I think the Matter standard is going to cause IPv6 adoption to increase significantly in the coming years. People will demand it, without even knowing what Matter or IPv6 are. They just want to be able to turn their lights off from their phone without any extra hardware or software.
Matter is only local networking. Essentially everyone has IPv6 on their local network.
That said, I disagree with the parent statement that v6 isn't going to happen. It's already happening at a steady rate. From the Google stats it's steadily rolling out. Some countries are reaching 100% v6 deployment. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see some countries with high v6 deployments see services which are v6 only.
They've had years to demand it, I don't see why it would suddenly change. Most users who buy "smart" appliances are not power users, don't set everything up themselves and just rely on manufacturer's servers anyway and don't need a direct connection - and are okay with it.
There’s something to be said for human readable addresses. I’m a little nostalgic of how the .hack world was envisioned, where servers had address names like Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground.
If roughly 10 million words exist, then allowing any three words in order creates a space for 10^21 addresses… five words and you’re close to ipv6 address space, six words and there’s more combinations than ipv6 addresses.
You can set your ULA to something like "fddd:192:168::/48" and then on your vlan you prefix hint, say, "66". Now, any device on that vlan will be addressable by "fddd:192:168:66::$host". For example, your gateway ('router') for that vlan would be "fddd:192:168:66::1".
If you want to be really wonky you can script DHCPv6 to statically assign ULA IPv6 leases that match the IPv4, and expire them when the IPv4 lease expires, but like said upthread, addressing hosts via IPv6 is the wrong way to go about it. On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".
> addressing hosts via IPv6 is the wrong way to go about it. On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".
.local is fine as long as all the daemons work correctly, but AFAIK there's no way to have SLAAC and put hosts in "normal" internal DNS, so .lan/.home/.internal are probably out.
I do it by abusing the static slaac address. I have a set of wierd vms where they are cloned from a reference image, so no fixed config allowed. I should have probably just have used dhcp6 but I started by trying slaac and the static address were stable enough for my purposes so it stuck.
How does that work? I initially assumed you meant you just statically assigned machines to addresses, which I think would work courtesy of collision avoidance (and the massive address space), but I can't see how that would work for VMs. Are you just letting VMs pick an IP at random and then having them never change it, at which point you manually add them to DNS?
> On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".
The "official" is home.arpa according to RFC 8375 [1]:
Users and devices within a home network (hereafter referred to as
"homenet") require devices and services to be identified by names
that are unique within the boundaries of the homenet [RFC7368]. The
naming mechanism needs to function without configuration from the
user. While it may be possible for a name to be delegated by an ISP,
homenets must also function in the absence of such a delegation.
This document reserves the name 'home.arpa.' to serve as the default
name for this purpose, with a scope limited to each individual
homenet.
".home" and ".lan" along with a bunch of other historic tlds are on the reserved list and cannot be registered.
Call techy people pathologically lazy but no one is going to switch to typing ".home.arpa" or ".internal". They should have stuck with the original proposal of making ".home" official, instead of sticking ".arpa" behind it. That immediately doomed the RFC.
It may be the most officially-recommended for home use, but .internal is also officially endorsed for "private-use applications" (deciding the semantics of these is left as an exercise to the reader): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal
You have to take into account seasonal trends. The summer is always higher, so yes, we’re currently below last summer, but we are above last April 1st, and this summer will be higher than last summer.
I’m always bemused when I read comments like this. Regardless of whether you think IPv6 is good or bad, it is happening. IPv6 traffic to Google goes up by a few percentage points a year, steadily, and is at around 50% now.
I tried it. Maybe it's easier to speak than hexadecimal is.
But I'm not sure that "How morally the enviable assistances categorize the insistent iodine beyond new time where new systems stalk" has the same memorable quality as "correct horse battery staple" does.
Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.
Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day.
The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".
CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.
IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).
"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
Kind of like what3words, except what3words uses three words which you stand a chance of remembering, whereas this produced, for an address similar to mine, "Miniature nerves eulogize gaily inside erect lion yet able stables hiss the conclusive consultation."
Care to elaborate why? I'm just curious since I didn't know (1) there was actually any kind of serious usage, or (2) there was pushback from rescue team...
W3W is very aggressive about protecting their IP, they don't want it to be a standard anyone can use like lat/long.
They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.
One reason is that there are a lot of similar words in the dictionary. It is easy to mishear the wrong location especially when they are close together. Some of the words are long and complicated. Another is that they are random which means can't navigate from the codes.
They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.
Something that I think was probably once obvious to me but I rediscovered recently is just how intensely wired for song the brain is. If you want to memorize anything, doing it as a song makes it far easier.
I’d really love to see things like this generate little jingles along with the sentence. :)
There actually was an attempt on HN a little while back to use GenAI to convert facts, flashcards, lists, etc. into automated melodic mnemonics. The biggest issue in that particular case was that it was also generating the motif from scratch.
At least for me, part of the reason I can still sing the countries of the world is because the original Animaniacs song was set to a tune that was already familiar: “Jarabe Tapatío” (aka the Mexican Hat Dance).
I don't understand how the mapping works. An address has 8 parts and produces 16 words, so each part consists of 2 words. If we take the example 2a02, that gets encoded to "how atop", but I don't see how that text helps me that "how atop" means 2a02? Am I suppose to memorize both? How does that help?
You are not supposed worry about the mapping. You trust the website to help decode it. You just remember the sentence. It's a little like what3words for coordinates.
The rationale being you are more likely to remember grammatical cogent sentence, than a random string of alphanumeric characters. Although I will agree that the generated sentences don't seem easy to remember. So I doubt it's utility.
