Well I was in my computer troubleshooting class and we discussed that this past thursday the IEEE(I don't remember what this stands for) handed out the last 5 packs of IPv4 addresses

Eventually we will have to make a switch to IPv6, but from what I hear the transition will not be very smooth.

I can't seem to find the video of the people from IEEE presenting them to the other countries, if someone could help that would be great.

So what are you're thoughts about the internet changing? Do you think the transition will be smooth? Sorry if this topic has been posted, and I apologize if its a boring topic, I just love anything related to computers and I wanted to share the info

The only problem I foresee is people trying to remember IPv6 addresses.

I mean, 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 just doesn't roll off the tongue like 8.8.8.8.

I agree, but there is also no date currently where businesses must switch to IPv6 and no longer support v4. Google currently supports v6 but thats the only place I know of currently.

Well, true. That doesn't make it any easier to remember an IPv6 address. Sooner or later IPv6 will replace IPv4 as the standard.

People knew a long time ago that the pool of available addresses was finite, and would run out eventually.
You have to remember, the internet was not conceptualized to be a global network. It's original purpose was to be a failsafe method of communication for the government in the event of a nuclear war (ie: wide scale disaster). If one or more nodes were knocked out, the network would still be viable.

The fact that they waited this long to worry about it is just typical human modus operandi, it seems. They should have implemented something like IPv6 back in the late '80s, when the internet began to transfer over from a government institution to the public domain.

The internet isn't going to break. The conversion will happen, and this will all blow over like the Y2K panic.
It's just kind of a mockery of the intelligent people involved in this thing, for them to have waited until the last minute to do something about it.

I understand that the internet isn't going to "break". I've just heard the transition will not be very smooth. Especially since we will all have to receive new routers from our ISP's.

Uhhh... new modems, maybe. New routers? Probably not. Most routers can support IPv6 out of the box - and if they can't, there are a multitude of third-party firmware that will make them (DD-WRT, Tomato, etc).

Also, I think most modems now can support IPv6. Give it a year or so and probably all new ones will.

Gahh! Sorry..I get those confused sometimes. I'm new to some of this stuff

IPv4 is gonna still be around for a long time. IPv4 isn't even truely "out", just out of "free" addresses. Each of the five Regional Internet Registries has at least 16 million unclaimed addresses. All that happened is there is no universally available addresses.

Edit: Oh, this shouldn't be taken as saying there is no need to update to IPv6. There most certainly is, and sooner is better than later, but basically people are playing the funeral music just a bit too early.


More than likely your local network is going to be staying IPv4, especially at your work. XP and Windows Server 2003 don't play 100% nice with IPv6 without a few more updates, to say nothing of earlier versions of Windows (I remember once working at an office and they had a Windows ME computer, I was mortified... that was just last year)

... ouch.

I mean... wow. Couldn't they have put that poor machine out of its misery? Like... take it out back and shoot it? Or, perhaps worse, try to install Gentoo from Stage 1 on it?

IPv6 address pool is finite as well. Finiteness is not the problem, it's the amount. Although finite, IPv6 address pool contains 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 addresses and that will only run out if we meet aliens and for whatever reason they decide to use our Internet as well, or when we start colonising other planets and if people there want to connect to the same Internet (although that would be an extremely laggy connection), because there is physically not enough material on Earth to build enough computers to deplete the entire IPv6 address pool (that is actually just an educated guesstimate, but I think it's true).

True, but the IPv4 4 byte scheme only has 4 billion (+/-) possible unique addresses. And many of those are reserved.
When you are looking at implementing a global network, that just isn't enough to go around. They knew this 20 some years ago.

By the time we run out of IPv6 addresses, humans will probably have nano-computer networks integrated into their cerebral cortex at birth, and we'll all be able to communicate "telepathically", and see things through other people's eyes. The internet will be as obsolete as Morse code and the telegraph are today.

I'm talking tongue-in-cheek. But, the truth is, the IPv6 address scheme will undoubtedly be sufficient to work until external peripherals are no longer necessary for long distance communication.

20-some years ago, no one expected the Internet to go public. It was developed for the government and research, and for that pupose, 4 billion addresses is more than enough.

You can blame nearsightedness, but they just didn't understand the future implementations of their invention.

Read post #5.

And the internet went public in 1989... that was 22 years ago.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet:


And I dare to argue that the topic of the limited amount of addresses was discussed at that time.
I'm not being confrontational, I just remember the discussions...

damn, I'm still thinking like the early 80s was 20 years ago

limited addresses was discussed back then, hence why IPv6 was out before the end of the millennium. Logistically speaking, IPv6 at the start of publicly available Internet was just not practical due to developmental costs, and lack of an existing knowledgebase + functioning hardware/hardware design. Going public with bleeding edge is expensive and not good for establishing a userbase, anyone will tell you that. So hashing together a working implementation of IPv6 would have been disastrous and quite possibly slowed the adoption of the Internet. The decision for classful network allocation was an appropriate stop-gap. If you want to blame anyone for this, don't blame those at the time of the Internet going public or those who came before them: they were working out making it work. Instead blame the slow adoption of IPv6 after it was standardized, as that is what caused all the problems.

lol...
Yeah, I know all about that mental time lapse thing... And, it gets worse with age, trust me.

I agree. Something like this should have been done in phases over a period of time, at least that seems like a logical approach to me.
But now it's crunch time. The chance to do it in the background is gone. Now, they are going to have to take bigger bites of the problem to get it worked out before they can resume moving forward again.

I reasd about this in the paper or somewhere a while back, so I'm a little fuzzy, but I think the article said that people were going to fight the change to IPv6, or something. By people, I mean businesses, website owners, not just your average nerd. So if it gets fought, and delayed for a long time, it will be interesting to see what happens. I like watching humanity fail because of their obsession with bickering.

The thing is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Corporation_for_Assigned_Names_and_Numbers is a self governed non-profit organization. They are loosely tied to the Department of Commerce, but not under any obligation to the DoC. In other words, they don't answer to anyone, and if they decide they are going to do something, there isn't really anything anyone in the private sector can do about it.

You could write your congressman, I guess. But honestly, I doubt any politician will spend much time worrying about something like this.
"ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet..."
They don't concern themselves with individual wants or wishes.

When they begin to implement the IPv6 protocol large scale, everyone is going to either fall in line, or go off line.

That's reassuring then. A little anticlimatic but I should be grateful, I loves my internets.

Because 30 years ago, they knew that everyone was going to have 2 or 3 internet connectible devices?

Totally. They even knew that people would have in their pockets computers more powerful than the room-sized ones of the time.

Would still be quicker than what we've had recently

DEFRON is right, local area networks will remain IPv4 for a very long time yet...no need to switch over thank goodness...can you imagine the hassle if you DNS went down? Right now, the IPv4 addresses are memorable to a certain extent! I have an Eidetic memory, and I still struggle to remember IPv6 address! No use adding unneccesary work, right?

It would be limited by the speed of light.

I'm not sure if you've heard, but there's also a certain marvellous invention called "paper".