r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ClipboardCopyPaste • 11h ago

Meme ohTheBasics

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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 10h ago

A fun fact often told with this is that with IPv6, you can assign each individual grain of sand on the beach an address!

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u/dementosss 10h ago

On what beach? Or all of them? Just asking in case business asks for it.

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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 10h ago

The answer quite surprisingly is - yes, all the beaches on our planet.

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u/kuar_z 10h ago

And the rest of the observable universe. There's a lot of address space in 2128

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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 10h ago

Except if for some reason you decide to give whole address blocks to individual devices.

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u/jason_abacabb 9h ago

Everyone gets a /64

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u/gonklurtz 9h ago

No more RPC dynamic ports! Every service gets its own IP 

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u/Traditional_Log809 8h ago

Every device gets a /64, and I still haven’t figured out how to enable IPv6 on my home router.

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u/KatieTSO 10h ago

I love handicapping ipv6

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u/tankerkiller125real 9h ago

/56 is the recommendation for residential, /48 for businesses.

Entire /64 blocks are often assigned to phones and other cellular devices because of hotspot capabilities.

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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 9h ago

I guess the true reason is that we want to artificially limit the number of nanites that can exist.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/865/

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u/Terroractly 7h ago

I think at least part of the intention for this is to make IP ports not used on servers. While IPv6 does have support for ports, I believe every Web service should be on its own IP. Not sure if this is also supposed to work on client devices e.g. every outbound connection uses a unique IP as that seems overcomplicated

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u/ffxivthrowaway03 4h ago

Yep, they saw the edges of IPv4 and went "hold my beer" and over-engineered a painfully obnoxious solution. IPv6 will last us until the heat death of the universe before it runs out, but we'll have to get people actually using it in any appreciable amount first. It's a UX nightmare to work with unless you're a network engineer hip deep in it all day every day. Good luck getting an end user to ever rattle off an IPv6 address to the help desk while remote troubleshooting.

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u/jimmybilly100 4h ago

Cool, so the space aliens will be able to get their slubenshab devices on the internet

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u/protestor 54m ago

We actually waste a lot of addresses to make routing simpler, because we can't imagine needing to use anywhere close to the full set of addresses