On 11/19/10 12:45 PM, William Herrin wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com> wrote:
as most of you are aware, there is no definite, canonical name for the two bytes of IPv6 addresses between colons. This forces people to use a description like I just did instead of a single, specific term.
Hi Richard,
I have an anti-naming proposal: Allow users to place the colons -anywhere- or even leave them out altogether without changing the semantics of the IPv6 address.
The colons are there for readability purposes only. They have no special significance and should not be elevated to significance by naming the parts of the address they delineate. Treat them specially and some fools will attach importance to arranging tasks on two-byte boundaries.
The meaningful boundaries in the protocol itself are nibble and /64. If you want socially significant boundaries, add /12, /32 and /48.
It is possible and desirable to be able to describe any mask length between /0 and /128. the /64 is an important demarcation point for subnets but everything shorter than that will appear in your routing table.
Regards, Bill Herrin