3 ms·
Couple things: 1) Instead of stuffing the extra 96 bits in an extension, you stuff all 128 in the extension and use a reserved unrouted address in the v4 heade
by AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Couple things:
1) Instead of stuffing the extra 96 bits in an extension, you stuff all 128 in the extension and use a reserved unrouted address in the v4 header field. Devices with no clue will just drop those packets.
2) Pedantically, switches are layer 2 devices. Some some of them act as routers also, but only routing is relevant.
- anyfoo 4y agoDevices with no clue of IPv6 also just drop those packets. What have we gained? The only thing I can imagine is that while you still need to alter or replace every piece of equipment on the net, software adoption would likely have been much easier and thus immediately higher if 128 bit addresses were the only change (I still don't see the benefit of tucking it in as a field into IPv4, but if IPv6 was just IPv4 with wider addresses), and all the other protocols and semantics that were changed with IPv6 stayed the same. But arguably, since you do need to change every piece of equipment, this was the time to make desirable, fundamental, not-backward compatible changes, and possibly the only opportunity at that.
- Dagger2 4y agoEven better, instead of using a reserved unrouted address, use the "IP version" header field, which literally exists for this exact purpose. I'm struggling to see how this would improve anything over what v6 did though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]