Yawn. This is the next Y2K

Submitted by horzo on Mon, 09/29/2008 - 10:19am

Yawn. This is the next Y2K panic.

There are many ways that the lifetime of the current IPv4 space can be extended. ISPs can use NAT more aggressivly, for instance. Very few broadband consumers need a publically routable address, or would notice if they didn't have one.

If and when it becomes necessary for ISPs and organizations requiring publically routable addrsses to transition to IPv6, they can do so without much drama. I don't think it's going to be all that complicated to hide legacy hosts behind an IPv4 NAT, while still allowing them to route to an IPv6 world.

 

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So 340 trillion, trillion,

Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Sun, 09/28/2008 - 9:44pm

So 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses is roughly the same number of stars in the universe?

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1.For Windows users, you

Submitted by damicatz on Sun, 09/28/2008 - 12:31pm

1.For Windows users, you need at least Vista to use IPv6 properly (XP has experiemental IPv6 support but it's flakey and doesn't work alongside IPv4).

As long as you are using Vista, you don't need to do anything to install IPv6; it's installed by default alongside IPv4. 

2.With Vista, IPv4 sites will still work.  Your network card will be assigned both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address.  Your computer will first try to find an IPv6 route before using IPv4.

3.The big caveat with IPv6 is that, at this time, there are no consumer level ISPs in North America (at least, to my knowledge) that support IPv6.  That means you won't get an IPv6 internet address; the IPv6 address you'll get in Vista will be a local IPv6 address (IPv6 has a mechanism for automatically generating a unique local address for every network card without a DHCP server called link-local addressing).  Your ISPs DNS servers may also not support IPv6 (though most should at least return the v6 address at this point in time).

That means that, in order to access the few IPv6 websites that are on the internet, you have to tunnel by encasing the IPv6 packet in an IPv4 packet.  There are a few ways to do this but none of them are ideal solutions.  I know that, for example, uTorrent supports IPv6 and that I've actually been able to connect to other peers using Toredo IPv6 tunneling but it still uses IPv4 packets on the outside.

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I want to see 340 trillion,

Submitted by yogurt80 on Sun, 09/28/2008 - 8:01am

I want to see 340 trillion, trillion, trillion displayed in binary.

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this is hardly news. big

Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Sun, 09/28/2008 - 4:52am

this is hardly news. big networking organizations do not want to switch from ipv4, the invested heavily into it and don't want to lose thier investment. meanwhile pretty much the entire general public who understands networking wants ipv6. firefox by default tries to usee ipv6 and when it can't it uses ipv4. people can install ipv6 into windows if they want and to see if they are connected to the internet over ipv6 they can visit kame.net. if you see a dancing turtle you got ipv6

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