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“it’s easy peasy” says guy who demonstrably already knows and has time to learn a bunch of shit 99.9% of people don’t have the background or inclination to.

People like you talking about IPv6 have the same vibe as someone bewildered by the fact that 99.9% of people can’t explain even the most basic equation of differential or integral calculus. That bewilderment is ignorance.



These people apparently had the time and inclination to learn a bunch of shit about IPv4, though.

"Easy" is meant in that context. The people acting like the IPv4 version is easy.

So your second paragraph doesn't fit the situation at all.


"The shit about IPv4" was easy to learn and well documented and supported.

"The shit about IPv6" is a mess of approaches that even the biggest fanboys can't agree on and are even less available on equipment used by people in prod.

IPv6 has failed wide adoption in 30 decades, calling it "easy" is outright denying the reality and shows the utter dumb obliviousness of people trying to push it and failing to realize where the issues are.


Could you share a list of IPv6 issues that IPv4 does not exhibit? Something that becomes materially harder with IPv6? E.g., "IPv6 addresses are long and unwieldy, hard to write down or remember". What else?


Traffic shapping in v6 is harder than v4. At least it was for me, because NDP messages were going into the shaping queue, but then getting lost since the queue only had a 128 bit address field, and 128 bits isn't actually enough for local addresses. When the traffic shaping allowed traffic immediately, the NDP traffic would be sent, but if it needed to be queued, the adapter index would get lost (or something) and the packets disappeared. So I'd get little bursts of v6 until NDP entries timed out and small queues meant a long time before it would work again.

Not an issue in ipv4 because ARP isn't IPv4 so IP traffic shaping ignores it automatically.


Software support is a big one. I ran pfSense. It did not support changing IPv6 prefixes. It still barely does. So something as simple has having reliable IPv6 connectivity and firewall rules with pfSense was impossible just a few years ago for me.

Android doesn't support DHCPv6 so I can't tell it my preferred NTP server, and Android silently ignores your local DNS server if it is advertised with a IPv4 address and the Android device got a IPv6 address.

Without DHCPv6 then dynamic DNS is required for all servers. Even a 56 bit prefix is too much to remember, especially when it changes every week. So then you need to install and configure a dynamic DNS client on all servers in your network.


"I already know enough to be productive, can the rest of the world please freeze and stop changing?"

This is not even that unreasonable. Sadly, the number of IP devices in the world by now far exceeds the IPv4 address space, and other folks want to do something about that. They hope the world won't freeze but would sort of progress.


Network engineering is a profession requiring specific education. At a high level it’s not different from calculus. You learn certain things and then you learn how to apply them in the real life situations.

It’s not hard for people who get an appropriate education and put some effort into it. Your lack of education is not my ignorance.




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