Erik Anderson: > Absolutely not. > > Making a change like this is a *big deal*, both in terms of money (to > upgrade/replace network infrastructure) as well as in terms of having > to learn a new technology. As such, it was very wise for the IP > governing boards to not just make an incremental bump in the IP > address space, but make a *huge* increase. This decision ensures that > we won't need to go through this whole process again in the > foreseeable future. 8 bytes is a huge increase. IPv4 has lasted longer than expected so I can't imagine 8 bytes being exhausted in the future. I read that 16 byte addresses can address more atoms than are thought to exist. >From a practical point of view I think the 16 byte addresses are a mistake. Systems have to work through all of that before they can start to do something useful. That's a good reason not to switch to IPv6. I believe you about IPv6 being an improvement over IPv4 in a number of ways, but think the length of the addresses was a mistake. I don't think anyone is paying for IPv6 specific upgrades to hardware. When they upgrade for a practical reason, the hardware they get is more IPv6 capable than what they had. Brian Wood Ebenezer Enterprises http://webEbenezer.net (651) 251-9384 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20121015/f0ac6ec9/attachment.html>