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IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

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121–130 of 143 posts

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#121

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 Tapa…

I memorized that (and several other) Animaniacs songs without being familiar with the melody. Even Tom Lehrer’s The Elements reached me before Pirates of Penzance did. I think the melody just needs to be simple, then it'll become ”familiar” quickly.

However, for the use-case at hand (remembering IPv6 addresses) I don't think I'd use that. I'd just write them down somewhere, like, uh, perhaps, oh I know: the hosts file.

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#123
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home users would ideally be served by things like mDNS and LLMNR, which should just work in the background. If I want to connect to the thermostat I should be able to just go to http://honeywell-thermostat and have it work. If I want to connect to the printer it should just be ipp://brother and I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server.

And if DNS fails, I have to use a serial console to get into my router and fix it, because I can't remember what address to type in ssh?

Your interface has a default gateway configured for it, doesn't it? Isn't that default gateway the router? NDP should show the local routers through router advertisements. There is also LLDP to help find such devices. LLMNR/mDNS provides DNS services even without a centralized nameserver (hence the whole "I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server"). So much out there other than just memorizing numbers. I've been working with IPv6 for nearly 20 years and I've never had an issue of "what was the IP address of the local router", because there's so many ways to find devices.

Even then nobody is stopping you from giving them memorable IP addresses. Giving your local router a link-local address of fe80::1 is perfectly valid. Or if you're needing larger networking than just link-local and have memorable addresses use ULAs and have the router on network one be fd00:1::1, the router on network two be fd00:2::1, the router on network three be fd00:3::1, etc. Is fe80::1 or fd00:1::1 really that much harder to memorize than 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1, if you're really super gung-ho about memorizing numbers?

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#124
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... How do you connect to another PC on your network? Always use DNS or something?

> Always use DNS or something? Yes. mDNS if we're talking about home networks.

That doesn't work across VLANs very well, how do you manage that?

Or devices that don't offer mDNS?

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#125
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS should be auto configured and work with multiple redundancy these days. If it breaks, so much that you cannot do a dig, you need to re think your network.

My DNS "server" is a router which can "add" static entries. Easy with static addresses, won't work with dynamic addresses. What redundancy, multiple servers? Do you think everybody runs dedicated homelabs to access a raspberry pi.

> My DNS "server" is a router which can "add" static entries...won't work with dynamic addresses.

Sounds like a pretty poor setup, systems which could auto-add DHCP'd or discovered entries have been around for literally decades. You're choosing to live in that limitation.

> What redundancy, multiple servers?

Multicast name resolution is a thing. Hosts can send out queries and other devices can respond back. You don't need a centralized DNS server to have functional DNS.

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#126
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree wrt NAT. It creates huge problems for many p2p applications.

I wouldn't call port forwarding "huge problems". It's only one minor router setting and if you don't want to deal with it, there's the abomination called upnp.

> I wouldn't call port forwarding "huge problems".

Port forwarding has massive problems if you're running applications expecting certain ports and need multiple hosts to have public access to those ports.

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#127
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always use DNS or something? Yes. mDNS if we're talking about home networks.

That doesn't work across VLANs very well, how do you manage that? Or devices that don't offer mDNS?

A home network has neither of those, you're running a nerd network. You can set up an mDNS relay, and those devices can use other methods to register their addresses & get DNS updated (DHCPv6, DDNS, random cloud services, etc.).

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#128
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your ipv4 address, 127.0.0.1. :) 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 com…

Scrabble is 250-280k uk edition - wouldn't want to go too much beyond that I suspect. Where'd 10 mil come from?

Across 7000 languages in the world including non-latin alphabets…

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#129
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Tapa…

I memorized that (and several other) Animaniacs songs without being familiar with the melody. Even Tom Lehrer’s The Elements reached me before Pirates of Penzance did. I think the melody just needs to be simple, then it'll become ”familiar” quickly. However, for the use-case at hand (remembering IPv6 addresses) I don't think I'd use that. I'd just write them down somewhere, like, uh, perhaps, oh I know: the hosts fil…

“Catchiness” is probably more important than anything, hence the concept of the earworm aka stuck song syndrome. Even SOTA GenAI like Suno/Udio fall pretty short of generating genuinely engaging melodies.

Re: IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember

#130

ipv6 is for faceless hordes of cellphones, which could just as easily be NAT despite being an ipv6 skeptic, i’ve been thinking to try using ipv6 for our new company network, but make the addresses purely readable

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.

Yes I'm going to generate random numbers until the number I generate is fd77::
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