IPv6 Act Now

If you are using Internet or almost any computer network you will likely using IPv4 packets. IPv4 uses 32-bit source and destination address fields. We are actually running out of addresses but have not fear, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is here with IPv6.

The IPv6 packet (Fig. 1) doesn’t look much like its IPv4 (Fig. 2) cousin, except for the leading version field. The IPv6 address fields are 128-bits. The larger address space is one reason to migrate to IPv6 but there are many more differences that give IPv6 an advantage. For example, the header checksum field has been eliminated because transport reliability has gone up and its overhead was unnecessary.

The movement to IPv6 on a global scale is inevitable. It has been more of an issue of getting the infrastructure in place to make the move to cause the minimal number of problems. It is possible for IPv4 and IPv6 subnets to exchange traffic but there are issues that vary depending upon the network configuration and the type of network traffic.

More from Electronic Design…

Leading internet firms have set 6 June as the World IPv6 launch day.

IPv6 is the new net address system that replaces the current protocol IPv4, which is about to run out of spaces to allocate.

Web companies participating in the event have pledged to enable IPv6 on their main websites from that date.

The Internet Society, which made the announcement, said the day represented “a major milestone” in the deployment of the standard.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo are the inaugural web firms involved.

More from BBC News…

For the moment I am going to assume there is more sensationalism than fact in the prediction the world is going to end this year. If the doomsayers turn out to be correct, following the advice in this piece won’t matter because Earth won’t be here.

And yet in one way, at least for the Internet, we should all be seen that R.E.M. song It’s the End of the World As We Know It. Several years ago the IT industry press gave considerable coverage to the fact we were running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. This is the year that happens, fulll stop.

And continuing with that famous song I quote “and I feel fine.”

It appears sensationalism sells. What does it really mean to us running out of Internet addresses? In reality, a whole lot of nothing.

That’s because it’s old news, and we have been planning for a long time. IPv6 is coming to town. I first wrote about it in one of my technical manuals over 10 years ago. In fact, I took that manual and some others and put them online with the help of my buddy Charles, eight years ago.

More from TRCB News…

The urgent push to move the whole of Internet addresses off of a system never intended to replace telephone, television, and computing simultaneously, and onto the IPv6 address system, is now entering its 13th consecutive blockbuster year. Despite high-level government recommendations for action plans, a global DNS poisoning scare that many say could never have happened under IPv6, and a grass-roots effort to build an actual holiday around the transition, it’s estimated that the rate at which the Asia/Pacific region is depleting IPv4 addresses is far outpacing the rate that hosts in that region are moving to IPv6.

It’s almost as if everyone wants a real Internet, but too few want to lend a hand in building it. Now the Internet Society, its original non-profit guidance organization, is stepping up its push to make IPv6 more marketable, first with the launch of a new Web site called Deploy360, to be followed up next week with meetings with consumer electronics vendors at CES in Las Vegas.

More from Read Write Web…

Comcast continues to extend its leadership role in the adoption of next-generation Internet services with the news that it has expanded its production IPv6 deployment into four more states — Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — over the past six weeks.

Comcast made the announcement here yesterday at a technical seminar sponsored by Network World called “The Critical Path to IPv6.”

Comcast launched its production IPv6 deployment on Oct. 31 in the East Bay area of San Francisco with 100 customers. Now Comcast says it has more than 1,000 users of IPv6 nationwide.

More from NetworkWorld…

We are at the dawn of the age of IPv6, the Internet protocol that will succeed version 4. With 340 undecillion available addresses, IPv6 ensures that the Internet can continue growing and offers advantages in terms of stability, flexibility, and simplicity in network administration.

The Internet is a communications network formed by millions of interconnected computers that share data and resources. All the computers on the network use the Internet protocol (IP) so that users can read a web page or send an e-mail and be sure that information is properly sent and received. The protocol assigns a numeric code (IP address) to each device on the network in order to identify it. In other words, “the IP protocol is the universal language that allows all the devices connected to the Internet to understand each other,” says Xavier Hesselbach, a member of the research group on Design and Evaluation of Broadband Networks and Services.

More from Eurasia Review…

The New Zealand IPv6 Task Force is pleased to announce that New Zealand’s public sector is making steady progress towards greater adoption and usage of IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol.

The finding follows a series of interviews conducted by the Task Force with a swath of SOEs, Crown entities, core government agencies and tertiary / research institutes.

The key takeaways from the report are:

Awareness of IPv6 and of IPv4 exhaustion is high in the government and wider state sector.

More from Voxy…

Quite a number of articles and blogs including one I contributed [PDF] had IPv6 haruspices dissect the entrails and divine the future of the internet in the wake of the june 8th IPv6 World Day. It came and went with some trepidation, the internet did not go comatose and some marveled at and reported on traffic peaks they witnessed.

Preparation of a keynote [PDF] for the Gogonet Live conference in San Jose, provided me the opportunity to have a look at how some variables evolved since June including the ‘brokenness’ issue, the penetration speed of mobile broadband and its retinue of smart phones and tablets as well as the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of older CPE equipment. A glimpse at the evolution of IPv6 traffic over the intervening semester, at least from the perspective of a global tier-1 wholesale network such as AS6453, would give some quantitative underpinning.

More from CircleID…

The Middle East is set to run out of IPv4 addresses in the first half of 2012, according to Axel Pawlik, managing director of RIPE NCC, one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) providing internet resource allocations, registration services and coordination activities for the internet on a global basis.

IPv4 addresses are numeric addresses that identify a computer and allow it to connect to the internet.

“When the computer engineers in the late Seventies started connecting computers to each other, they invented a protocol, and at some point you have to make a design decision of how many numbers are feasible and how long these numbers should be. They decided it should be 32 bits. They thought that that should be plenty of addresses for the next 100 years or so. Now the internet has taken up a big slice of our daily lives. In the late 80s and early 90s we realised that there was going to be an issue because there were too many computers hooked up to the internet and we were about to run out of address blocks,” Pawlik told ITP.net.

More from ITP.net…

Part 2 In the previous part I explored why you should limber up to IPv6 sooner rather than later, and now here’s my experience actually walking the talk.

Importantly, mine is not a big-bang approach. I’m not trying to have everything perfect for IPv6 immediately, but rather I want to do just enough to be visible in the brave new world, safely, and tie up loose ends later as I go along.

More from The Register…