World IPv6 Day

[Babs]

About World IPv6 Day

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organizations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour "test flight". The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

Please join us for this test drive and help accelerate the momentum of IPv6 deployment.

<a href="http://www.worldipv6day.org/">source</a>

What is IPv6 you say?

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) that is designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The Internet operates by transferring data in small packets that are independently routed across networks as specified by an international communications protocol known as the Internet Protocol. Each data packet contains two numeric addresses that are the packet's origin and destination devices. Since 1981, IPv4 has been the publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, and it is currently the foundation for most Internet communications. The growth of the Internet has mandated a need for more addresses than is possible with IPv4. IPv6 allows for vastly more addresses.

IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion, and is described in Internet standard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998.[1] Like IPv4, IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks. While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038
) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.

IPv6 implements additional features not present in IPv4. It simplifies aspects of address assignment (stateless address autoconfiguration), network renumbering and router announcements when changing Internet connectivity providers. The IPv6 subnet size has been standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits to facilitate an automatic mechanism for forming the host identifier from link layer media addressing information (MAC address). Network security is also integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture, and the IPv6 specification mandates support for IPsec as a fundamental interoperability requirement.

The last top level (/8) block of free IPv4 addresses was assigned in February 2011, although many free addresses still remain in most assigned blocks and will continue to be allocated for some three to six months from then. After that, only 1024 addresses are made available from APNIC for each LIR.[2] While IPv6 is supported on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments,[3] IPv6 does not implement interoperability features with IPv4, and creates essentially a parallel, independent network. Exchanging traffic between the two networks requires special translator gateways, but modern computer operating systems implement dual-protocol software for transparent access to both networks using 'tunneling'. In December 2010, despite marking its 12th anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general worldwide deployment. A 2008 study[4] by Google Inc. indicated that penetration was still less than one percent of Internet-enabled hosts in any country at that time.

source from wikipedia

I dread to see all the disasters.   

[Tricia Lea]

so they tryin to fix what aint broke

[Babs]

In general its a good thing. For social networking like FB it will be a nightmare like no other

[taco_harvell]

Well, truthfully something will be broke soon if they don't do this. Because of mistakes in IPv4 the possibility of running out of IP addresses is very real.

[Babs]

That's why I said in general its a good thing. Just not for an already broken fb lol

[MelodyB]

Can someone explain this in English? I started reading and got lost so I gave up. Lol

[Babs]

In easy speak its like when a town adds a new prefix for phone numbers because they are running out of numbers to use.

They are going with a new format that will allow for more ip addresses

[MelodyB]

So all of our stuff will be redone, and in the process be lost for awhile cause the old addys won't work and the new ones prolly won't be recognized?

Joy.

[Lynx]

Yeah, pretty much.  But in this phone analogy, when the city adds the new phone prefixes, the old ones won't be able to work with the new ones.  Website owners will need to get a new phone number and everyone will have to run around rebuilding the phone books.

[Babs]

More or less but I think they are doing it in increments to help ease transition

[Lynx]

Raises one good question... why not go to IPv64 now and save the hassle of having to upgrade for quite some time to come?