this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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Context:

People have been asking for IPv6 Support on GitHub since years (probably a decade by now)

... and someone even got so annoyed that they decided to setup a dedicated website for checking this: https://isgithubipv6.live/

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (9 children)

whats the problem with IPv4?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

IPv6 changed some things. First and foremost it has a huge address space:

  • IPv4: 4294967296 (2^32)
  • IPv6: 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (2^128)

Then they simplyfied some things:

  • Removed Broadcast in favor of Multicast and Anycast
  • Added autoconfiguration without a DHCP server
  • Better subnetting support

And much more

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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.

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