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…

When the Internet was created in the 1970s, no-one would have imagined just how ubiquitous its use would be. Today, nearly every man, woman and child ‘connects’ on a daily basis and even humble domestic devices such as refrigerators and cookers can be connected to the Internet to aid daily life. In 2010, Gartner1 predicted that 1.6 billion smartphones alone will shipped, each having its own IP address – illustrating the scale of the issue. Nielsen’s Global Online Survey for 2011, conducted across 55 countries, showed that almost half of the Middle East’s online consumers (43 percent) plan to use a mobile phone to access the Internet while 29 percent intend to use a handheld multimedia device and 24 percent plan to access the net via an in-home video game system.

More from Zawya…

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

IANA assigns IPv4 addresses to the RIRs in blocks that equate to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a “/8” or “slash-8”. A global policy agreed on by all five RIR communities and ratified in 2009 by ICANN, the international body responsible for the IANA function, dictated that when the IANA IPv4 free pool reached five remaining /8 blocks, these blocks were to be simultaneously and equally distributed to the five RIRs.

“This is an historic day in the history of the Internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time,” states Raúl Echeberría, Chairman of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the official representative of the five RIRs. “The future of the Internet is in IPv6. All Internet stakeholders must now take definitive action to deploy IPv6.”

“This is truly a major turning point in the on-going development of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “Nobody was caught off guard by this, the Internet technical community has been planning for IPv4 depletion for quite some time. But it means the adoption of IPv6 is now of paramount importance, since it will allow the Internet to continue its amazing growth and foster the global innovation we’ve all come to expect.”

IPv6 is the “next generation” of the Internet Protocol, providing a hugely expanded address space and allowing the Internet to grow into the future. “Billions of people world wide use the Internet for everything from sending tweets to paying bills. The transition to IPv6 from IPv4 represents an opportunity for even more innovative applications without the fear of running out of essential Internet IP addresses,” said Vice President of IANA Elise Gerich.

Adoption of IPv6 is now vital for all Internet stakeholders. The RIRs have been working with network operators at the local, regional, and global level for more than a decade to offer training and advice on IPv6 adoption and ensure that everyone is prepared for the exhaustion of IPv4.

“Each RIR will have its final full /8 from IANA, plus any existing IP address holdings to distribute. Depending on address space requests received, this could last each RIR anywhere from a few weeks to many months. It’s only a matter of time before the RIRs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must start denying requests for IPv4 address space. Deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option,” added Echeberría. IPv6 address space has been available since 1999. Visit http://www.nro.net/ipv6/ for more information on IPv6, or your local RIR for information on how to get address space.

APNIC, which is an administration authority of IP addresses (RIR: Regional Internet Registry) and responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, made an announcement about a rapidly decreasing stock of IPv4 addresses.

IANA, which supervises RIRs, currently has a stock of seven blocks of IPv4 addresses. A block, which is called “/8,” is equivalent to 16,777,216 addresses. In the announcement, APNIC said that IANA will soon distribute two of the remaining seven blocks.

This means that IANA will run out of stock; When the number of blocks owned by IANA becomes five, the five blocks will be automatically distributed to five regions.

More from Tech On...

We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses. In case you haven’t been watching, that indicates that the long expected run on IPv4 Internet addresses has begun.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigns IPv4 addresses to the regional Internet registry (RIR) in blocks that are equal to 1/256th of the entire IPv4 address space. Each block is referred to as a “/8″ aka “slash-8″ and includes just over 16 million IP addresses. The most recent assignment means that there are now only 7 of these blocks available.

More from ZDNet…

There are now only seven blocks of IPv4 addresses left in the global pool, and five are already allocated.

Last night, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) doled out two blocks each to a pair of regional internet registries (RIRs) – the American Registry for Internet Numbers and RIPE NCC, which manages Europe and the Middle East – leaving only seven blocks, called /8s, of IPv4 addresses remaining.

More from PC Pro…

I attended the RIPE 61 meeting this month, and, not unexpectedly for a group that has some interest in IP addresses, the topic of IPv4 address exhaustion, and the related topic of the transition of the network to IPv6 has captured a lot of attention throughout the meeting. One session I found particularly interesting was one on the transition to IPv6, where folk related their experiences and perspectives on the forthcoming transition to IPv6.

I found the session interesting, as it exposed some commonly held beliefs about the transition to IPv6, so I’d like to share them here, and discuss a little about why I find them somewhat fanciful.

Read more on CircleID…

With cyberspace almost full, Samantha Amjadali finds out it’s going to take half a trillion dollars to avoid a global squeeze.

IPV6. It is the ultimate case of procrastination; a problem so big, so complex and so expensive, the world has ignored it for two decades.

Read more from Sydney Morning Herald

Olivier Crepin-Leblond from the Internet Society chapter in England recently announced the results of an “IPv6 crawler” tool they designed and implemented. This tool trawls through the DNS to detect IPv6 compliant servers, producing results that can be viewed on an “IPv6 Matrix”, showing IPv6 penetration on geographical maps.

More on RIPE Labs…