Support IPv6!

August 4, 2022 - Alex Roland

This website supports IPv6 and you should too! IPv6 is an important part of the future of networking, and it isn't as hard to learn as you might think. One of the concepts of network design is making sure you make the subnets the correct size. This can be challenging depending on the environment and if you aren't careful you can run out of available addresses.

With IPv4 you design networks based on quantity of hosts. If you know a network will only contain a few hosts, you would likely allocate a /28, which gives 14 usable addresses, instead of a /24 and wasting hundreds of addresses. Of course there could be the issue where the network has to grow unexpectedly and now you have to either try to expand it or migrate to a new network.

With IPv6 you design networks based on how many networks you will need. One /64 IPv6 subnet gives you about 18.4 quintillion host addresses, so there is no reason to think about how many hosts will sit on that network. To put this into perspective, if you assigned 6,000,000 new address every second to your NIC it would take about 98,000 years to go through all the available addresses.

Due to the size of the IPv6 network space, this makes allocating subnets easier. A lot of companies will get something like a /48 assigned to them, which offers 65,536 /64 subnets, so there usually isn't much worry about allocating a /64 even for just a few hosts.