Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion

Thu Jul 9 21:04:06 UTC 2015

----- On Jul 9, 2015, at 4:56 PM, Naslund, Steve SNaslund at medline.com wrote:

> Huh, since when does ANY application care about what size address allocation you
> have?  A V6 address is a 128 bit address period.  Any IPv6 aware application
> will handle addresses as a 128 bit variable.

The DHCPv6-PD server application on your router(s) might care.

> Does any application running on IPv4 care if you have a /28 or a /29?  In fact
> the application should not even be aware of what the net mask is because that
> is an OS function to handle the IP stack.  This argument makes no sense at all
> since every application will be able to handle any allocation size since it is
> not even aware what that is.  Any IPv6 compatible OS will not care either
> because they would be able to handle any number of masked bits.  No app
> developer has ever been tied into the size of a subnet since CIDR was invented.

For an application that doesn't do anything with IP addresses (allocating, etc.), it shouldn't matter, but that does not mean that there aren't applications for which it does.

-Randy