From: "TJ" <trejrco@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:15:55 -0500
-----Original Message----- From: Tim Durack [mailto:tdurack@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 14:03 To: TJ Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Using /126 for IPv6 router links
<<snip>>
2^128 is a "very big number." However, from a network engineering perspective, IPv6 is really only 64bits of network address space. 2^64 is still a "very big number."
An end-user assignment /48 is really only 2^16 networks. That's not very big once you start planning a human-friendly repeatable number plan.
An ISP allocation is /32, which is only 2^16 /48s. Again, not that big.
Once you start planning a practical address plan, IPv6 isn't as big as everybody keeps saying...
I didn't realize "human friendly" was even a nominal design consideration, especially as different humans have different tolerances for defining "friendly" :)
It was absolutely an issue. The excellent A6 proposal was killed because it was not human friendly. Very computer friendly, but people were not too happy about dealing with it. It was, in most ways, vastly superior to AAAA, but a real pain to try to deal with "by hand". -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751