this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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IPv6

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/ipv6
 

I'm curious about something so I'm going to throw this thought experiment out here. For some background I run a pure IPv6 network and dove into v6 ignoring any v4 baggage so this is more of a devils advocate question than anything I genuinely believe.

Onto the question, why should I run a /64 subnet and waste all those addresses as opposed to running a /96 or even a /112?

  1. It breaks SLAAC and Android

let's assume I don't care for whatever reason and I'm content with DHCP, maybe android actually supports DHCP in this alternate universe

  1. It breaks RFC3306 aka Unicast-prefix-based multicast groups

No applications I care about are impacted by this breakage

  1. It violates the purity of the spec

I don't care

What advantages does running a /64 provide over smaller subnets? Especially subnets like a /96 where address count still far exceeds usage so filling subnets remains impossible.

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[โ€“] orangeboats 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You are right - although I dislike Google in general, the fact that Android supports only SLAAC is most likely the dominating reason why residential ISPs delegate /64 at all.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

๐Ÿค” I hope you're wrong but also I doubt you are. Ik a lot of people have been making a fuss about Android and DHCP, I do hope Google will stick to their guns on this. I feel like whether they do or not will have a massive impact on the direction v6 goes with subnet sizes in the future. Mostly in business environments which largely haven't deployed v6 yet.