273e`. But most operating systems allow configuring a static link address so if you really wanted you could use `fe80::403e:7ab` for something close to "homelab" (and `fe80::cafe` for your coffee maker) you absolutely can.
[0] The allocated range is fe80::/10 so fe(8|9|A|B)[0-F], but in practice it seems rare for devices today to use anything but fe80::.
My domain is `bitcicle.com`, so I use the internal ULA prefix: `fddf:b17c:1c1e::`.
Makes it easier to remember.
"One hundred one hundred one hundred one hundred"
or
"one hundred, 4 times"
vs.
"f d seven a colon one one five c colon a one e zero colon colon five three"
This is just a rant but IPv6 will never be widely adopted.
Not because of home or B2B use.
It's mainly just B2B stacks lagging behind today.
Depends on your home. In the US Comcast has had IPv6 for a while:
* https://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/ipv6-deployment...
In a lot of countries that were not lucky enough to get online early, the ISPs were not able to get IPv4 for every CPE WAN interface. If you go to the by-country tab, you'll find a number of countries are >70%:
* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
The fact that the US has a lot of IPv4, and a lot of software companies are in the US, may mean that a lot of software is IPv4-centric just because the US-centric outlook can ignore IPv6 with little personal impact. If more devs that to dogfood being behind a CG-NAT I think things would change.
How often do you really need to communicate a complete IP address manually, human to human, via voice or handwriting where you can't just copy/paste?
I mean REALLY NEED. Not just "I'm too lazy to set up DNS", not some hypothetical nonsense where you've found yourself on a network that has functional IPv6 but all autoconfiguration beyond SLAAC is disabled, etc. It just doesn't happen at a rate sufficient to justify how much people like you whine about it.
DNS works. You set it up correctly once when you provision the system, it stays working, you never need to think about a raw IP address again until it's time to deploy a new system or something weird happens like changing a NIC. If your DNS is that broken that you can't depend on it, fix that first and stop worrying about trying to remember complete addresses. If you need to tell a colleague what system you're looking at and DNS is not properly configured for that system, "the one ending in 44a1" is more than sufficient 99% of the time in the same way "the one ending in 127" was for v4 and the rest of the time you have computers and copy/paste works.
That was the whole point of mDNS.
This will work even on a pure ipv6 network (with no hosts having ipv4 addresses).
~ $ arp -a
? (192.168.50.1) at e8:9c:25:52:83:10 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (192.168.50.9) at 64:9a:63:eb:ed:f1 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (192.168.50.50) at 14:98:77:70:17:a7 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]AFAIK you must always specify a service like `_ssh._tcp` or `_http._tcp`; you can’t ask dns-sd to just dump all the advertised mDNS services on your network. That might be possible with the underlying `nw_browser_t` APIs, though.
For address discovery which is what we're really talking about here it's just "<hostname>.local"
No, it's not. That is a service address, not the host's hostname.
The host's hostname is whatever the computer is named, which if you are in a position where you're wanting to give someone else its IPv4 address or access your own thing via its IPv4 address you definitely can also know it's hostname because it's either shown in the same parts of the GUI or one command away. On a lot of CLI systems it's literally in the prompt.
Either way it's not advertised unless that host is configured to advertise itself, you have to query for it and the host will then respond.
"you can’t ask dns-sd to just dump all the advertised mDNS services on your network": I ran into this too. So besides the defaults and maybe network itself standing in the way, the tooling around mDNS is user-unfriendly.
Here's me pinging my laptop (macOS 27) from my file server (Ubuntu 24.04)
~ ping persephone.local
PING persephone.local (fd82:74ca:1cef:385a:1897:2e4b:a726:18b6%3) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from fd82:74ca:1cef:385a:1897:2e4b:a726:18b6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.496 ms
64 bytes from fd82:74ca:1cef:385a:1897:2e4b:a726:18b6: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.515 ms
^C
--- persephone.local ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.496/0.505/0.515/0.009 msWe're talking about somebody who knows how to get the IPv4 address of their computer, the hostname is available in basically the same exact place on every single system, and easier to remember, and remains the same on every network unless there's a conflict.
It works as long as the network operator of system admin hasn't gone out of their way to break it.
> Shouldn't those question marks be the hostnames on arp -a? On some networks it shows them, on others it doesn't.
Those question marks will fill in if there is a reverse dns entry in the local DNS server, which is set in IPv4 networks based on the device putting its hostname in the DHCP request. Most consumer combo gateway devices will do this by default as does Windows DHCP, but a lot of business firewall devices don't do it at all or don't do it by default.
Either way, that's not relevant to IPv6, mDNS is the way.
I'm pretty frequently in a scenario where I know local v4 addrs but not hostnames, usually on a network that's not my own. But even on my own network cause there's no simple way to discover the names, so not everything is a Linux box I can SSH into to ask the hostname. I'd use mDNS if I could reliably type something in to show all the DNS entries on the LAN, never having to diagnose any issues with this.
Like I said in my previous post, for the most part if you need to actually communicate the raw IP that probably means something has gone wrong and you're now troubleshooting with someone who should have access to a higher level view of the network where "the one ending in 3 charlie echo 5" should be more than sufficient just like it would be if you were communicating a MAC address while troubleshooting DHCPv4 issues.
In the 12 years I've had a dual-stack network I've never had to communicate a full IPv6 address verbally, but if I did I'd pretty much do it the same way I would an IPv4 address. One group at a time, with a pause implying the separator. If there was one or more zero subnets involved that could be shortened with double-colon I'd say that.
For example the record I just got back for Google of 2607:f8b0:4023:141b::71 I'd read off as:
two six zero seven (or maybe twenty-six oh seven)
foxtrot eight bravo zero
four zero two three (or maybe forty twenty-three)
one four one bravo
double colon
seven one
edit: HN makes it way harder than it should be to have multiple lines.
Same with ULA addresses like 10.$x.$y.$z for private networks. Most of those you can assume `fd$x::$z` and just need to pass whatever is on the other side of the double colons. (Where $x is optional and likely network-wide.)
DHCP6 is pretty well supported on a lot of Enterprise routers, so the fd:: ULA space, which is what DHCP6 is most good for, has no required reason to be long addresses (outside of silly things like this link's mentioned Tailscale fingerprinting/advertising IP).
If you want a real example, I was at a nonprofit event helping with their video livestream. They have a Zowiebox that displays its IP address on a digital display. I reached its web management portal that way on their Windows PC that ofc had no nmap etc installed. Oh and that box is IPv4-only.
Uhh, that one time in 2003 over Teamspeek, but it was really cool and really important, I promise! Definitely important enough to justify the horror that is NAT.
And a nice MAC...