Comment by inigyou

4 days ago

All global IPv6 addresses start with 2. This is by design. Pedantically, 3 is also reserved for global. Some other prefixes are also reserved, like fd for the ULA (local) range.

The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.

>The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.

lol, there is no doubt that had a massive opposite effect. To the point of nearly killing it in terms of willingness to adopt.

  • I know that on my hosted server, I never bothered to set it up, because I didn't know how to properly configure or sub-net it. I know it's skill issue, but really feels significantly more complicated and even harder to understand than NAT even.

    Not to mention, at home, most of the ads I do see (PiHole) are IPv6 addresses.

    • No network is "smaller" than /64. All end-networks are /64.

      Split subnets at four bit chunks.

      Allocated networks, like to a home or small office, should be /56 or /60.

      Then you have to think about link-local addresses and privacy addresses, and how to hand out IPv6 and configure DNS: SLAAC vs. DHCPv6 or some combination.

      I have a rough draft of a beginner document but it's not ready. :)

      3 replies →

  • How many /24s does your organisation have? With IPv6, one block is almost always sufficient.

    • It's mental that my fairly techy-orientated but otherwise pretty standard UK ISP provides me with a /48 as default.

      So I have 1.2 million million million million IPv6 addresses available.

      That ought to be enough, eh?

      2 replies →

The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long that we don't run out of them in 20 years or so.

There fixed that for you.

  • The problem is NAT solved the same problem more easily and cheaply. It was at the cost of making it difficult for every host to talk directly to every other host, but it turned out most of the people building networks didn't want that feature anyway.

    • It's been a strong centralisation pressure on the internet. Centralisation is bad.

  • We already ran out of ipv4 about 15 years AGO.

    64 bits would be enough to avoid run out, but hierarchical allocation would still be a problem. 128 bits is long enough for many levels of hierarchy. (And yes, you can subnet all the bits, not just the first 64)