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RE: IPv6 terminology question
Colleagues,
From an applications programming viewpoint, the 2 octets between the colons are called an unsigned short, as in the 16-bit C language data structure. RFC 3493 specifies the IPv6 address structure as 16 unsigned 8-bit integers; however, this is functionally equivalent to 8 unsigned 16-bit integers. As a result, the x's in the message below are unsigned shorts.
Best Regards,
Jeffrey Dunn
Info Systems Eng., Lead
MITRE Corporation.
(301) 448-6965 (mobile)
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-v6ops@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-v6ops@ops.ietf.org] On Behalf Of Joel Jaeggli
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 4:32 PM
To: Daniel Stickney
Cc: IPv6 Operations
Subject: Re: IPv6 terminology question
Daniel Stickney wrote:
>> Daniel,
>>
>> This is defined in RFC4291 "IPv6 Addressing Architecture" Section 2.2 "Text Representation of Addresses". It says:
>>
>> 1. The preferred form is x:x:x:x:x:x:x:x, where the 'x's are one to
>> four hexadecimal digits of the eight 16-bit pieces of the address.
>> Examples:
>>
>> ABCD:EF01:2345:6789:ABCD:EF01:2345:6789
>>
>> 2001:DB8:0:0:8:800:200C:417A
>>
>> Note that it is not necessary to write the leading zeros in an
>> individual field, but there must be at least one numeral in every
>> field (except for the case described in 2.).
>>
>> The closest thing to a definition would be to call them "field"s. For example, "an IPv6 address is made up of 8 colon separated fields".
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> p.s. Suggest in the future, try reading the actual specifications.
>>
>
> I appreciate your input Bob.
>
> What term do you all normally use in your discussions with other
> engineers? I'm fine with "field", just haven't heard or seen anyone else
> use it yet.
A book that I performed a review on covering this subject states:
"IPv6 addresses are written in 8 groups of 16 bits each, or 8 groups of
4 hexadecimal numbers separated by colons." - Goralski, "The Illustrated
Network" 2009
I'm comfortable with that being sufficiently unambiguous, modula you
have to skip to the next paragraph to get abbreviation.
> Thanks,
>