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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.
Yeah, good job and more please.
Whoever writes the speeches @ 1600 Penn ought to make sure this one at least gets some lip service. While not a big deal for the general public, it is something that shows some common sense due diligence and proactive thinking from a widely vilified branch of our Federal machinery.
There is a difference here. IPv6 would be the equivalent of IBM saying something more like:
640 exabytes ought to be enough for anyone.
(note by exabyte I mean 1000 terabytes, not Exabyte the brand name of many 8mm digital video tape drives).
340*10^36 (the IPv6 address space) is more than 10^26 times the current demand for addresses.
Compare to 640k which was roughly 10^1 times the standard memory size for machines of the day.
In fact, today, I doubt you can identify many (any?) machines with more than a terabyte of RAM.
In fact, it's rare to find more than 128GB of RAM capacity in most machines. (64GB is roughly
100,000 times the original 640KB number, so 128GB would be 2*10^5 times 640KB).
To put the comparison in some perspectives you might be able to wrap your head around...
If you were to allocate an almond M&M for every 256 IPv4 addresses, the resulting amount /24 prefix)
of almond M&Ms laid out in a 1-M&M thick layer would cover only 70 yards of an american
regulation football field (NFL, not FIFA). (16.7 million M&Ms, 1 for each IPv4
Contrast that with the number of IPv6 /64 prefixes (a bit more than 18 quintillion) which
would provide enough M&Ms to fill all of the great lakes.
Where each /24 can accommodate a single router and up to 253 other hosts, each /64 can accommodate more hosts than you could ever physically put on any
IPv6
conceivable scale of network gear (18 quintillion+ hosts).
There will not be a likely shortage of IPv6 addresses in any of our lifetimes.
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.