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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?"
Hopefully before they start implementing this strategy, they will take the huge Class A addresses from those who don't necessarily need all of it:
....
MIT (I know they make use of public IPs, but 16 million addresses?)
Haliburton (!)
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (?)
Ford Motor Company
This website has an updated list. There are a lot more on the list who have waste space, I just don't feel like going through all of them.
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
And it's oh so delightful when you have to connect to heterogenous networks who are both using the same private IP scheme. Or when you have to VPN into your office from a customer network and you're both using the same scheme. Or when you have to VPN through a NAT firewall.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Erm, that's easier said than done. A normal residential IPv6 allocation will be a /64 prefix, which means you are allocated a 64-bit prefix, and you can select any address in the remaining 64-bit address space. So you'd have 18446744073709551616 addresses to scan to find all the hosts on the network. Assuming that the hosts have Privacy Extensions turned off, and that they are all autoconfiguring based on their MAC addresses, you know that the 12th and 13th bytes are 0xFF and 0xFE respectively. That still leaves 48 bits of address space, or 281474976710656 addresses. Good luck.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac