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CNN On IPv6
i am the waltuss writes "CNN has tackled The Great IP Crunch of 2010 in this article. Its a good overview/intro to the subject that will likely take the place of the Y2K "bug" after January 1. "
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I work for a wireless phone provider. One of my duties includes the keeping an eye on whether or not we have enough numbers. I also represent my company in matters regarding new areaa codes. Suffice to say, this is a serrious pain in the ass for everyone. Here (Minneapolis/St. Paul) we just split the 612 area code into two, with 651 being the new one, about a year ago. We're already planning to split the 612 again, this time into three pieces. All of these have been/will be geographical splits. All the phone companys are pushing for overlay splits, but the public, and the Public Utilities Commision hate those. A geographical split is where one area has one code, and another has a different one. In a overlay, both codes occupy the same physical areas. IE you and your neighbor may have different area codes. Solution to this? Beats me. But the day is coming where it'll be required to dial 10 digits to make any call. The public will hate it. But there is no way around it. Number Portibility is the new process in which we're hoping to save numbers. You move? Take your phone number with you. No need to issue a new one, or hold your old one for 90 days before reissue. Lots of technical problems involved with this. Not to mention the billing headaches it creates.
OK, so I'm a math weirdo, but play along for a moment. If one trillion Bill Gateses were standing in a circle and threw all their pennies in, how tall would the pile of pennies be?
Actually, there wouldn't be a pile at all: the density would only be one penny per 2.5 square cm. Assuming three Gateses per linear meter. Evenly spread out, there's plenty of room to spare. 1*10^12 people -> (1/3)*10^12 m circumference -> 1.06*10^11 m diameter -> 2.5*10^21 m^2 area -> 2.5*10^13 cm^2 per Gates. Each Gates gets to throw his wealth of 1.06*10^13 pennies into a square 50 km on a side.
If all those Gateses were standing in a circle, light would take over five minutes to cross its diameter. The circle would be not quite the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
To be precise, about 2.9%.
But good luck rewriting the TCP protocol for your penny network -- its end-to-end space-time delay is ten minutes!
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
This is something a of no-brainer, but you can find out a great deal about IPv6 by checking out
v 6-04.txt
http://www.ipv6.org/
If you just want a in-depth understanding of why you should use IPv6 instead of Ipv4 take a look at
http://www.ie tf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-iab-case-for-ip
This was a good article on a technical subject. I've looked into this a bit already, and this article agreed with what I already knew and confirmed a few things I'd only suspected.
This is of more than passing interest to us. My employer has recently aquired some other largish companies, and we need to set up a corporate Intranet. Problem is, we don't have enough IP addresses.
(Well, maybe we do. There are rumours of a class B address owned by some research lab somewhere in the company. People are currently trying to track it down. Failing that, we might just have to buy a company that already owns one.)
So now what do we do about IPv6? Everyone in the company is using IPv4, often with 10.*.*.* addresses hidden behind firewalls that do NAT. We need to integrate all these networks into one corporate Intranet, and the idea of having lots of NAT boxes playing games with IP addresses does not sound good. Neither does the prospect of renumbering all those boxes by hand. We don't run DHCP anywhere (someone once talked about security issues as the reason for that, I don't know anything more).
One idea is to create an IPv6 backbone for the Intranet with IPv4 subnets hanging off it, and use protocol translation routers to connect the subnets. That way we can get the subnets on with minimum hassle, and upgrade them as and when it becomes feasible.
As far as upgrading goes, our favoured solution would be to just buy new machines with IPv6 stacks installed. We certainly don't want a flag day. Reading the IPv6 site, it looks like IPv6 and IPv4 machines can co-exist on the same Ethernet spur or whatever. Am I right about this?
Any information would be gratefully received.