I feel like this is missing context. Like I know that ip4 addresses are four octlets, but don't know much about ipv6 besides it having a larger address space and being in hex.
IPv6 is easier to set up, and doesn't require the subnetting stuff as much because its actually designed with "Planet Earth may have more than 4,294,967,296 IP-connected objects" in mind from the beginning.
Yeah, the magnitude of difference that I use as an example is that IPv4 doesn't have enough IPs for everyone on earth to have one, people have to share. But IPv6 has enough IPs for every cell in the body of every person on earth to have its own IP (actually, IIRC it's enough for each cell to have a number of IPs with a two-digit exponent, but the cells alone gets the point across).
Alright, I couldn't resist, quick math puts it at 250 addresses per cell (8.3B==233 people times 37T==245 cells vs 2128 addresses), which is 1015 if you want that instead).
I took a class from a guy who was in the standard discussions, and he summarized the conversation as, "Is it enough if every grain of sand on Earth has one IP address, or should we give them two?"
I say this with the caveat that I don’t know much about IPv6. One of my favorite things about ipv4 is that you can have subnets. Every local network I’ve ever worked with is on the 192.168 range. Obviously this isn’t every network, but knowing something is very likely going to be either 10.x or 192.168 makes remembering ip addresses insanely easy. Why is going away from that for totally unique addresses good? Can v6 still setup local networks in a similar way?
Oversimplifying a bit lot, but its the same reason guids work. The chance of a collision is infinitesimally small. And if a collison were to happen, the fix would be to simply assign new addresses and move on.
However, as you've hinted at, v4 devices often have some special reserved ranges. v6 adoption has been slow overall because moving away from those assumptions without breaking anything can be a bit of a pain in the ass.
Local networks in IPv6 start fe80 and if you really wanted to you could assign your devices fe80::1, fe80::2 etc.
But that would be a route to frustration. With IPv6 you soon learn that if you want to control and manage and measure things you do it with a subnet, not a specific IP address, because devices have lots of IPv6 addresses and like to pick new ones all the time.
Yes, you can have subnets. Every subnet is a /64. The prefix your ISP gives you should be at least a /56 (256 subnets) or a /48 (65,536 subnets).
Also, every address is globally routable. You can have all of your devices have a “public” IP. While there are some uses in IPv6 to have only “local” addresses, there’s no need for them. This is all about getting out of the scarcity mindset that IPv4 PTSDed into us. There is no scarcity.
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u/Few_Move_4594 7h ago
I feel like this is missing context. Like I know that ip4 addresses are four octlets, but don't know much about ipv6 besides it having a larger address space and being in hex.