IPv6 musings

about IPv6

just sharing something about the next generation of ipv6, after going to ip awareness training conducted by peter warren (CISCO instructor)

what happened to ipv5? it’s basically another research branch that went dead, while ipv6 survived.

but adoption slow.

how many ip addresses can ipv6 handle?

there’s some discrepancy over this. peter warren said 10 to the power of 57, and “it’s possible to give an ip address to every atom in the universe!”

ipv4 uses 32 bit address space => 10 to the power of 9 i.e. about 4 billion possible ip addresses; there’s now “around 30 million webservers in the world”
ipv6 uses 128 bit address space => according to wikipedia.org, 10 to the power of 38
according to astronomycafe.net, the number of atoms in the known/visible universe: 10 to the power of 77
so it’s not quite enough to cover everything, but think about it, who wants to give an ip address to EVERY sand on EVERY beach in the world?

still, ipv4 served us well for 30-40 years, so ipv6 surely could do so for another 30-40 yrs

majority of world still running on ipv4

there is no cut-off point, it will happen to our org when the cost of staying at ipv4 is greater than the cost of migrating to ipv6

you can connect ipv6 net to another ipv6 net thru ipv4 net via tunelling

routers already support ipv6, only need to enable IOS

peter warren: “microsoft doesnt produce ipv6 stack yet”

hence in LAN, you only need 3rd party ip stack running on top of the OS.

Linux already support ipv6

the present hardware in LAN will work nicely with ipv6, cos switches, NICs, Ethernet cables working on layer 2 (datalink) is oblivious of all this stuff.

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