But really what's the point of giving half an internet worth of addresses to every machine? I never understood that part of IPv6.
I think it would have been better having shorter addresses and not waste so many on every endpoint.
I think it would have been better having shorter addresses and not waste so many on every endpoint.
With a fixed size host identifier compared to a variable size ipv4 host identifier network renumbering becomes easier. If you separate out the host part of the ip address a network operator can change ip ranges by simply replacing the top 64 bits with prefix translation and other computers can still be routed to with the unique bottom 64 bits in the new ip network.
This is what you do if you start with a clean sheet and design a protocol where you don't need to put address scarcity as the first priority.
Aside, isn't embedding MAC addrs in ones IP address a bad idea?
You will sometimes see admins complain that IPv6 demands that you allow ICMP (at least the TOOBIG messages) through the firewall because they're worried that people on the internet will start doing pingscans of their network. This is because they do not understand what 2^64 is.
Hint: the ICMPv6 packet is no shorter than 48 bytes and there are 1.8446744e+19 addresses to scan.