Infiltrator Posted April 3, 2011 Share Posted April 3, 2011 Internet policymakers officially handed out the last five blocks of IPv4 address space to each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) at a ceremony held in Miami Thursday morning. BACKGROUND: IPv4 exhaustion predicted The ceremony marked the depletion of the free pool of addresses for IPv4, the main communications protocol that underpins the Internet. The ceremony's goal was not only to celebrate this historic milestone in the Internet's 40-year history, but also to demonstrate that this precious resource of IPv4 addresses was doled out in an equitable fashion around the globe. Policymakers -- including the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- used the ceremony to underscore the need for network operators and content providers to migrate to IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to IPv4. "This is one of the most important days of the Internet," said Rob Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO. "A pool of more than 4 billion Internet addresses has been emptied ... This marks the opportunity to shift to a version of IP that is so large it is difficult to even imagine ... and that can carry us into the future.'' IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power. PANIC TIME QUIZ: How prepared are you for IPv6? Each of the RIRs was given what is called a /8 block of IPv4 addresses, which is around 16.7 million addresses. Experts say it will take anywhere from three to seven months for the registries to distribute the remaining IPv4 addresses to carriers. Once the registries hand out all of the IPv4 addresses, network operators must either deploy complex, expensive network address translation (NAT) technologies to share IPv4 addresses among multiple users, or adopt IPv6. COMPARISON: IPv6 vs. Carrier-Grade NAT The Internet engineering community used the Miami event as an opportunity to encourage network operators and content providers to quickly adopt IPv6. "Today begins the final chapter of IPv4," said Lynn St. Amour, president and CEO of the Internet Society. "The sooner we all move to adopt IPv6, the better and brighter our future will be ... The fundamental key to the Internet's success is the unification of networks through globally addressing. That is why so many have stepped up to deploy IPv6." Olaf Kolkman, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, warned that network operators and content providers need to adopt IPv6 because the available technical workarounds will become increasingly difficult to support. "The next 2 or 3 billion Internet users will use IPv6 only," he warned, but he added that coexistence between the two protocols will continue for decades. "As long as there will be people that have legacy equipment with IPv4, there will need to be a reason to communicate with IPv4." Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/020311-ipv4-ceremony.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted April 3, 2011 Author Share Posted April 3, 2011 (edited) Be welcomed IPv6. Your journey has just began. Edited April 3, 2011 by Infiltrator Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digip Posted April 3, 2011 Share Posted April 3, 2011 I've got it disabled on all my machines, and my Router doesn't seem to speak IPv6 either, so I am curious as to what will happen when sites go natively IPv6. I probably won't be able to reach any of them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted April 3, 2011 Author Share Posted April 3, 2011 There was an article on Computerworld before, on Yahoo.com migrating some of their servers to IPv6. Aparatenly only IPv6 enabled platforms would be able to view websites hosted on these servers. So anyone who was on an IPv4 network would experience difficulties reaching those sites. So I wonder how they are going to address this problem, if someone is on an IPv4 network trying to access an IPv6 network. Don't know if there will be a NAT like protocol implemented as a workaround, until every one is fully migrated to IPv6. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
buffy Posted April 4, 2011 Share Posted April 4, 2011 Most websites wont go 6 only in my life time (aged 27) Its like this> 1. IPv4 2. IPv6 over IPv4 3. IPv4 over IPv6 4. IPv6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted April 4, 2011 Author Share Posted April 4, 2011 Most websites wont go 6 only in my life time (aged 27) Its like this> 1. IPv4 2. IPv6 over IPv4 3. IPv4 over IPv6 4. IPv6 That's exactly what I had in mind, a NAT like protocol to translate both IP versions versa and versa. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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