Using IPv6 with prefixes shorter than a /64 on a LAN

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Jan 26 17:05:48 UTC 2011


On Jan 25, 2011, at 2:07 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:17:59 EST, Ricky Beam said:
>> On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:46:19 -0500, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>>> Dude... In IPv6, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 /64s.
>> 
>> Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
>> 
>> "Dude, there are 256 /8 in IPv4."
>> 
>> "640k ought to be enough for anyone."
>> 
>> People can mismange anything into oblivion.  IPv6 will end up the same  
>> mess IPv4 has become. (granted, it should take more than 30 years this  
>> time.)
> 
> To burn through all the /48s in 100 years, we'll have to use them up
> at the rate of 89,255 *per second*.
> 
> That implies either *really* good aggregation, or your routers having enough
> CPU to handle the BGP churn caused by 90K new prefixes arriving on the Internet
> per second.  Oh, and hot-pluggable memory, you'll need another terabyte of RAM
> every few hours.  At that point, running out of prefixes is the *least* of your
> worries.
> 
This presumes that we don't run out of /48s by installing them in routers a /20 at a time.

Owen





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