IPv4 To IPv6 Transition...Huh??

Cue the Lifehacker expertise:

The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is kind of confusing if you've never really read much about it, but the idea is pretty simple. IPv4 is what we currently use, and it results in IP addresses with four sets of numbers. For example, the IP address to your router is probably 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.1.1 (or something similar).

The periods separate each number, and there are a total of four. Because there are only so many combinations, we've actually managed to (essentially) run out of IPv4 addresses. Without IP addresses, we can't keep adding more computers to the internet. That's a simplified explanation of the problem, but that's essentially the issue. The solution is iPv6, which results in longer addresses that look like this: 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf. This offers up many, many more combinations so we'll be able to allocate new IPv6 addresses for a long time. For a good overview of the whole situation, check out this infographic.

How the Change Affects You

It's pretty easy to memorize an IPv4 address—it's not much different than memorizing a phone number—but IPv6 addresses are quite a bit more difficult. On the surface, you're dealing with something a bit more complex. Beneath the surface, IPv6 also works a bit differently than IPv4 and requires both hardware and software support to function. IPv6 support is built in to most modern computer hardware, but not all. If you want to check if your hardware supports IPv6, the easiest thing to do is head for the command line. In Windows you can run ipconfig. On a Mac or Linux machine you can run ifconfig. These commands should list IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for your hardware. If you see an IPv6 address listed, you're good.

Sort of.

Software support is also necessary for IPv6 to work. You can't just enter an address like 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf because, at the moment, your browser probably doesn't recognize the format (or sort of does). Fortunately there isn't much to worry about here because, 1) you can't do anything about this and 2) software support will be on its way.

When the Change is Coming

June 8, 2011, is World IPv6 Day, during which web companies like Google and Facebook are participating in a 24-hour test of IPv6. In reality, the IPv6 change isn't likely to mean much to you for quite some time. In the United States, the IPv6 compatibility deadline set by the federal government is September 30, 2012, according to Information Week. This is the date after which "webmail, domain name server (DNS), and Internet service provider (ISP) services, must operationally use native IPv6." This is soon, but not terribly soon, and for most of us, that deadline won't really mean a lot. If you're running a popular browser, you can expect compatibility by the time you'll need it, and likewise with most hardware. Chances are you won't have to do anything other than keep your software up to date, but if you have IPv6-incompatible hardware, you'll likely have updated anything that isn't compatible by then. While the IPv6 transition won't halt your ability to access the internet, it could cause some issues moving forward.

Hope that helps!

So how many IP addresses is this, anyway? For some fun ways to describe it, check this out:

I wanted to make a cool graphic to show the relative sizes of the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces. You know, where I’d show the IPv6 address space as a big box and the IPv4 address space as a tiny one. The problem is that the IPv6 address space is so much larger than the IPv4 space that there is no way to show it to scale!

To make this diagram to scale, imagine the IPv4 address space is the 1.6-inch square above. In that case, the IPv6 address space would be represented by a square the size of the solar system.

Or this:

It’s pretty hard to grasp just how large this number is. Consider:

• It’s enough addresses for many trillions of addresses to be assigned to every human being on the planet.
• The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.
• The earth’s surface area is about 510 trillion square meters. If a typical computer has a footprint of about a tenth of a square meter, we would have to stack computers 10 billion high blanketing the entire surface of the earth to use up that same trillionth of the address space.
  

Or these:

Wikipedia: It’s 2⁵² addresses for every observable star in the known universe.

Random bogger: We could assign an IPv6 address to every atom on the surface of the earth – and have enough addresses left over for another hundred earths.

It’s a lot of addresses. We won’t run out. Whatever else happens, we won’t run out.

I think that's a safe statement! Of course, it probably won't be a transition without troubles, but hopefully it won't be too bad:

Traffic running on IPv6 equipment is invisible to IPv4 equipment in almost every way. The committee made a decision not to pursue backward compatibility, which probably made a lot of technical issues easier but leaves us with difficult problems now that we’ve procrastinated and there’s no time to ease into things. It’s going to take equipment changes up and down the line, from the largest ISPs and global routers down to your office, before we will be able to deal with IPv4 and IPv6 traffic at the same time. No one knows whether that will be important to those of us in small businesses or not; that will evolve from all the confusion over our heads in the next few years. With luck, a working connection will be delivered to us, we’ll buy some new Netgear equipment, and someone else will have gone prematurely grey to make it work easily for us.

At least we're not seeing catastrophic predictions of the end of the world, like with the Millennium Bug. Regardless, now you know...and now you can sleep at night.

:)