5 ms·

And oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6. My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got

And oddly enough, this seems to be happening all over again with ipv6. My company has a /32 ipv6 space. That's 79228162514264337593543950336 /128s. And we got it by... just asking for it. I know everyone's shouting about "there are enough IPs for every atom on earth!" but just like "no one understood that over half of all humans would be on the internet", maybe we'll need more IPs in the future becuase of some unforeseen development... it seems silly to be handing out blocks like this just for giggles.

gvx 8y ago
That seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.
- nolok 8y ago
  We would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.
PC_LOAD_LETTER 8y ago
Yeah, we can only give out 4,294,967,295 more /32s to large companies.
- nolok 8y ago
  So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy
nikeee 8y ago
People start encoding information in IPv6 addresses because the address space is so huge. This however, could lead to address shortage. There was an article about this recently on the German news site Heise: https://heise.de/-4196981 https://heise.de/-4196981 Translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fheise.de%2F-4196981&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
cesarb 8y ago
They thought of that; the current allocation scheme will be used for IIRC only 1/8 of the IPv6 address space. If that's ever exhausted, there's still the other 7/8 which can be allocated in a more conservative manner.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Apparently not for every atom. The space is small enough to save us from grey goo scenario, at least until nanobots invent NAT. https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/
BillinghamJ 8y ago
I believe it's more like every atom in the universe. Which means that inherently it is enough. But indeed it is still best to be somewhat careful.

gvx 8y ago

That seems wasteful, but that is the equivalent to getting a single IPv4 address by asking for it, and the IPv4 shortage wasn't caused by the distribution of individual addresses. It's a world of difference to getting a /8 by asking for it.

nolok 8y ago
We would still have ipv4 shortage that way though, not enough to give one to everyone, let alone the several we need. Same here, this might seem a crazy problem to worry about, but they're handing out ranges of size large enough that there isn't enough to give one to any person alive.

PC_LOAD_LETTER 8y ago

Yeah, we can only give out 4,294,967,295 more /32s to large companies.

nolok 8y ago
So to take a known scale, there is not enough to give one to each person alive. Which might seem crazy but then again, why would everyone not only need an ipv4, but need several (phone, computers, watch, tv,...)? Crazy

nikeee 8y ago

People start encoding information in IPv6 addresses because the address space is so huge. This however, could lead to address shortage. There was an article about this recently on the German news site Heise: https://heise.de/-4196981 https://heise.de/-4196981 Translation: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fheise.de%2F-4196981&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

cesarb 8y ago

They thought of that; the current allocation scheme will be used for IIRC only 1/8 of the IPv6 address space. If that's ever exhausted, there's still the other 7/8 which can be allocated in a more conservative manner.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Apparently not for every atom. The space is small enough to save us from grey goo scenario, at least until nanobots invent NAT. https://xkcd.com/865/ https://xkcd.com/865/

BillinghamJ 8y ago

I believe it's more like every atom in the universe. Which means that inherently it is enough. But indeed it is still best to be somewhat careful.