What is the use-case for this? I’m trying to think of an IPv6 address I would need to remember, and then when I’d have access to this site without having access to a text file where I could have noted the address down. I’m coming up empty.
> How now the smart flies take the new time beyond new time where new times come.
..Nice idea, but it may need some more thought. (Even more so as 2001:db8::1 is much easier to remember than that!) (I wrote that parenthetical from memory on edit, vs. had to copy-paste the sentence when it was my intention to comment on it within seconds.)
So just imagine if there was a service that could translate any words you wanted into the IP address instead of relying on some website to generate jibberish. Wouldn't that be cool to use instead? Some kind of name system? Based around domains of authority?
Not too sure of the utility of this. It's not an easy sentence to remember, because while grammatical, it's nonsense—it would take some effort. So if I'm trying to memorize a static IP, setting up a DNS name is likely to be easier. And also if I'm going to be using this to memorize IPs I'd like the algorithm to be open source.
All that being said, I think it's a neat idea and a cool tool!
We kind of had the same idea for ECDSA public keys (an imagined solution to zokos triangle -- human readable and decentralized) as well as private keys (BIP39 brain wallets). Honestly it still falls short of truly name-based though.
I'm fine with 16 but they should have only used the bytes as they were needed, at least for 5 and 6 byte addresses, so those who desire short addresses could buy them.
If you're assigning addresses, you can make the addresses in a ULA as short as you want. You're supposed to use a random 40 bit network id but if you can accept that you may need to renumber at some point there is no reason you can't use fd12:b:a:d::beef or whatever.
Not because of the encryption element, but the part about representing a 64 bit integer as a six word sequence for usability.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/KEY#Usability).
Also used outside of that for quickly/easily recognising hash fingerprints.
(It's easier to recognise that your fingerprint is "GAFF WAIT SKID GIG SKY EYED" than "87FE C776 8B73 CCF9").
(It also slips some parity in there for good measure).
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8981#name-problem-s...
That said, I disagree with the parent statement that v6 isn't going to happen. It's already happening at a steady rate. From the Google stats it's steadily rolling out. Some countries are reaching 100% v6 deployment. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see some countries with high v6 deployments see services which are v6 only.
also I sure as hell dont remember my ipv4 address
There’s something to be said for human readable addresses. I’m a little nostalgic of how the .hack world was envisioned, where servers had address names like Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground.
If roughly 10 million words exist, then allowing any three words in order creates a space for 10^21 addresses… five words and you’re close to ipv6 address space, six words and there’s more combinations than ipv6 addresses.
I've never recognized an IPv6 address or prefix used in my networks.
If you want to be really wonky you can script DHCPv6 to statically assign ULA IPv6 leases that match the IPv4, and expire them when the IPv4 lease expires, but like said upthread, addressing hosts via IPv6 is the wrong way to go about it. On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".
.local is fine as long as all the daemons work correctly, but AFAIK there's no way to have SLAAC and put hosts in "normal" internal DNS, so .lan/.home/.internal are probably out.
The "official" is home.arpa according to RFC 8375 [1]:
[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8375".home" and ".lan" along with a bunch of other historic tlds are on the reserved list and cannot be registered.
Call techy people pathologically lazy but no one is going to switch to typing ".home.arpa" or ".internal". They should have stuck with the original proposal of making ".home" official, instead of sticking ".arpa" behind it. That immediately doomed the RFC.
Wow. That's so amazingly unpopular. Why anyone bothers talking about something untold millions of people use every day is beyond me.
You have to take into account seasonal trends. The summer is always higher, so yes, we’re currently below last summer, but we are above last April 1st, and this summer will be higher than last summer.
But I'm not sure that "How morally the enviable assistances categorize the insistent iodine beyond new time where new systems stalk" has the same memorable quality as "correct horse battery staple" does.
So then I need to use DNS. At which point it could be IPv6.
I have 56 host entries in my dnsmasq.conf.
The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".
CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.
IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).
"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
IPv6 predates those by decades.
They advertise it as being useful for search/rescue as you can provide a precise location over an unclear voice channel. They conveniently ignore that speaking numbers is clearer than speaking random words.
I'm sure there's more I'm unaware of.
They are missing feature of some codes that can have variable length for variable precision.
I’d really love to see things like this generate little jingles along with the sentence. :)
At least for me, part of the reason I can still sing the countries of the world is because the original Animaniacs song was set to a tune that was already familiar: “Jarabe Tapatío” (aka the Mexican Hat Dance).
Music, meter, and rhyme are all (among other things) algorithms for indexing and error-correction, tools very suitable to the squishy hardware.
Hard to forget a sentence like that!
Or more concisely, localhost.
That is a lot of words for ::1.
Edit: there was another one below, haha :)
And I don't think I ever typed manually any IPv6 address other than `::1`.
I use a simple one like `fd10::1/128` and `fd10::2/128` and so on
Technically speaking RFC 4193 says you should use random bits. But I don't care.
The rationale being you are more likely to remember grammatical cogent sentence, than a random string of alphanumeric characters. Although I will agree that the generated sentences don't seem easy to remember. So I doubt it's utility.
> How now the smart flies take the new time beyond new time where new times come.
..Nice idea, but it may need some more thought. (Even more so as 2001:db8::1 is much easier to remember than that!) (I wrote that parenthetical from memory on edit, vs. had to copy-paste the sentence when it was my intention to comment on it within seconds.)
All that being said, I think it's a neat idea and a cool tool!
[…] thaw the new case beyond pure mass where flagrant toys fucken.
despite being an ipv6 skeptic, i’ve been thinking to try using ipv6 for our new company network, but make the addresses purely readable