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(Almost) All You Need To Know About IPv6
Butterspoon tips us to an article in Ars Technica titled "Everything you need to know about IPv6." Perhaps not quite "everything"; the article doesn't try to explain the reasons behind IPv6's meager adoption since its introduction 12 years ago. But it should be regarded as essential reading for anyone overly comfortable with their IPv4 addresses. Quoting: "As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those [IPv4 addresses] were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up. Are you ready for IPv6?"
That is 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12 for you, you insensitive clod. And remember, 172.16 is a 12-bit netmask, not a /16 and definitely not a /8 (I think HP owns a few of the other ranges in 172.x.x.x which usually gets blocked within a firewalled/natted network by an anal admin that didn't pay enough attention.
NAT though is NOT a solution, it's a patch, a fix to a problem of running out of space. There should be enough IP's out there for everyone, but the '/8 should be enough for the average company' idea from the 80's-early 90's screwed us all up. Each Coca Cola or IBM-owned computer for example could have it's own public IP, the way it should be, but they own 16M+ addresses, way too much for their needs. But anyway, IPv6 is going to keep us out of trouble for now until we make the same mistake (history has a tendency to repeat itself) and we have to invent IPv8 or so.
Next to that IPv4 has been missing some major features and runs into problems with large networks and (very) fast links (talking 10Gigabit for example) IPv6 will solve for us, it routes faster, it has inheritely support for multicast and jumboframes, IPSec and mobile versions while IPv4 usually has that functionality bolted on (sometimes implemented slightly different with each manufacturer).
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