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0 pointsdsl24d ago0 comments

Imagine if one day someone came up with a "better" way to chew food, but you had to learn how to do a super complex jaw movement and it wouldn't work in restaurants. It has no obvious benefit to you. The only motivation is that a small group of obsessively passionate (but not in a good way) people say at some unknown point in the future food won't be edible anymore.

IPv6 just tried to do too much so it failed at everything. Putting letters in IP addresses made it near impossible to remember what your network settings were supposed to be.

It is nothing short of a miracle that devices can even get IPv6 addresses. SLAAC was supposed to replace DHCP, but it couldn't provide DNS server addresses. DHCPv6 was introduced to replace SLAAC, but this time they forgot to add a way to communicate a default route. This lead to Cisco, Microsoft, and Google all taking completely different approaches, and the IETF helpfully blocking any efforts at cross vendor standardization because of v6 zealots.

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Dagger224d ago

Meanwhile, everybody else is using a plastic skull that they carry around with them to pre-chew the inedible food, which is the majority of the food you can get these days.

"It's not inedible," they say. "Just let me get my skull out."

> IPv6 just tried to do too much so it failed at everything. Putting letters in IP addresses made it near impossible to remember what your network settings were supposed to be.

People said the same sort of thing about v4: that it was hard to configure because you needed to know four separate addresses (IP, netmask, default route AND the DNS server) and if you mix up any of these it doesn't work.

As it turns out, in both cases it's just a lack of familiarity, not actual difficulty. The super complex jaw movement is just a regular bite, but you puff your cheeks out a bit. Or er, something.

> This lead to Cisco, Microsoft, and Google all taking completely different approaches [...] but this time they forgot to add a way to communicate a default route

"There should only be one way to do things... wait, no, not like that."

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