nanog mailing list archives

Re: IPv6 Ignorance


From: John Mitchell <mitch () illuminati org>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:28:09 +0100

I think people forget how humongous the v6 space is...

Remember that the address space is 2^128 (or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses) to put the in perspective (and a great sample that explained to me how large it was, you will still get 667 quadrillion address per square millimetre of the Earth’s Surface.

There's a great article on the myths and debunks of the address space at http://rednectar.net/2012/05/24/just-how-many-ipv6-addresses-are-there-really/ one of the things it talks about is the /64 and /48 allocation.

<snip>
> Given that the first 3 bits of a public IPv6 address are always 001, giving /48 allocations to customers means that service providers will only have 2^(48-3) or 2^45 allocations of /48 to hand out > to a population of approximately 6 billion people. 2^33 is over 8 billion, so assuming a population of 2^33, there will be enough IPv6 /48 allocations to cater for 2^(45-33) or 2^12 or 4096 IPv6 > address allocations per user in the world."
</snip>

- Mitch -


On 17/09/12 04:23, Randy Bush wrote:
[ yes, there are a lot of idiots out there.  this is not new.  but ]

"We are totally convinced that the factors that made IPv4 run out of
addresses will remanifest themselves once again and likely sooner than
a lot of us might expect given the "Reccomendations" for "Best
Practice" deployment."
while i am not "totally convinced," i am certainly concerned.  we are
doing many of the same things all over again.  remember when rip forced
a homogenous, often classful, mask length in a network and we chewed
through /24s?  think /64 in ipv6, except it's half the bits not 1/4 of
them.  remember when we gave out As and Bs willy nilly?  look at the
giant swaths of v6 we give out today in the hopes that someone will
deploy it.

and don't bs me with how humongous the v6 address space is.  we once
though 32 bits was humongous.

randy



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