The United States has lost one of its most ardent proponents of IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, with the death of Jim Bound earlier this week. Bound was a Senior Fellow with HP, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force and CTO of the IPv6 Forum.
U.S. loses IPv6 leader - Network World
Google has begun preaching the wonders of IPv6 in the hope more awareness will help expedite the transition from the legacy IPv4 networks most people use today.
During a presentation at this year’s linux.conf.au in Hobart, senior Google software engineer Angus Lees recalled how Google’s IPv6 efforts started as a covert, hobbyist project about two years ago and has gained enough momentum that a AAAA record for google.com could be added to Google’s DNS in a year.
Google ramps up IPv6 mission, google.com a year away - Network World
Iljitsch van Beijnum writes …
As we reported back in July, the Internet Engineering Task Force has been thinking about ways to make the IPv4 world talk to the (future) IPv6 world. This way, we don’t all have to upgrade at the same time. In order to make more progress before the next IETF meeting in November in Minneapolis, a two-day interim meeting was held last week in Montréal.
The problem that the IETF is facing is that, despite the family resemblance, there is a very fundamental difference between IPv4 and IPv6: IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, while IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses. So how do you make a system that only has an IPv4 address talk to a system with only an IPv6 address? Simple enough: you translate the packet. The IETF standardized a way to do this years ago under the name SIIT (Stateless IP and ICMP Translation). However, SIIT has a big problem: the translation is one-to-one.
IETF working on making IPv6 and IPv4 talk to each other
Iljitsch van Beijnum writes …
A little over a year ago, I wrote an article about the IPv4 address consumption with the subtitle IPv4 Address Space: 2.46 Billion Down, 1.25 Billion to Go. A week ago, we reached the magic number of 2.7 billion IPv4 addresses used. With 3.7 billion possible addresses,¹ this means we now have less than a billion unused IPv4 addresses left. There are 39 blocks of 16.78 million addresses in the IANA global pool and another 339 million addresses that have been given out by IANA to the five Regional Internet Registries, but not yet delegated to ISPs or end-users.Related Stories
So, how long will a billion quench our thirst for addresses? Geoff Huston at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre has written a script that downloads the relevant information and creates daily predictions. The current ones target 10 February 2011 as the moment that IANA will give out the last of its blocks to one of the regional registries, and 17 December 2011 as the day that the last RIR will hand out the last IPv4 address to an ISP (or end-user).
We’re running out of IPv4 addresses. Time for IPv6. Really.