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Re: It's Ars Tech's turn to bang the IPv4 exhaustion drum

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Wed Aug 20 14:59:37 2008
On 20 aug 2008, at 20:34, Crist Clark wrote:

On a "true" P-to-P link, there is no netmask, no? A netmask is a
concept that applies to broadcast media, like Ethernet. Even if
you only have two hosts on an Ethernet link, it's not really
P-to-P in the strict sense.

An interface needs a prefix length (subnet mask for those of us stuck in the '90s) so the system knows which addresses are directly connected through the interface in question. Whether the link is point- to-point, broadcast or NBMA doesn't matter for that purpose.

But as for how ND works over a P-to-P, the FreeBSD stack seems
to be a little odd.

[...]

But despite all of that, it all works pretty sweetly.

There have been compatibility issues with PPP for IPv6 in the past because some implementations would do ND and others wouldn't...