Using IPv6 with prefixes shorter than a /64 on a LAN

[jfbeam at gmail.com (Ricky Beam)]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:46:19 -0500, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> Dude... In IPv6, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 /64s.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

"Dude, there are 256 /8 in IPv4."

"640k ought to be enough for anyone."

People can mismange anything into oblivion.  IPv6 will end up the same  
mess IPv4 has become. (granted, it should take more than 30 years this  
time.)

> The largest ISPs have thousands (not tens of thousands) of  
> point-to-point links.

Having worked for small ISPs, I can count over 10k ptp links.  That number  
goes way up when you count dialup and DSL.

>>> You should think of IPv6 as a 64-bit address that happens to include a
>>> 64-bit host identifier.
>>
>> No, you should not.  That underminds the fundamental concept of IPv6  
>> being *classless*.  And it will lead to idiots writing broken  
>> applications and protocols assuming that to be true.
>>
> True, but, in terms of deploying networks, unless you have a really good
> reason not to, it is best to use /64 for all segments.

Again, the only reason for this /64 class boundry is SLAAC.  The network  
is still 128 bits; you still have to pay attention to ALL of those bits.

(Remember, SLAAC started out as a /80.)

> Blindly, no. However, it's not impractical to implement fast path  
> switching that
> handles things on /64s and push anything that requires something else
> to the slow path.

Any router that does CPU switching is already trash.  High speed, low  
latency routing and switches is done in silicon (fpga's); it is not hoised  
to a general purpose CPU.

For consumer devices, (almost) everything is done by the CPU to make it  
cheap. (some actually have tiny single chip switches in there.)

--Ricky