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IPv4 vs IPv6: The Road Ahead
jeffy124 writes "With the world moving towards having every device under the sun being Internet-connected, is the Internet going to be too large? This article off CNN.com examines this potential situation. They look into the problems of switching networks from IPv4 to IPv6, and the inclusion of inter-operability between the two. Benefits of moving to IPv6 are looked at, but so are the critics of it who point out that if we don't have a problem now, why fix it? While low of technical details, the story points out that not many systems out there currently support IPv6. "
if we don't have a problem now, why fix it?
(ahem)
"640 kB should be enough for everybody"
"I see a worldwide market for 5, maybe 6 computers"
and one that I can only assume:
"yeah, use 2 digits for the year. Bah, the year 2000 is 20 years away, nobody will be using this stuff then anyways"
And besides, if you wait until the problem is upon us, it'll be too late to fix it.
If God gave us curiosity
Will it give back that huge class A domain that MIT still has?
A class A is 1/20,282,409,603,651,670,423,947,251,286,016th of the total IP6 namespace. Why not let them keep it?
According to the RFC's, even a lowly dialup users will be given more routable addresses than the
entire internet contains at the moment.
How about a killer app? The problem is that right now if you start using ipv6 you are pretty much alone. Actually you might as well unplug your network cable, since you won't be able to do much useful stuff with it.
What is needed is ipv6 only services (e.g. mp3 peer2peer filesharing) AND an easy way to get an ipv6 number for your clients/servers that can coexist with your current ipv4 number (i.e. your computer has both an ipv4 and ipv6 number). The easy part is essential because that prevents that people start creating ipv4 gateways to such services (thus removing the need for getting an ipv6 number). There are plenty of ipv6 numbers available so getting and registering one should be made as easy as possible (something like a distributed, global dhcp server that would automatically get you one based on your mac address would come in handy). Come to think of it, why not just automatically convert those mac addresses into ipv6 numbers (mac addresses are supposed to be unique anyway but I'm not entirely sure this is a great idea)
As I understand it, ipv6 can be tunneled over existing ipv4 networks, so it shouldn't be a problem if some routers inbetween ipv6 hosts are ipv4 only.
This would cause the amount of client pc's with ipv6 numbers to gradually grow. Also since lots of PCs don't have static ipv4 numbers, the amount of servers on ipv6 would also grow. Eventually, there will be a critical mass of ipv6 servers and clients and the switch can be made.
Currently there are a lot of p2p applications in development. I imagine, implementing such stuff would be a lot easier using ipv6 with its improved features. Another killerapp could be streaming multimedia (you want to see this great movie, get yourself an ipv6 number now!!).
Jilles