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It's easier to remember the IPs of good DNSes, too. (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Today in our newest take on "older technology is better": why NAT rules!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Our network architecture has the tendency to waste IP addresses. A subnet may have 10 devices but have 256 IPs (e.g. a /24 network like 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.255) - that's 246 wasted addresses. This wastage is kinda unavoidable since we'd need to keep our routing tables from being too fragmented.

With that in mind it is entirely possible for 64-bit addressing space to not be enough, unless we revert to methods like NAT which come with their own disadvantages.

We have already used up about one /11 block of the IPv6 internet. That's 128-11=117 bits. If we replace the standardized /64 subnets of IPv6 with old /24 subnets typical in IPv4 networks, you get 61 bits. That's dangerously close to the upper limit of a hypothetical 64-bit IPv5 internet.