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IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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This is a hill I'm willing to die on: the reason nobody wants to use ipv6 is the fucking colons.
You don't need to use shift to type in an ipv4 address.
It's fucking stupid and annoying.
Nah, it's that the tooling on the infrastructure side still sucks in current year. Why tf as an AT&T customer can I not get more than one PD from upstream without editing my dhcpc conf? And why can my gateway, once getting multiple PDs, not tell me which ones I've assigned out to subinterfaces? Not to mention there's still infrastructure devices which can't have v6 management interfaces, layer3 switches which can't act as RAs, all sorts of shit like that.
Isn't the recommended strategy to delegate a larger prefix to the gateway and then make smaller subnetworks from that for each interface? Then you don't have to deal with separate prefixes.
It is. How At&t handles it is they hand out only 1 /64 of the delagted /60 (by default) per explicit IA-PD request, rather than the full /60 they allocate by default (which, note, is not on a nibble boundry like it's supposed to be, and you only get half of that as usable).
But on every gateway device I've used, even if you get a full /56 prefix, you still have to explicitly assign out each /64 to sub interfaces. Really, ipv6 is a bunch of great ideas which were ruined by shitty implementations everywhere.
Wow that's extremely annoying.
On openwrt, you just tell the interface to grab a /64 from any other interface that tags its delegation as shareable. And on the source interface you can specify with what priority those /64s are given out.
That seems reasonable to me as far as implementations go. The ones where they will autoassign always just overload pd index 0 which is worse than doing nothing imo lmao
Exactly. Most good ISPs will give you a /56 or /60 range if your router asks for it, and then you can subnet it into multiple /64 ranges (16 /64 networks for a /60, or 256 networks for a /56).
I have three VLANs with internet access (main, guest, and IoT), and each one gets its own /64 range.
Note that you shouldn't use subnets smaller than a /64, as several features (such as SLAAC and privacy extensions) rely on it.
it seems so silly an oversight of ipv6. sometimes you just can't have /64 subnets because the ISP only gives you a single /64
That's an ISP being dumb, not a problem with ipv6.
Especially annoying since colons are already used to specify port number. Sure you can put it all inside [], but that just makes it even uglier.
That does bother me a bit
Plus you can type a v4 address with one hand on the numeric keypad alone.
not in europe, we have a colon there
If caps lock changed + to : and made the rest of the stuff on the sides of the number pad into a through... (f?) by default, I no shitting, honestly believe we'd see a huge uptick in ipv6 adoption.
It seems like such a small thing but it's the kind of inconvenience that, repeated SO MANY TIMES over the course of a long period will make you want to destroy things.
Why would you do this?
Sometimes you gotta access your router. Especially when it's giving you headaches.
How often do you type IP addresses? That's what DNS is for. The only time I use IPs is when I haven't configured a DNS record yet (and in the DNS configuration, of course).
MORE TIMES THAN THERE ARE ATOMS IN THE UNIVERSE, CHILD.
IT IS THE ONLY WAY I CAN CUM IF I CANNOT CUM THEN I CANNOT SHUM AND IF I STOP SHUMMING ALL THE UNIVERSE CEASES TO EXIST.
someone get this guy a ten key and a box of kleenex
Just rely on DNS. After all, it's not like there are memes on its legendary reliability.
There are some things you shouldn't use DNS for such as DNS. However, IPv6 has build in shorthand notation that makes it much easier.
And harder to remember when trying to ssh into your servers
This issue can’t really be fixed, more addresses inherently means larger addresses.
If anything I’d say IPv6 works to mitigate this by making each byte 2 characters
You can use short hands or dns
ssh aliases changed my life
It doesn't seem like that big of deal