this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
313 points (85.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

19623 readers
96 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] orangeboats@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 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.