nanog mailing list archives

Re: any interesting/useful resources available to IPv6 only?


From: Doug Barton <dougb () dougbarton us>
Date: Sun, 5 May 2019 19:31:37 -0700

On 5/3/19 1:33 PM, Mohammad Khalil wrote:
Hello all
I have prepared something in the past you might find useful (hopefully).

First, it's considered rude to send attachments of any size to a mailing list, never mind one that's almost 2 megs in size. Much better to put it on a web site somewhere and send a URL.

Second, I normally wouldn't respond to something like this, except that there are so many errors and bad ideas in your document that I felt compelled to respond lest someone find it in the archives and rely on it. I will assume that your intentions were good here, however your results are dangerous, in the sense that someone reading your document would be worse off than if they had not read it.

Taking one tidbit from one of your early paragraphs, "The IPv6 protocol creates a 128-bit address, four times the size of the 32-bit IPv4 standard." There is, sort of, a sense in which you could say that the addresses themselves are four times the size, but it creates a dangerous impression that the total address space of IPv6 is only four times the size of IPv4; and it's the address space that is the thing actually worth talking about.

Many of your other errors also involve math, which suggests a lack of understanding of basic networking concepts, binary math, etc. For example, "With 264 available addresses per segment, it is highly unlikely to see prefix lengths shorter than /64 for segments that host end systems." A /64 segment in IPv6 has 2^64 address, or the entire IPv4 address range, squared. Maybe you meant to say 2^64 and forgot the exponent indicator? Given that you correctly identify exponents in other sections, it's hard to tell.

The document is also out of date in regards to the latest protocol changes, deprecations, etc.; and further out of date in regards to how operators are actually implementing IPv6.

Again, sorry to pile on ...

If anyone is looking for a pretty good introduction to the basics of IPv6 the Wikipedia article is a good start.

hope this helps,

Doug


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