IPv6 should concede to using v4 addresses, for now
1. legacy ip allocations are a huge mess, largely due to growth - mirroring that haphazard, patchwork allocation model for ipv6 would be obscenely inefficient &amp; make the v6 dfz table as bad as the legacy ip counterpart<p>2. as much as 41% of the world already has ipv6 - why should they not continue what they’re doing?<p>3. “Not only is v4 still around, but the phrase &quot;IP address&quot; is generally understood to mean v4.” no, that’s really not a thing.<p>4. “Say a device&#x27;s IPv4 address is 71.177.17.171 (seriously I used to have this one). Maybe I also get v6 address 2345:0425:2CA1:::0567:5673:23b5.” …what? how did you get from point a to point b? i would have expected something containing 47 b1 11 ab but…what?<p>5. “Even making it a longer octal like 71.177.17.171.77.111.11.11 would&#x27;ve been easier for most people.” that’s…not octal. an octal representation of that ip would be 107 261 21 253 which is…not really an improvement, i don’t think?<p>6. “When I mentioned this to some network expert colleagues over lunch (I&#x27;m no expert), they each said, the human-unfriendly v6 addresses are a feature to encourage use of DNS within an enterprise system.” the idea of hexadecimal addresses is intended to be more user-friendly than a long string of unnecessarily verbose octets like 251.82.40.105.0.49.61.129.87.46.0.0.31.96.255 . should you be using dns? sure - but you also should be using it for legacy ip. can you memorize legacy ip addresses? yes. can many ppl also memorize ipv6 addresses? also yes. should either of those things be standard practice? no - there are better uses for brain cells.<p>7. “The common enterprise workaround is predictable.” no, it’s not. nat46 is rarely used. nat64 is much, much more common. (the common enterprise “workaround” is “stonewall on ipv6 as long as possible.”)<p>8. “Humans should even represent such padded v6 address in the v4 octal notation;” oh. there’s the problem: legacy ip addresses aren’t octal, they’re decimal. have you genuinely never seen a legacy ip address containing an 8 or 9? wait. do you know what octal is? (also, there’s an octet missing from my example two points above. did you notice?)<p>9. “Slow adoption has usually been blamed on old systems, but I&#x27;m getting tired of that explanation.” i’m getting tired of harebrained THIS IS HOW WE SHOULD OF DONE IPV6 theories that are 20+ years too late, but here we are.