IPv6 Ignorance

Mon Sep 17 04:22:21 UTC 2012

On Mon, 17 Sep 2012, Randy Bush wrote:

> and don't bs me with how humongous the v6 address space is.  we once 
> though 32 bits was humongous.

Giving out a /48 to every person on earth uses approximately 2^33 
networks, meaning we could cram it into a /15. So even if we have 10 /48s 
at home from different providers, we're still only using a small fraction 
of the first /3. If we get this wrong, we have several more /3s to get it 
right in.

You already know this, and I can't really believe that people sat down in 
the 70ties and 80ties and said "there is never going to be more than 128 
large corporations that need a /8 in IPv4" ?

I start to get worried when people want to map 32 bits into IPv6 in 
several places, for instance telling all ISPs that they can have a /24 so 
that we can produce IPv4 mapped /56 to end customer, and make this space 
permanent. Temporary is fine, permanent is not.

So I agree with you that there is still a risk that this is going to get 
screwed up, but I don't feel too gloomy yet.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se