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World IPv6 day celebrated by Google, Facebook, Bing and others

by Hugo Jobling on 8 June 2011, 15:56

Tags: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa6bw

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Addressing the issue

Some of the web's biggest names are taking to day to World IPv6 Day - a 24-hour 'test' of their services run over the next generation of IP addresses.

Big names including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Microsoft (on its Bing search engine) are involved, enabling IPv6-based access to their websites for the day. This isn't the first time many have tested out IPv6 compatibility - Google has had an IPv6 subdomain for a while now - but it is the first time so many influential companies have thrown their consolidated weight behind promoting IPv6.

ipv6

The purpose of today's 'test' is the promotion of the forthcoming exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, of which an estimated 80 million addresses, out of the 4.3 billion available, remain. Once these remaining addresses are used up, the transition to IPv6 will be required if any more devices are to be connected to the Internet, without re-using old IPv4 addresses.

There's no cause for panic, as the transition won't happen overnight, and for the general populous it should prove relatively seamless as general web traffic rarely uses IP addresses anyway, relying instead on DNS names, translated into IPs - a process that works just as well with IPv6 ad with IPv4. This test is about promoting the soon-to-be-required transition to IPv6, not

There's some irony in today's IPv6 test, as a large majority of web users will be unable to take part themselves as few ISPs offer support for IPv6 addresses currently. As all of the sites involved in today's test are also accessible via IPv4, that's not a problem, but it does put a dampener on the celebrations.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Awesome, nice to see it finally being used in anger.

Perhaps it won't be too long before static IPs are free from ISPs :)
You want not just a static IP but 65534 of them, so you can put a real IPv6 IP on everything in your house. Plus you could need pick the end your address you too could have f00d, do6, face, dead, boob, booc or beef at the end.
This test is about promoting the soon-to-be-required transition to IPv6, not

There's some irony

Is a bit of the article missing? I'm confused as to why they could't just add another few load of numbers onto what they have now, so instead of 1.1.1.1 have 1.1.1.1.1.1.1 that'd add a fair few more addresses.
Servers would have used IPv6 years ago if ISPs adopted it or at least had a roadmap to adoption instead of depleting the v4 pool to absolute exhaustion and NATing around the problem.
warejon9
I'm confused as to why they could't just add another few load of numbers onto what they have now, so instead of 1.1.1.1 have 1.1.1.1.1.1.1 that'd add a fair few more addresses.
Because IPv4 is 32bits in length. To add another n bytes you need a new standard, new equipment or at least patched firmwares for existing equipment, etc. v6 also adds a number of security features and modern niceties which weren't part of the v4 specifications since it was designed before the internet which would be far too problematic to retro-engineer into existing IPv4 infrastructure.

It's best to just have a fresh start with all these considerations as part of the design. We're in the transition mess we're in now because we've abused the crap out of IPv4 for decades with NAT and other such patchwork brainfarts.