[AusNOG] IPv6 Addressing

[Jones, Rick]

I think we can safely say that the magnitude of the numbers are such that the problem will not surface for a very long time, and the technology to manage it will be very, very different.  I know it sounds like we are putting our heads in the sand, but in fact we are not.

Ipv4 is able to deliver 1,677,216 /24 subnets (ignoring reserved addresses).
Ipv6 is able to deliver 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 /64 subnets (again ignoring reserved addresses).

Making the subnet smaller gives us very little practical benefit - CPUs like working with numbers on 32 bit boundaries and going to 79,228,162,514,264,300,000,000,000,000 /32 subnets gives us no practical benefit at all, unless we want to assign addresses at the atomic or sub-atomic level.

The benefit of /64 is that it is consistent across the Internet, and means that we can forget about the sizes of subnets once and for all.  The order of magnitude jump from 32 bits to 128 bits gives us 79,228,162,514,264,300,000,000,000,000 ipv4 address spaces to play with, far more than we are ever going to use in the next 40 years.

Cheers,
Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Mark Smith
Sent: Thursday, 7 April 2011 7:25 AM
To: Cameron
Cc: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net; 'David Hughes'
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] IPv6 Addressing

On Thu, 7 Apr 2011 06:52:32 +1000
"Cameron" <lists at nurve.com.au> wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net [mailto:ausnog-
> > bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Mark Andrews
> > Sent: Thursday, 7 April 2011 12:01 AM
> > To: David Hughes
> > Cc: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
> > Subject: Re: [AusNOG] IPv6 Addressing
> > 
> > 
> > If we use those up we can think about how we carve up the next 8th of the
> > IPv6 address space
> 
> Well when you put it that way, we're still got 240/4 that has been allocated
> for future use.
> 

There's 5/8ths left after the one Mark mentioned. Almost six except ::1,
and a few other things have been taken from outside the current 1/8th.

> I'd love to believe that we won't be reliving this in 10-20 years but it's
> hard when we've been here before and as far as I can see, we're making all
> the same mistakes just with bigger numbers.
> 

The mistakes being made a maths ones. 

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