IPv6 address/port format

[stephenb@uk.uu.net]

On 11 Jan, David Burgess wrote:
> 
> 
> Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
>> 
>> > "Dwayne C . Litzenberger" <dlitz@cheerful.com> said:
>> > > I'm not really knowledgeable about this, but what is a good, standard way
>> > > to show address/port shown in IPv4, IPv6, IPX, etc?  I would think
>> > > address.:port (dot-colon) would be good (and it already works with domain
>> > > names), but I haven't seen this done yet.
>> >
>> > > Any thoughts?
>> >
>> >   I've seen people use both "IPv6-addr port" (space sep.) and
>> > "IPv6-addr/port".  I think I really like using '/', and haven't yet
>> > found a place where that will cause problems except for in URIs.
>> 
>> It's too easily confused with network prefixes.. (IPv6-addr/prefixlen).
>> 
>> How am I supposed to know whether 3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1/64 should be
>> parsed as an <address,port> pair or as a network prefix?
>> 
> 
> The obvious answer is, of course, by context.  If I were to tell you to
> connect to 3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1/64, then you would connect to service 64. 
> If I was talking about routing issues, then the 64 would be the prefix
> length.
> 
> In spite of that, I think the slash is still too problematic once we
> get into the WWW.  There are places where the context is ambiguous.  For
> example, the following URI should be perfectly reasonable:
> 
> http://3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1/1019/ 
> 
> Where 1019 is the directory on the web server that points to some
> website I'm hosting.  The only tractable way to solve the problem is to
> come up with a different service port method.
> 
> Since we're tossing suggestions around, how about putting the service
> number is square brackets.  I can't think of a place where that would
> hurt us (except at the Unix shell prompt).  Something like
> 3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1[1019] would be doable....
> 
> Another suggestion would be to reverse the IPv4 semantics for dotted
> quad:service.  For example, "3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1.1019" might work.  Since
> there are no valid v4 addresses in the 0.0.0.x or 0.0.1.x blocks, we
> wouldn't even have to worry about 32 bit v4 address representations. 
> Without at least one more '.', it's fairly obvious that the suffix isn't
> an address component.
> 
The / referance whould only cause confusion, why not have something
slightly representative of IP @ a port number. Just a thought.

3ffe:1ce1:0:b5::1>64

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Stephen Burley
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