| HN Mirror

> Neat that you casually get an entire subnet for a rented computer.

Here's a little more info on this, because it's fun: it looks like Hetzner give you a /64, which by convention is indeed the size of one IPv6 subnet. That's also the minimum size block any IPv6 provider will give you (the spec essentially requires this). My ISP gives me a /64 by default, but upon request will route a /56 or even an entire /48 to me, meaning I can actually get a block of 65k subnets, for free. Hell, if you're on an IPv4-only connection, you can set up a tunnel with Hurricane Electric and get a /48 for free -- that's what I did for several years!

IPv6 is pretty objectively amazing -- huge address space to the point where we can just give people a few hundred or even thousand subnets if they need them, no need for NAT or the accursed CG-NAT meaning IPs are actually globally unique, stateless client configuration (SLAAC), backwards-compatible at the software layer via IPv4-mapped addresses, probably more things I've forgotten...

Unfortunately, the world has been slow to figure this out; there's no real incentive to migrate. You can find the global IPv6 stats online, but as a personal data point which surprised me, I can tell you (unless it's changed in the past few months) that the University of Oxford's network (which you'd expect to be pretty modernized!) is still entirely IPv4-only.