[AusNOG] IPv6 Addressing

[Mark Smith]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2011 22:10:06 +1000
David Hughes <David at hughes.com.au> wrote:

> 
> Convenience and efficiency are usually mutually exclusive (and yes, I did jumper an ARCnet address in the dark ages, although I won't admit that in public .... :)
> 

I think efficiency only matters if the costs of being inefficient are
unacceptable.

If the following was a reasonable belief, and as it has
turned out to be true one, for the Ethernet people in 1981 -

"48-bit host numbers lead to large Ethernet and internet packets. We
believe that this will not pose a problem as both local and public data
networks continue to offer higher bandwidths at reasonable costs, and
the memory and logic costs associated with storing and processing these
numbers continue to become lower with the advances in LSI technology."

http://ethernethistory.typepad.com/papers/HostNumbers.pdf

it should easily be true in 2011 at layer 3, so addressing bits can
and are cheap, therefore "excessive" address spaces, when they
provide operational convenience, have a useful value. I don't remember
anybody complaining about 80 bit IPX addresses in the 90s, and
having learnt IPv4 post-IPX, I still remember wondering why it all had
to be so complicated.

Regards,
Mark.

p.s., ARCnet is still around (apparently), and it has much simpler
addressing than that complicated Ethernet and TCP/IP thing -

"Unlike TCP/IP/Ethernet networks with complex 48-bit addressing and
assignment, ARCNET nodes can only number 255 and can be set by a simple
8-position DIP switch".

http://www.arcnet.com/abtarc.htm

Awesome, not only do you get to fiddle with DIP switches, you get to
learn decimal to binary too, and about recovering from link layer
addressing collisions if you don't get it right!