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Military Pressuring Vendors On IPv6
netbuzz writes "US military officials are threatening IT suppliers with the loss of military business if they don't use their own wares to start deploying IPv6 on their corporate networks and public-facing Web services immediately. 'We are pressing our vendors in any way we can,' says Ron Broersma, DREN Chief Engineer and a Network Security Manager for the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 'We are competing one off against another. If they want to sell to us, we're asking them: Are you using IPv6 features in your own products on your corporate networks? Is your public Web site IPv6 enabled? We've been doing this to all of the vendors.'"
2^128 unique address. I don't think we'll be exhausting them any time soon. That's like each person on earth have access to roughly 10^38 unique address.
(Deep breath)
When we have colonised the entire observable Universe (at a (hugely over)estimated one habitable planet per star), our descendants* will be able to own about three-quarters of a million cellphones each.**
If you mean we should skip a step while we're at it, we are: we're going straight from 32-bit to 128-bit, rather than 64-bit.
* In before "this is Slashdot".
** 715,925 cellphones should be enough for anyone!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Newegg doesn't sell them, but the Apple Airport Express (and any 802.11n based Apple router) supports IPv6. $99 and up. Buffalo had one out in 2007, before their WiFi lawsuit, and has a few more out now. DLink does too.
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers has a good list.
It will be interesting to see what router manufacturers decide to be nice and offer IPv6 formware upgrades, and which ones push people towards new equipment.
I'll try...
I have no idea of any meaningful measurement of Library of Congress for comparison, sorry.
It takes 39 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv6. Only 10 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv4.
If you treat each address as a unit of mass and consider IPv4 to have mass equivalent of 7 liters of water, then, IPv6 would have mass equivalent roughly to Earth. (The whole earth, including all the oceans, lakes, land masses, people, buildings, etc.)
In IPv4, there are more than 1.5 people alive today for every address.
In IPv6, there are 50,041,524,547,196,832,862,260,971,681 addresses for each person alive today.
Or, perhaps consider the following:
The US public debt is 13,848,000.000,000. If IP addresses were pennies, we would need 3,462 IPv4 internets to pay it off. The IPv6 address space, converted to pennies, OTOH, would pay the public debt more than 24,572,672,365,752,344,270,896,491 times. /64 network worth of pennies, please ;-)
(If anyone wants to send me even a single IPv6
email me for contact information.)
Hope that helps.
You try to design a router ASIC with variable length addresses!
You and I might struggle, but Tony Li didn't seem to have a problem with it. Really. Go and look at Google Groups for info.big-internet around 1993-1994 and see Tony provide pseudo-code that demonstrated that variable length was not a problem for ASICs, nor was it any slower.
Yes, it is obvious that fixed length must be better than variable length. Yes, that is incorrect. What everyone 'knows' may be far from the truth.
Now, continue surfing using the more efficient, cheaper ATM (fixed size cells) NIC rather than that inefficient , expensive Ethernet (variable size frames) NIC.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.