June 8, 2011 has been designated World IPv6 day – a day when lots of the big players on the internet have committed to switch on and test IPv6 for a day to see how it goes. Hopefully, it’ll go swimmingly and no-one will be turning it off again later.<\/p>\n
So what is IPv6, and why does it deserve its own day?<\/p>\n
IPv6 stands for “Internet Protocol, version 6” and is the latest standard for assigning addresses to internet-capable devices.<\/p>\n
Before IPv6, machines on the internet were given addresses using IPv4. IPv4 addresses were 32 bits long, typically written as four decimal numbers, up to 3 digits long each, separated by decimal points. For example:<\/p>\n
192.0.2.1<\/pre>\nThis gives ~4.3 billion unique IPv4 addresses to serve a current world population of ~6.9 billion. (I’m using US billions here.) Although back in the day when someone reckoned there was a world market for 5 computers this might’ve seemed excessive, now that many of us own a variety of internet-capable phones, computers\/laptops, games consoles, even home electronics, and big businesses have farms of thousands of servers, it really doesn’t cut it any more.<\/p>\n
ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who are responsible for managing internet address space, handed out the last of the IPv4 addresses to the 5 World RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) on February 3rd, 2011. Once these addresses are handed out, that’s it for IPv4 unless unused addresses can be reclaimed from their current owners – and would you willingly part with a resource that rare?<\/p>\n
In practice, there are lots of tricks people use to allow machines to re-use a selection of IPv4 addresses, but reusing address prohibits these machines from communicating directly with each other – instead they usually hide behind and communicate through other machines that do have precious, unique addresses.<\/p>\n
The Future – IPv6<\/h3>\n
So how about IPv6 addresses? These are 128 bits long, written as 8 hexadecimal numbers, up to 4 digits long each, and separated by colons. For example:<\/p>\n
2001:0DB8:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329<\/pre>\nThis gives a grand total of 3.4\u00d71038<\/sup> addresses, equating to significantly more than billions of trillions of addresses per person on the planet. Nice! Lots of scope there for an ever more internet-connected life for us all, if you’re into that kind of thing, and I am. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Want to Know More?<\/h3>\n
If you want to know more about IPv6 and its implementation, my hubby, David Malone, is co-author of this excellent O’Reilly volume, along with Niall Murphy (no relation): IPv6 Network Administration<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
June 8, 2011 has been designated World IPv6 day – a day when lots of the big players on the internet have committed to switch on and test IPv6 for a day to see how it goes. Hopefully, it’ll go swimmingly and no-one will be turning it off again later. So what is IPv6, and … Continue reading “Happy World IPv6 Day!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-ipv6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}