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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • Whenever I’ve come across mDNS it was unstable and not installed. Bonjour was distributed with iTunes and sucked (15y ago). I could see mDNS supplying additional info for a configuration tool, but the IP layer remains reliant on IPs.

    What bugs me is that IPv6 has built-in neighbor discovery that almost does what mDNS does, which could just have included a hostname… It’s a replacement for ARP and only ARP.




  • One of the main issues I think is holding IPv6 back is that we keep needing to memorize IPs and type them by hand. 192.168.0.16, 172.16.0.0/12, and 10.0.0.0/8 are easy to remember, and usually it’s just the last number that’s important, anyway, because we all use 192.168.1.0/24 by default.

    But then IPv6 comes along with /48 prefixes and endless numbers to read, analyze (same subnet? typos?), memorize or write down. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

    IPv6 would have to integrate some sort of DNS resolver on a network level so that people can work with computer names. That would make the hostname actually relevant and not have every Windows be called DESKTOP-W38D6M5P. If you already have a separate DNS service, it’s only the registration step that has slightly more friction, but still.

    E: I guess you could argue that it’s a UI problem. IPv6 has neighbor discovery and the UI can just show a list to choose from. Still no hostnames, though. Is configuration part of a layer’s responsibility?