this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
814 points (98.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
19488 readers
1147 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They went just a teeny tiny little bit overboard with the address space. Ipv4 is four groups between 0 and 255, ipv6 is eight groups of four digit hex, 0000 to ffff - e.g the Google DNS ipv4 address is 8.8.8.8. the ipv6 one is 2001:4860:4860:0:0:0:0:8888 (thankfully at least some devices allow using :: to skip all the zeroes, so it's "just" 2001:4860:4860::8888)
But we now have enough ipv6 addresses to give more than 10 billion ipv6 addresses to every single grain of sand on earth, and still have some left over.
They never wanted to worry about address space size again. And this makes subnetting much easier. I have a /56 allocation so I could do 256 /64 subnets. I hope that at some point home routers will have the option for seperate subnets built in. This way you could easily have guest, IoT, work or whatever networks without NAT.
One thing you have to consider though is that the minimum network size that allows autoconf is /64 and that because of the privacy extension a device usually has 3-4 IPv6 adresses.
as is seemingly standard for bit range increases. y2038 is now y2,900,000,000 due to added a silly amount of bits.