Of all the sins of IPv6, its tied between using ':' as the separator, and the god awful '::' "just skip writing the address because we made them too fucking big lol"
Wouldn't have been a problem if they hadn't given every square millimeter of the planet 100 billion addresses.
[–] orangeboats 15 hours ago
[–] mahboi 8 hours ago
But I don't get why the other commenter was proposing putting the 0s at the beginning instead of the end. Shouldn't the new address space be under the existing subnets?
[–] wpm 14 hours ago
[–] throw0101c 14 hours ago
The protocol chosen for IPng, SIPP, did actually have "only" 64 bits, but this was deemed not enough as folks did not want to have to worry about running out again (amongst other reasons), and so tweaked it to have a fixed 128 bits:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1752
SIPP originally was variable-length capable, but it was decided fixed-length was better (e.g., for hardware like ASICs).
> Wouldn't have been a problem if they hadn't given every square millimeter of the planet 100 billion addresses.
For the record: IPv6 gives 10¹⁷ addresses per mm²; in terms of volume, 10⁸ IPv6 addresses per mm³ throughout the Earth.
[–] wpm 14 hours ago
I woulda thought 18 quintillion would've been enough addresses for the next century or two but good thing we locked in all this extra data we throw away with a '::'.
I'm sure it was all well considered by intelligent people, but it was still a dumb decision.
[–] ndriscoll 13 hours ago
Like I only tangentially interact with this stuff, but I can't imagine how a network operator wouldn't prefer we live in an all ipv6 world.
[–] cowlevel 10 hours ago
[–] growse 14 hours ago
See, no colons in sight!
Fine, let's change the question.
Without counting, how many zeroes are there in 192.168.0.0.0.0.0.1?