How to wish you hadn't forced ipv6 adoption (was "How to force rapid ipv6 adoption")

Sat Oct 3 14:35:30 UTC 2015

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 1:35 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

>
> > On Oct 1, 2015, at 21:47 , Rob McEwen <rob at invaluement.com> wrote:
> > Also, it seems so bizarre that in order to TRY to solve this, we have to
> make sure that MASSIVE numbers of individual IPv6 IP addresses.. that equal
> numbers that my calculate can't reach (too many digits)... would all be
> allocated to one single combined usage scenario. Then allocating only /48s
> multiples that number by 65K. Mind boggling
>
> You’ll get over that eventually. Once you get some experience with the
> conveniences and other advantages it brings, it’s actually pretty easy to
> wrap your head around.
>
>
I agree with Owen (and the others who have chimed in) on that one. As long
as you're thinking and talking about individual addresses you're stuck in
an IPv4 mindset. One of the points in having 64 bits reserved for the host
portion of the address is that you never need to think or worry about
individual addresses. IPv6 eliminates the address scarcity issue. There's
no reason to ever think about how many individual addresses are available
on any network. The answer is always more than enough. Instead you think
about networks and network size.

Also, good luck trying to shove the IPv6 genie back into the bottle. I
doubt you're going to have much success. I know my large organization has
seen the percentage of email traffic on our edge MTAs using IPv6 steadily
grow since we dual-stacked them back in 2012. It's been a while since I
checked with the organization responsible for them, but I believe it's
somewhere north of 10% of all email traffic now. (I know our heavily used
website has reached roughly 20% IPv6 traffic now.) So it's best to just
keep working on ways to manage spam in an IPv6 world since that's the
present reality.

Scott