I’m sure you’ve read about the upcoming collapse of the IPv4 scheme, collapse in the sense that it will run out of numbers in 2011. That means that IPv6 will be the replacement. Microsoft Windows7 has built in support for IPv6, along side of IPv4. Google and Facebook also have begun to transition to the newest version. But not everyone else is do so yet.
Here is what is happening. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, doles out IPv4 addresses in blocks of 16.8 million called slash-eights or /8s to five organizations called regional Internet registries (RIRs). Well they only have seven left of the 256 “slash-8″ blocks original 256 /8s. And after the next two are handed out, the remaining five will automatically be distributed to each one of the five of the RIRs. They in turn will offer them to Internet service providers, hosting companies, and others with an IP appetite.
Original Recipe
Experts have known for ages that the limit of IPv4, with its 4.3 billion IP addresses would be a problem. The problem originally stemmed from a 1977 decision by Vint Cerf (one of the real “inventors” of the Internet and not a politician).
At the time, just a few years into the Internet’s history, he decided to use 32-bit Internet addresses. But 232, about 4.3 billion, looks a lot smaller in 2011 than it did back in 1977.
When interest in the Internet exploded in the 90’s things changed. So Internet engineers, in the 1990’s, developed IPv6, which has an almost inexhaustible supply. In other words, there are 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. There are 128 bits so the value is 2128.
Another interesting feature is the subnetting will not be necessary. An IPv6 subnet always has 64 bits in its host portion. It therefore has a /64 routing prefix (128−64 = the 64 most-significant bits). Although it is technically possible to use smaller subnets, they are impractical for local area networks because stateless address auto configuration of network interfaces requires a /64 address.
IPv6 does not implement special address formats for broadcast traffic or network numbers, and thus all addresses in a subnet are valid host addresses.
Subnetting in IPv6 is based on the concepts of variable-length subnet masking (VLSM) and the Classless Inter-Domain Routing methodology. But having the 255.255.255.x format is a thing of the past.
What remains, though, is how quickly the Internet world moves to IPv6, there will now be a need and demand to move in that direction.
Source: cnet
