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We don't talk about IPv5
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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Just my perspective as a controls (SCADA engineer):
I work for a large power company. We have close to 100 sites, each with hundreds of IP devices, and have never had a problem with ipv4. Especially when im out in the field I love being able to check IPs, calculate gateways, etc at a glance. Ipv6 is just completely freaking unreadable.
I see the value of outward-facing ipv6 devices (i.e. devices on the internet), considering we are out of ipv4s. But I don't see why we have to convert private networks to ipv6. Put more bluntly: at least industry, it just isn't gonna happen for decades (if it ever does). Unless you need more IPs it's just worse to work with. And there's a huge amount of inertia- got one singular device that doesn't talk ipv6 at a given generation site? What are you supposed to do?
i've done both ipv4 and v6, but never embedded. from my perspective, ipv6 addresses can be easier to remember and use, with a little clever arrangement of zeros and especially because they're hexadecimal. that's in addition to the way more elegant way the protocol itself handles various things. obviously not worth upgrading systems that don't even need dhcp, but that applies to a lot of things in that field
90% of industrial devices are still 100 Mbit/s.
I mean that's of the ethenet capable ones... a huge chunk are still serial
I was going to say, my friend has to maintain some fucking DOS systems because their ancient embroidery machines only want to talk to software as old as they are, over connections as old as they are.
And the rest are pure analog
You'll be lucky if you find ethernet on them. RJ45 serial is still pretty common nowadays
If you set up your DNS correctly then you don't even need the IPs. Just give devices unique, human-readable names and maybe do separate sub-domains for each site or something.
For that to work industrial devices have to support DNS in the first place…
Oh, now that you mention it I've never tried to map a static DNS entry to a device without DNS. Welp, time to get thousands of raspberry pi's to act as IP KVMs!
That would imply en existence of display/usb outputs…
We’re essentially talking a bunch of embedded devices talking to each other. You can give them all the dns entries you want, but if they (or the programming environment) don’t support DNS lookup you might as well put your dns server in excel.
The microcomputers (raspberry pi, arduino, whatever) could have a modern network interface and relay the communication to the embedded devices over oldschool serial. But yeah, straight DNS wouldn't work. I like the idea though, gonna start posting my 10 favorite IP addresses on a piece of paper on the fridge. Who needs excel!
I’m a protective relay settings engineer at a contractor for lots of power companies. I’m dipping my toes into my first substation automation project. Getting to design the device native files, IPs, and other networking parts from the drawings package of site and device manuals. It’s all SEL equipment with a gateway at the top and local powerWAN, RTAC, annunciators, and relays below. I live thousands of miles from the site, so local testing would be challenging but probably have to fly or something lol. I have been doing some research on how to emulate this is a lab setting when all you have is the RTAC and some relays. Is this something SCADA engineers have to do sometimes? Like if you need to test a scheme when you can’t build it physically first?