IPv6 Promotion Effort.

rafa writes "The IETF may soon launch an IPv6 promotion effort. The new IPv6 is an improvement over the current standard IPv4, that has a larger amount of addresses available, improves routing and has several other benefits. "

Comments

Pick your own IP address at random!

[jonathanclark]

This is not what is going to happen, but with 128 bit addresses you could just pick a number at random and use it. The odds of 2 people chosing the same number is low enough to be acceptable.

The actual probability is approx:

1- exp(-n*n/m)

where n is the number of addresses selected
and m is the total addresses available.

If 4 billion people select addresses at random then the odds of a collision are:
1 in 415,828,534,307,635,078.

To put this number in perspective, your odds of guessing the right number to a 56bit DES encryption key on your first try is 1 is much better:
1 in 72,057,594,037,927,936

We won't be running out of IP addresses anytime soon. 2^128 is not big enough that we could assign each atom on the planet is own IP address (this number is ~2^170), but we certainly could assign each atom that could possibly be seen it's own IP (i.e. by excluding those in the earth's core). Considering that you need a fair number of atoms to store just to store a 128bit number, I think we are safe until space travel explodes.