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Comment by nedludd | Hacker News Reader

I work for a very large company that is supposedly "leading the charge" in the IPv6 space.

Three years ago all groups were supposed to have converted completely to IPv6 by the end of the year. Never happened.

Back then the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses was "any day now". I guess someone must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.

I think for us operations types IPv6 is still too complicated. I mean when someone says "hey, what's the IP of that web server?", saying "192.168.13.129" is easy. You can even memorize an address like that. "fe80::2bdd:d4c5:f093:300a", not so much.

Besides the IPv4 address exhaustion problem I don't think anyone has made a compelling argument for IPv6 yet. At least not on the ground.

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> I think for us operations types IPv6 is still too complicated. I mean when someone says "hey, what's the IP of that web server?", saying "192.168.13.129" is easy.

There's a cure for that, it's called DNS. But seriously, building IPv6 networks feels strage for a few hours, after that you just wish IPv4 would disappear because it's clumsy and ambiguous in comparison.

IPv6 leaves so much room to logically arrange your (and the world's) whole network in one namespace without any RFC1918, making routing and firewall configuration really easy and elegant. Soon you will be able to know a system's VLAN/function/location just by looking at certain parts of the address.

Memorization is important. Although so many more provisioning/procuring processes are automated than they were during the Internet's rapid growth phase in the West, engineers and other professionals still have a great need to handle the addresses, and to do so without frequently needing to look them up.

I observed that it took a little while for the majority of network-touching professionals to become accustomed to memorizing an IPv4 address in one or two glances. I believe doing the same for an IPv6 address is possible. As this happens, the adoption rate will accelerate.

>I guess someone must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.

I lived in such a closet one summer a couple of years ago. If I'm getting this terminology right, they had an entire 16-bit block to themselves (65k addresses).

Company I just left after 12 years had an entire /8 and a /16. One of the projects I worked on in 2014 was moving a lot of the stuff out of the /16 (which had been owned by a subsidiary that was bought almost 20 years ago) and into the larger subnet.

I heard rumors that they were going to renumber out of the /8 and start using RFC1918 addresses for all "internal" (non-Internet-facing) stuff in the next couple of years.

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