[GTALUG] pulling the plug on home phone

[James Knott]

On 06/02/2016 09:18 AM, Dave Cramer wrote:
>
>     BTW, Rogers is currently handing out blocks of 2^64 (18.4 billion,
>     billion) addresses, though they may increase that later, if that's not
>     enough.  ;-)
>
> What does this mean? Are they handing these out to customers ? 
>

Yep.  Each customer currently gets 2^64 addresses and, as I mentioned,
that may be increased in the future.  Prior to Rogers providing IPv6, I
used a 6in4 tunnel to get 2^72 addresses, but I didn't use them all.  ;-)

IPv6 is quite different in this regard, from IPv4, in that ISPs are
supposed to provide at least a /64 prefix, which means the first 64 bits
are the network address and the remaining 64, for addresses on the local
network.  When I used that tunnel, I had a /56 prefix, which meant that
the first 56 bits determined my network address and the remaining 72
were mine to use as I desired.  When you get big blocks like that, the
idea is you use a router to separate the block into multiple /64 networks.

It gets even more interesting.  Every IPv6 capable device will have a
non-routable link local address, which starts with fe80.  Then there
will be one or more other addresses.  For example, you will get MAC
address based IPv6 addresses.  Since those are tied to a specific
device, some people may have privacy concerns.  To address (sorry <g>),
random number "privacy" addresses are also created, which typically have
a lifetime of 24 hours,  You can configure your computer to use MAC or
random addresses or both.  If both, you'd use the random addresses for
your web surfing and the MAC addresses for servers you want to reach. 
So, when you run ifconfig, you will see a link local address, a MAC
address and a few random addresses.  There are also other address
classes, such as unique local, which are routable, but not out to the
Internet, in the same manner that RFC 1918 addresses are used.

There's an excellent reference called IPv6 Essentials.  I recently saw
it on Google Play for under $15.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023432.do