Yeah the address format is long and different @D. Strout
Care to take a rudimentary stab at describing such or post useful links that do good describing such?
AAAA records = equivalent of A record for IPV4?
Sorry, awkward being a newb for a change.
First, the easy part: Yes, AAAA in IPv6 = A in IPv4.
For the address format, it works something like this. You have a total of 8 "segments", separated by colons, just like IPv4 had four segments separated with periods. Each segment has four hex digits (0-f), for a total of 65536 total possibilities per segment. So, for example, here is a valid IPv6 address:
2001:0db8:23c5:89be:0045:67aa:0aba:301d
...Which is rather long and convoluted. The nice thing is, IPv6 addresses can be abbreviated under certain circumstances. First of all, leading zeroes in any segment can be dropped. So the address above could be rewritten as:
2001:db8:23c5:89be:45:67aa:aba:301d
...Better, but still kinda long. However, since there are so many addresses (2^128), you won't usually see all those segments filled up. Often you'll have a large block in the middle of all zeroes. These can be collapsed in to a double colon. So this address:
2001:db8:0:0:0:0:aba:301d
Can be rewritten as:
2001:db8::aba:301d
Which is actually pretty manageable. The two are equally valid. Note that you can't do this twice, otherwise when looking up the address a computer couldn't "tell" how many blocks of all-zero each double colon would represent. Likewise for removing leading zeroes - don't remove trailing ones. If you should have a case where you have two sets of bunches-of-zeroes you could truncate, truncate the longer one. If they're the same length, truncate the leftmost one.
These are edge cases, and a good parser (for instance, Google Chrome's address bar) will handle all these for you. Plug an extended IPv6 address in to Google Chrome and it will navigate to it, but also shorten it in the address bar. Firefox, unfortunately, doesn't. Which brings me to how to navigate to IPv6 addresses. When you type an IPv6 address in your browser's address bar, for instance, you need to surround it with square brackets. This is to differentiate IPv6 address colons from port colons.
Some other details. Prefix sizes are calculated thusly (where
p=prefix size, e.g. /64): 2^(128-
p). So a /64 block has 1,844,674,407,370,955,116 addresses. If you have a block allocated to a box of yours, you can add addresses from it with the `ip` command:
ip -6 addr add [address]/[block-size] dev [dev(usually eth0 or he-ipv6 if tunneled)]
For instance:
ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:63f::3209:8788 dev eth0
Incidentally, I've been using addresses starting with 2001:dba because that is the IPv6 documentation prefix.
