What’s the silliest use for 281 trillion IP addresses that you can think of? That’s the question I asked myself when AWS launched support for assigning IPv6 prefixes to EC2 instances.

The IPv6 prefixes are /80, which gives your EC2 instance 281,474,976,710,656 IP addresses to play with. You could use the feature to run 281 trillion containers with their own IPs (which I assume is what AWS intended for the feature), but I wanted to find a more fun use.

After noodling on it for a bit, I had an idea: SSH doesn’t support TOTP (those six digit codes that change every 30 seconds) out of the box. Neither does Telnet, plain old HTTP or any number of protocols. So I thought it would be fun to add TOTP support to every protocol by embedding the six digit code inside the IP address.

The result is ipv6-ghost-ship.