You may be starting to hear in the news that some organisation, that sounds a lot like a line from an 80s pop song, is running out of IP addresses. You probably didn’t, or won’t, care too much. But should you?
IANA is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and they control things such as IP address assignment, what domains you can type into your browser and expect to work, and many other things. Again, you might be wondering why you care. In short once IANA run out addresses to give people, adding new hardware to connect to the public internet is going to be a lot harder. If IANA has no IP addresses, they can’t give your ISP one, and in turn nor will your ISP.
Unfortunately we can’t just add extra numbers onto the end of an existing IP address and expect it to work. Many years ago, when networks were being invented, for performance reasons IP addresses were given a fixed length. That limit will be present more devices than you might want to imagine.
Thankfully many years ago people saw these depletion coming, and got together to come up with bigger addresses and to plans some of the others issues they saw in the curent IP suite. That eventually became IPv6 (pronounced: Aye-Pee-Vee-Six).
The current version of IP is called IPv4. Everything about IPv6 is bigger. IPv4 has about 4,294,967,296 addresses, whereas IPv6 has about 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (in both cases we can’t use the full quantity). That’s such a big number that I actually have to resort to using Wolfram Alpha to tell me how to say it. In addition IPv6 has several features that should make deploying some networks a little quicker.
Unfortunately uptake of IPv6 has been very low outside of a few industries and continents.
The main problem was that there was no content, so the hardware and software manufacturers didn’t put much time or effort into adding support for it into their products. That seems reasonable, right? Maybe, until you consider that people won’t deliver content over IPv6 if there’s no one who can see it. It’s a bit of a nasty chicken and egg scenario. The other problem is that IPv6 is a bit intimidating for many who aren’t into networking.
Now we’re all standing on the rain slick precipice of darkness. There are short term solutions, using the same technology that you will see in home routers and in many corporate environments today; NAT, or Network Address Translation. NAT lets you share a single, or multiple, addresses with many other devices. I bet you’re thinking that sounds awesome? The problem with NAT is that it’s not a very nice technology. It picks and pulls at data and requires a more processing than a pure router. It gets especially nasty when you start piling multiple levels of NAT on top of each other – which is precisely what some ISPs may have to start doing soon. This means that programs like Skype may start being more troublesome, online gaming, and so on. These are probably things you care about!
So, IPv6 is the future. The real issue is that many companies aren’t ready for what’s to come. I’m not just talking SMEs here. Core internet carriers, ISPs, datacentres are just as lacking in many instances. A lot of software and hardware doesn’t have the necessary support (yet, although its getting a lot better), in some places workarounds (static tunnels and a technology called Teredo) to get IPv6 connectivity to computers are actually causing problems, many IT professionals are still afraid of IPv6, and best practises are still being written for some parts of the technology.
Some are still sceptical that we won’t move to IPv6, but I’d be willing to argue that it’s inevitable. However, it will be many years before we’re all using IPv6, and IPv4 is just one of those technologies for old nerds to reminisce about.
If you’re starting to feel depressed, don’t be too much. There will be some pain, but many system administrators and network operators will be working hard into the night, as they always have, to ensure that you get all the facebooks and youtubes that you need to get your work done.
If you want to chat about your network and IPv6, get in touch.
[...] If you’re not familiar with what IPv6 is, it’s the next generation Internet Protocol. In broad terms, if we don’t all start using it we’re heading for a world where communicating directly between devices gets a little trickier (if you want to know more, check out our (rather long) previous blog post entitled “The sky is falling on our heads; We’re running out of addresses“). [...]
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