Managing Serviceguard Eighteenth Edition, September 2010

can appear only once in an address and it can be used to compress the leading,
trailing, or contiguous sixteen-bit zeroes in an address. Example:
fec0:1:0:0:0:0:0:1234 can be represented as fec0:1::1234.
When dealing with a mixed environment of IPv4 and IPv6 nodes there is an
alternative form of IPv6 address that will be used. It is x:x:x:x:x:x:d.d.d.d, where
'x's are the hexadecimal values of higher order 96 bits of IPv6 address and the 'd's
are the decimal values of the 32-bit lower order bits. Typically IPv4 Mapped IPv6
addresses and IPv4 Compatible IPv6 addresses will be represented in this notation.
These addresses will be discussed in later sections.
Examples:
0:0:0:0:0:0:10.1.2.3
and
::10.11.3.123
IPv6 Address Prefix
IPv6 Address Prefix is similar to CIDR in IPv4 and is written in CIDR notation. An
IPv6 address prefix is represented by the notation:
IPv6-address/prefix-length where ipv6-address is an IPv6 address in any
notation listed above and prefix-length is a decimal value representing how many
of the leftmost contiguous bits of the address comprise the prefix. Example:
fec0:0:0:1::1234/64
The first 64-bits of the address fec0:0:0:1 forms the address prefix. An address
prefix is used in IPv6 addresses to denote how many bits in the IPv6 address represent
the subnet.
Unicast Addresses
IPv6 unicast addresses are classified into different types. They are global aggregatable
unicast address, site-local address and link-local address. Typically a unicast address
is logically divided as follows:
Table G-2
128-n bitsn bits
Interface IDSubnet prefix
Interface identifiers in a IPv6 unicast address are used to identify the interfaces on a
link. Interface identifiers are required to be unique on that link. The link is generally
identified by the subnet prefix.
A unicast address is called an unspecified address if all the bits in the address are zero.
Textually it is represented as “::”.
The unicast address ::1 or 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 is called the loopback address. It is
used by a node to send packets to itself.
476 IPv6 Network Support