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U.S. DoD Commits To IPv6

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the leading-the-way dept.

babaloo writes "According to this article the U.S. Defense Department wants to move it's entire network to IPv6 by the year 2008. Will this be what pushes at least U.S. based companies and providers to actually convert over?" It's definitely a shot in the arm that IPv6 needs. This seemed to be more of a priority back when NAT was much less prevalent, but it seems we'll eventually find ourselves on IPv6, even if we drag our feet there.

5 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. dupe? by zoloto · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wasn't this covered here:
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13 /194120 6&mode=thread

    oh wait, this is /.
    any news is good news!

  2. Re:Heavy Sigh by caluml · · Score: 4, Informative
    Er, no.

    From ifconfig:
    inet6 addr: fe80::240:93fa:fe43:6f50/64 Scope:Link

    And you're right - DNS will become more invaluable.
    Although you only have to remember your subnet - eg 2001:618:15, and the address you use on that subnet, which is usually something like ::1, or ::2, etc.

    --
    Get your own free personal location tracker
  3. Re:Recap by jared_hanson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Won't we need IPv7 by then?

    No, we will not. The current IPv4 has approximately 4,300,000,000 (4.3 x 10^9) total addresses in its address space. IPv6, however, has 3.4 x 10^38 available addresses.

    To quote from the WIDE FAQ: "If the address space of IPv4 is compared to 1 millimeter, the address space of IPv6 would be 80 times the diameter of the galactic system."

    It is simply not feasible that we will ever need anything more than IPv6.

    --
    -- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
  4. More than one benefit. by davidu · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2460.html
    IPv6 has many improvements over IPv4 other than just more address space.
    • Expanded Addressing Capabilities (multicast, anycast, etc)
    • Header Format Simplification
    • Flow Labeling Capability
    • Authentication and Privacy Capabilities
    There is no address space shortage as reported...everywhere. -davidu
    --

    # Hack the planet, it's important.
  5. Re:Big numbers... by caluml · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's hierarchical. Someone owns "all" the IP addresses. Big ISP 1 asks for a chunk of space, and gets, oh, I don't know, a /30. ISP 2 gets a /36. Company 3 (me :O) ) gets a /48, which is 65536 subnets, each of 2^64 addresses, which is more than enough for me.
    Hierarchical is good, as it means that the world doesn't need to know about routes for each company. It just says: Oh, that address is in the range belonging to Big ISP 1, so I'll pass it on. Big ISP 1 knows that it belongs to ISP 2, and ISP 2 passes it on to Company 3.

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