Written by Clifford
The world is running out of IPv4 IP addresses and will soon only issue IPv6 addresses.
What does the system administrator need to do to make the transition to this new reality?
A bit can be 0 or 1, so there are 2^32= appx 4.3 billion possible IP addresses.
But in fact ISPs do not have many left to sell.
Brazil has some still available from its allotment.
Africa as a continent has more.
In the future, cars and devices not even built yet will be attached to the internet.
Zone information indicates routing throw in, like locally routable or globally routable.
Each of these groups has 16 bits.
So the maximum number of combinations is 2^16 = 0xFFFF or 65,636.
But 0 is a valid address, so we subtract 1 to give a possible 65,635 addresses.
What do I need to do?
Google keeps track of IPv6 adoption here.
For example, Facebook has one: 2a03:2880:2050:3f07:face:b00c::1.
Some things you are going to need to do are the following.
For example, IPv6 makes DNS queries using both UDP and TCP.
IPv4 uses UDP only.
Less memory will be required, but that does not mean internet backbones can keep the old Cisco routers.
Because there are enough IP addresses to give every rig on this planet (and other planets too!)
an IP address, there will be no more need to do NAT routing.
With NAT, all the devices on an internal connection translate to one IP address on the internet.
With IPv6 each equipment can have its own address.
So have program servers.
Ubuntu is set up by default without IPv6 support.
Your ISP will also need to upgrade their DHCP servers.
Mobile cell phones too will have to make the switch to IPv6.
This is being addressed in the 4G mobile phone standard.
But 4G is not available everywhere.
3G and even 2G remain the only options in most of the world.
SpamHaus and others maintain a list of these blocked domains.
You will need to ensure that your antivirus and spam software and vendor supports IPv6.
