IPv6 Basics by Josh Williams
By Brian Gadoury
June 15, 2012
Josh Williams reviewed World IPv6 Launch that occurred on 2012-06-06. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook are some of the larger companies that launched on that date. While not exactly on the same scale, endpoint.com did a little over a year earlier.
As many of you may already know, the pool of (32-bit) IPv4 IP addresses that we’re all familiar with, has officially run out. IPv6, defined in 1998, has 128-bit addresses that are constructed by 8 hexadecimal segments.
What are some of the advantages of having the huge pool of addresses? Well, there’s really no longer any need for NAT—everything becomes directly routable. IPv6 also gives us stateless auto-configuration that uses your MAC address to create your IPv6 address, so this means you’re that much more likely to be able to successfully get the same network address. IPsec is optionally built in to IPv6. (Optional because not everything truly needs IPsec.)
Not sure if your computer or mobile device is using IPv6 yet? Hit http://testipv6.com and it’ll tell you. Welcome to the future, finally.
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