[Gllug] Public IPs - When are they appropriate

[tet at accucard.com]

>> Even if we assume that the last 6 octets of the IPv6 address will be
>> the MAC address - so the unicast addresses effectively only offer
>> 2^(125-48) addresses - 2^77 - that's still 1.5x10^23, or 5x 10^8 per
>> square meter of the Earth's surface.
>
>So does this mean that if you change your ethernet card you'll have to
>change your IPv6 address?

No, it doesn't. From memory, the last 6 octets in an IPv6 address aren't
used for routing at all, so can be set to whatever you want, and traffic
will still reach you. A convention ahs been suggested whereby they'll
contain the MAC address of the source machine for outgoing packets, but
it's just convention, it's not mandated, and IPc6 implementations are
free to ignore it if they wish.

And even if it was mandatory, MAC addresses are programmable on decent
hardware anyway :-)

Tet

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