I’m curious about something so I’m going to throw this thought experiment out here. For some background I run a pure IPv6 network and dove into v6 ignoring any v4 baggage so this is more of a devils advocate question than anything I genuinely believe.

Onto the question, why should I run a /64 subnet and waste all those addresses as opposed to running a /96 or even a /112?

  1. It breaks SLAAC and Android

let’s assume I don’t care for whatever reason and I’m content with DHCP, maybe android actually supports DHCP in this alternate universe

  1. It breaks RFC3306 aka Unicast-prefix-based multicast groups

No applications I care about are impacted by this breakage

  1. It violates the purity of the spec

I don’t care

What advantages does running a /64 provide over smaller subnets? Especially subnets like a /96 where address count still far exceeds usage so filling subnets remains impossible.

  • @MSgtRedFoxEnglish
    1•6 months ago

    will not exhaust for over 100 years

    This is outside the scope of your question and old, but I keep seeing something like this as a justification for not caring about conservation like v4 limitations. I have questions though.

    v4 has been around for ~50 years?

    Does everyone likely believe that we’ll replace the protocol before then? So there’s no need to worry about having a repeat take place?

    Doee anyone thing it’s weird that we are repeating previous unforeseen requirements? IBM said there’d never need to be more than so many KBs of RAM, etc.

    Do we think the rate of IP enabled devices will increase, decrease, or stay the same as we progress through that up coming 100 years?

    I suppose we’ll just migrate to a new protocol version when we finally get that colony on Mars, expand all over the universe and run out of the infinite IP space 😉

    • slazer2auEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      We may replace it by then, but when people quote the 100 year thing like I have we sometimes forget to mention that is in reference to the current allocated 2000::/3 block.
      We have several other blocks reserved for future use which will take several hundred years each to use up.

      If we find a more efficient way of using address space then we can use those methods for the other /3 blocks.