Friday 10 June 2011

IPv6 upgrade looms

As some of the may know, June 8th was IPv6 day. IPv6 day is when loads of companies around the world agree to test their IPv6 support. Some of you might know from World of Warcraft - it had a bunch of IPv6 servers running for a 24 hour period.
But what is IPv6? IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol version 6. It is a web standard that controls how information and your IP addresses are communicated between computers. Currently we all run on IPv4. This is your traditional 127.0.0.1 kind of IP, pretty much everyone should know that. But the problem is we are running out of IP addresses to give to people!
That's where IPv6 comes in. It allows 340 undecillion IP addresses. That's such a stupidly huge number, we can probably never run out (think the number 34 followed by 38 zeroes). IPv4 supports a mere 4294967296 addresses, and that simply isn't enough for us humans.
But good news! After IPv6 day, a bunch of big companies like Google and Facebook have confirmed that they will be supporting IPv6 permanently in the near future. I'm thinking IPv6 will be the standard in a few years, not long to go now!

34 comments:

  1. I actually heard a few years ago that we were eventually going to run out of IP's. I thought it couldn't happen, proved wrong huh.

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  2. Sounds promising. I always love to hear about technological advancements!!

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  3. Why isn't that enough? It's several hundred times the number of people on the planet.

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  4. very cool info thank you!
    I wonder how long until we are forced to go to IP6 on external networks?

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  5. Wow I just learned a new level of numbers!

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  6. how does IPv6 look like?
    IPv4 is seprated by 3 dots. ranging from 0-255, no? What about IPv6?

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  7. My crappy ISP hasn't upgraded to IPv6 yet...

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  8. Well, it had to come to this, hasn't?

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  9. good mby i should switch to IPV6

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  10. Good to know they are actually looking into this before we are all screwed by the lack of IP addresses.

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  11. Nice, can't wait. What's an example of one of these addresses?

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  12. lol, I've never even heard of the number "undecillion"

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  13. I remember running out of IP addresses was quite a scare a few yars back. Glad to hear it's all been sorted out.

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  14. I think I have seen some website that has countdown until all IPv4's have been given out.

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  15. incredible man. cant wait for that. 4294 million really isnt enough haha

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  16. Awesome, I remember reading somewhere that the IPs will soon run out, glad to see this is not the case. :)

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  17. I'm glad we're getting to the point where we really start using is as it's quite a bit faster due to the new frame setup got to love less overhead <3

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  18. This would be interesting D3N00B1F13D™. The IPs provided by IPv6 will sureley never run out.

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  19. That's really cool... didn't know about this!

    followed!

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  20. oh wow! what are we trying to do, invite aliens to join our network?

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  21. thx for info very interesting! followed

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  22. First I've heard of this, always nice to find out about this stuff after the fix is in, no reason to worry now. ;)

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  23. I didn't know that, thanks :)

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  24. Im always going to be a IPv4 hipster. As long as they keep the internet up, im cool.

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  25. thats big news, glad we figured out a permanent solution to our IP problem

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  26. did a post on this a couple of days ago cant wait until ipv6 is the standard!

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  27. Thanks for this post! I jusk know nothing about this ipv6 stuff...

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  28. didnt know this, usefull information

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  29. Interesting! I hope the step to Ipv6 will go smoothly.

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  30. haha a hundred years later.... IPv7 comes out due to over population. haha

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