What's So Great About IPv6?

From the ever quoted Wiki

Or you can go to the source, IETF.org RFC 4294

IPv6 has a much larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, where IPv4 uses only 32 bits. This expansion provides flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic and eliminates the need for network address translation (NAT). NAT gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion.

Network security is integrated into the design of the IPv6 architecture.

Should you be feeling left out - also from Wiki: and heavily redacted

A recent study^[1] by Google indicates that penetration is still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. According to the study, Mac OS X leads in IPv6 penetration of 2.44%, followed by Linux (0.93%) and Windows Vista (0.32%).^[2]

Yes, IPv6 was 'needed' before NAT was previlant. There are still some companies and institutions (like MIT and HP) that have a class A set of IP addresses. (HP may have returned theirs, but ) many of the 'originators' of the internet had large address spaces culled out before the internet got 'popular'.

IPv4 address space is still a 'rare' commodity and is tightly controlled. IPv6 is under ICANN control also.

With IPv6 the story goes that every square inch of the earth surface could be assigned a separate IP address. True or not, it does give a feeling for the number of addresses available.

I just got high speed cable at a new business address. I was asked "Would you like a fixed or dynamic IP address?" How much for the fixed? "Oh either one is no charge." That would not have been the case (if I could have gotten one at all) before IP6. So I went for the fixed of course. Now I can host my own website if I desire without any problem.

Dude, dynamic all the way. Having a "static IP" is like saying "hey here is where I live and here is where my spare key is!!"

Dynamic means that evertime you power down the modem and turn it back on you should get a new address. This helps when hacker's servers are attacking you.

Steve

In some ways yes. There is nothing that keeps servers from having 'dynmic' IP addresses and clients from having 'static' IP addresses.

Back before the days DNS (Dynamic Name Service if my memory holds, like most geeks I tend to speak in TLAs not real words) everything was static and we used host tables.

When I worked for a major oil company we had multi-thousand line host files that were distributed weekly before we had corporate DNS servers. Even after DNS was available many computers did not 'do DNS', so we still had significant host tables.

The advent of ubiquitous DNS was a real revilation in the administration of networks and in the spread of the internet. ... But it 'pushed the bottleneck' in internet access to the point to where NAT (Network Address Translation) helped eliminate the next problem.

In the history of computer networking (and in computer performance and tuning) seldom is there really a 'silver bullet'. Because the latest 'grand solution for everything' only pushes the problem to another choke point in the system. Typically the choke point existed before, but it never choked the system because there was another point that caused more problems and was a bigger headache, so the new choke point was not recognized and dealt with before it was an issue.

Other major networking issues that have been solved that I think look like 'magic' is the self healing routing network. Typically if a major (or minor) link goes down most traffic is not 'stopped', it is just re-routed without manual intervention. Solving dynamic network problems like that was one of the things that allows 7x24 networking for the major portions of the internet (all but the 'last mile' -- the final legs to/from end users to/from their ISP). That problem has been solved too, but most of us don't want to pay for it! :) (Mesh networks look like a great solution, but finding a good way to monetize it is the problem for getting companies to invest in it, IMHO)

Enough pontificating for now ... JC