Introducing draft-denog-v6ops-addresspartnaming

Tue Nov 23 15:30:18 UTC 2010

> If we can't choose mouthful (which for some reason sounds thematically
> correct), "chunk" gets my vote.
> *(Chunk = Maybe not the most technical, but has been working for me all
> along ...)*

Chunk is at least the proper English term for these bits between the
colons. The process of breaking up a long string into shorter
substrings is already known as "chunking". With IPv4, the chunking was
done on octet boundaries so people used the specific term "octet"
instead of the more general "chunk". But in the absence of a specific
term, chunk is the correct and proper way to refer to these bits.

IPv6 addresses are chunked into 16 bit chunks and each chunk is
written down in hexadecimal notation with a colon between the chunks.
For example, 805B:2D9D:DC28:0000:0000:FC57:D4C8:1FFF. Of course there
are some other rules that allow for shorter strings but they all start
with the 8 chunks separated by colons. The last 4 chunks represent the
interface identifier and the first 4 chunks are the network prefix.

-- Michael Dillon