Best practice for picking convenient IPv6 addresses for a few hosts on an isolated LAN

I have in the past setup small ad hoc LANs which were totally disconnected from the internet and when assigning addresses to the hosts, I could pick whatever made communicating the addresses between humans as easy as possible (and as easy as possible to remember in your head). Not surprising, one of my favourites were to give hosts numbers like 10.1.1.1, 10.1.1.2, 10.1.1.3 etc. Very easy to communicate, and very easy to keep in your head. (Ok, I had almost total freedom on how to choose my addresses. I could of course not use 127.0.0.1 for any of the ethernet interfaces, or use any subnet addresses or broadcast addresses)

While waiting for various parties (enterprises, ISPs etc) to deploy IPv6 (and thus provide a real incentive to use IPv6 in the real world), I'm a bit keen on trying it out by on a small (minimalistic?) scale, simply by repeating the task by setting up a isolated LAN but this time relying on IPv6 to communicate between the hosts. I can, quite freely, pick any IPv6 addresses I like. Almost, at least. I cannot pick ::1 as the address of any LAN interface for example, as that is reselved for the loopback interface. And given all the different ranges of IPv6 addresses that are reserved for all kinds of uses and purposes, I wonder: in this isolated LAN context, what is the best way to pick easy to remember, easy to communicate verbally IPv6 addresses? (Say it is for 3 to 32 hosts or so)

I know this question is a bit academic and probably not something you would run into in a 'real' deployment of IPv6 (be it business or hobby usage). Still I'm curious about the best way to "handcraft" convenient IPv6 addresses, so please don't provide answers which only provides me with a solution which "saves" me from the need to create these IPv6 addresses manually. (Or provide answers that only explains why it is a bad practice manually setting these IPv6 addresses...)

Solution 1:

I'm on board with Tom's Solution but an amendment:

FC00:0001:0001::/48 would be your network segment

Hosts:

FC00:1:1::1

FC00:1:1::2

FC00:1:1::3

. . .

FC00:1:1:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF

...THAT'S A LOT OF IPs!

Solution 2:

The address block fc00::/7 has been reserved as a private network by IANA as described in RFC 4193

All you really need to do is assign your network as a /48 out of that, and start addressing. fc00:0001:0001/48 and so on

As far as keeping track of IP addresses goes, I suggest you use either a wiki page or some similar document.
Or a DHCPv6 server that hands out statically assigned leases.

Solution 3:

I would recommend using addresses in FD00::/8 rather than in FC00::/8 for this, FD00::/8 is allocated as locally assigned ULA, where FC00:/8 is intended to be used for centrally assigned ULA, ie each organisation wanting ULA will be allocated a 40-bit prefix (presumably by IANA and/or the RIRs, though no assignment mechanism has been defined and no assignments have been made).

Personally, I'd go for the simplest possible option: FD00::1, FD00::2, etc for a test/demo network; use a /64 prefix so your network is FD00::/64.

I know there's a MUST for using a pseudo-random method for creating a ULA prefix, but I would just ignore that for a test/demo system that I'm never going to connect to anything else and will be taking down at the end of the lab.