Waste will kill ipv6 too

Mel Beckman mel at beckman.org
Wed Dec 20 18:48:25 UTC 2017


I won’t do the math for you, but you’re circumcising the mosquito here. We didn’t just increase our usable space by 2 orders of magnitude. It’s increased more than 35 orders of magnitude. 

Using a /64 for P2P links is no problem, really. Worrying about that is like a scuba diver worrying about how many air molecules are surrounding the boat on the way out to sea. 

There’s plenty, and until we colonize Alpha Centauri Bb, there will continue to be plenty :)

They’re just integers, after all. 

 -mel

> On Dec 20, 2017, at 10:23 AM, Mike <mike-nanog at tiedyenetworks.com> wrote:
> 
> On 12/17/2017 08:31 PM, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
>> some fun examples of the size of ipv6:
>> 
>> https://samsclass.info/ipv6/exhaustion-2016.htm
>> 
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2qxgxw/self_just_how_big_is_ipv6/
>> 
> 
> 
> Every time I see these "Look how many more addresses we have now with
> IPv6", I just shake my head.
> 
>   Yes, the address space is very large. But, all of the protocols, all
> of the addressing guides, all of the operational 'best practices', ALL
> OF IT, increases by orders of magnitude the amount of waste along with
> it. Call this the 'shavings', in IPv4 for example, when you assign a P2P
> link with a /30, you are using 2 and wasting 2 addresses. But in IPv6,
> due to ping-pong and just so many technical manuals and other advices,
> you are told to "just use a /64' for your point to points. So, the
> actual waste is dilutes the actual implementable size of the total ipv6
> address space due to the waste component. And I have not yet seen any
> study or even proposed theory to explore what the IPv6 Internet would
> look like, if used in place of all IPv4 in all the places and ways that
> it's used. I think, in time, we will discover that we have only
> increased our usable ip space by no more than 2 orders of magnitude over
> that which is achieved in ipv4, and we will be looking again at a global
> ip protocol upgrade I bet within my lifetime. While we are at it, why is
> nobody thinking or talking about the looming exhaustion of ieee OUI
> addresses? Network cards made 15 years ago and since consigned to the
> electronics scrap heap in the sky, take with them their addresses never
> to be reused again (unless you are a freak like me and keep some for
> 'positively never assigned anywhere'). And old dead companies that were
> assigned OUIs, they get 24 bits of address space to take to their
> graves. We should be re-thinking mac addressing altogether too.
> 
> (Please no hate mail, these opinions are strictly mine...)
> 
> Mike-
> 



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