2012 and IPv6 Is Coming to Town

For the moment I am going to assume there is more sensationalism than fact in the prediction the world is going to end this year. If the doomsayers turn out to be correct, following the advice in this piece won’t matter because Earth won’t be here.

And yet in one way, at least for the Internet, we should all be seen that R.E.M. song It’s the End of the World As We Know It. Several years ago the IT industry press gave considerable coverage to the fact we were running out of IPv4 Internet addresses. This is the year that happens, fulll stop.

And continuing with that famous song I quote “and I feel fine.”

It appears sensationalism sells. What does it really mean to us running out of Internet addresses? In reality, a whole lot of nothing.

That’s because it’s old news, and we have been planning for a long time. IPv6 is coming to town. I first wrote about it in one of my technical manuals over 10 years ago. In fact, I took that manual and some others and put them online with the help of my buddy Charles, eight years ago.

If you need a quick overview of what IPv6 means, you can get up to speed in a couple pages by going here.

http://www.certiguide.com/netplus/cg_np_XVIIIPv6.htm

The folks that have a full-time job of the Internet equivalent of keeping the lights on have been testing as diligently as when the industry had the Y2K rollover.

Yes, some people said it was a much to do about nothing because nothing happened. That is mathematical fantasy in action. Nothing happened because we worked hard to prepare for it. And the same is true for the upcoming IPv6.

Before I give quick advice for our readers that just use computers, let me point out what the true meaning of exhausting the numbers that run our current Internet really means.

It means the last of the reserved numbers will be allocated to a few countries. Everyone who needs to know knew this was coming. So while all the numbers have been allocated to various countries, it does not mean they’re all actually being used with in each country.

While by no means am I an expert on every operating system on the planet, I know enough about Windows, Linux and OS X to know they all support IPv6. It was an optional install going back to Windows 2000. OS X has had it certainly since the aging Tiger OS. I cannot say for certainty what versions of Linux do and don’t have IPv6 support. As anyone can take the source code and take things out, it could be that some flavor doesn’t have IPv6. I know certainly it’s been available in Linux for a long time.

My advice for our readers that are not full-time network engineers is to do: absolutely nothing.

And I mean do nothing with your computer and IPv6. The odds are extremely high that making changes at best will only slow your computer down. And there is a considered possibility you will no longer connect to anything including your computers in your home, office or local coffee shop.

Without getting too technical, that magic number that we are reportedly running out of only needs to magic at that point in the network where the connection is truly globally public.

That magical box you have in your home that let you hook up a few computers, watch Netflix and check your e-mail certainly needs a magic number. However, here’s the trick. The magic number you are using in your home or office is created and given to you by that magical box.

The magical box is pretty smart. It gets one public magic number (IP address) so it can go find Google, ESPN, Netflix, yada yada. On your side of the house (office, coffee shop) the magic number is a private number reserved for that area. By definition, this private magic number cannot participate on the Internet directly.

Instead, your magical box acts as a funnel to take all your individual devices and translates the data going in and out through the one public magic number (IP address). In the USA alone. This is repeated every day in tens of millions of offices, homes and hotspots (that free Wi-Fi stuff).

All this IPv6 stuff is going to be important, at least to the people whose job it is to keep the Internet running as a distribution system. Just as a translate the magic public number two a magic private number, the professionals will handle the upgrade of the distribution system without you having to worry about anything.

Getting all scared and turning on IPv6 on your computer (tablet, internet-enabled phone) at best will slow everything down because you loaded more stuff. More likely it will really slow down because is going to try both IPv4 and IPv6.

And the worst case is your device will now try IPv6 only. And since everything you touch is IPv4, you will only be talking to yourself.

Hopefully you can see how IPv6 is important in our lives. It’s a lot like electricity. Important that you have it, not important to you how it gets there. And messing with it can have dire consequences.

Short URL: http://www.trcbnews.com/?p=7315

Posted by Tcat Houser on Jan 14 2012. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry