Waste of IPs? or shrewed method to collect IP space?

[rosenblumb]

at the moment I'm splitting my /64 into /96's so each vlan has as much space as the IPv4 internet

I was trying that on my own network and I started running into some issues with my windows hosts doing the eui-64 autoconfig and having issues with my scheme.  When I upgraded to the /48 it made things a whole lot easier to do.  What I did was to use my address space 2001:470:aaaa::/48 (aaaa is just to fill space since I dont want to put my actual block online for people to be evil with) and then use that 4th space before the /64 to be the vlan number (eg 2001:470:aaaa:10::/64 for vlan 10).  Made life really easy to figure out and I have no problems with the windows hosts doing autoconfig and still being in the proper place.  My network is completely Cisco based and it seems to have no problems at all dealing with this (not that it should).  I have OSPFv3 running through the network and my tunnel endpoint advertising a default route through the ospf network.

Also while yes this does seem like a waste of all of of the 1.2*10^24 addresses that I have allocated to me in the /48, I then remember that in the grand scheme of things thats only 3*10^-13 percent of the total available address space in ipv6 and .0015% of what HE has allocated to it (assuming they have the 2001:470::/32 as their block and not something larger). 

[ntmatter]

On account of extended RTT, IPv6 (or IPv4) isn't practical outside of the proximity of Earth (including satellites in orbit and the Moon).  Mars, at its closest, is about 12 minutes one-way.  A 24 minute RTT (1840 seconds plus) won't work.

Any interplanetary protocol must have forward error correction and not require acknowledgment of individual packets or session parts.  We will have gateways to interplanetary nodes, but their transmissions away from Earth will not be part of IPv6.

Enough of this foolishness.

Humor aside, IPv6 and IPv4 work perfectly fine in these situations because they are completely stateless. There's no guarantee that your packets will arrive intact, in order, or even at all, but that's not IP's job. This functionality belongs to the higher-level protocols such as TCP (which merely sits on top of IP in the network stack to provide conveniences such as sessions, ports, reliable transport, and in-order delivery).

You're quite right that protocols will need to be radically redesigned with interesting error correction schemes and ACKless transfers, however IPv6 can be used unaltered if we choose to cling to it. TCP, on the other hand...strictly a Terrestrial Communication Protocol. A new solution will be necessary.