IPv6 Addressing Help

Tue Aug 18 00:22:50 UTC 2009

William Herrin wrote:
> The future looks a lot like the past but with more blinking lights.
> Seriously, I'm pretty nuts when it comes to networking. My basement is
> AS11875, multihomed with about 35mbps of bandwidth. If I can't imagine
> how *I* would use more than 16 subnets then it's a safe bet that many
> years will pass before Joe random DSL customer wants to.

The the Dell sitting on my desk has something like 15 VMs spread across
6 or so discrete subnets, the host has a public v4 address as does one
of vm's along with about two dozen private addresses, they're
interconnected with some boxes in the closet, via two ethernets and
several vlans. The box is using a /61 on the v6 side...

> The world won't end, even if you assign every customer a /48. But why
> be so grossly wasteful *before* anyone has demonstrated a practical
> use for doing so?

Why is is necessary insist that using bits in a fashion that doesn't
require that growth be predicated on requests for additional resources
be considered wasteful?

> 
>> I guess you ran the numbers on how to run out of IPv6 address space?
> 
> IIRC, RIPE allocated a /19 to France Telecom. Doesn't take more than a
> few hundred thousand allocations like that one to wipe out the IPv6
> address space.
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
> 
> 