In networking environments, it is seen as good practice to give each device an IPv6 loopback address. This is an IPv6 address that is not directly assigned to any physical interface and will typically be reachable when the networking appliance (in this case a router) is up and running.
This loopback address is also used for operational and management actions on the equipment and for routing protocols like eBGP, which use these addresses for terminating the peering sessions.
Loopback addresses typically have a prefix mask of /128. This avoids unnecessary unused addresses although address conservation is not really an issue in IPv6.
In the initial 6NET core network, the 6NET PoP routers were the only pieces of equipment that needed a loopback address. Below is a list which details the addresses used. The
The <SLA> for the loopback addresses is ‘0000’.
