On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 10:00 PM, Brian Wood <woodbrian77 at gmail.com> wrote: > > What do you think of ipv6? I've read that less than 1% > of the traffic on the internet is ipv6 traffic. IPv6 is vastly superior to v4 in nearly every way except perhaps in that it's more difficult to memorize v6 addresses. Most of the RIRs still have at least a few IPv4 netblocks available for assignment. This includes ARIN, our RIR, which has the equivalent of ~2.8 /8s available still. Unfortunately many companies are taking a "stick our head in the sand" approach and won't seriously think about transitioning their networks to v6 until they absolutely need to. Needless to say, this is a very foolish stance - you never want to put yourself in a position where you are *forced* to make a huge change like this. Some small internal LANs may not transition for many many years. Fortunately is seems as if most ISPs are taking the transition seriously and many have either IPv6 in production or in beta. Comcast, for instance, has been using IPv6 to manage their OOB administrative network for years. <advocacy_mode> Is *your* website/email/etc available via v6? If not, get on it! Does the software you write support v6? There is very much a chicken/egg problem here, and the more resources available via v6, the faster eyeball networks will make the transition. </advocacy_mode> > What baffles me about ipv6 is why they decided to go > from 4 byte addresses to 16 bytes. Wouldn't 8 byte > addresses make more sense? Absolutely not. Making a change like this is a *big deal*, both in terms of money (to upgrade/replace network infrastructure) as well as in terms of having to learn a new technology. As such, it was very wise for the IP governing boards to not just make an incremental bump in the IP address space, but make a *huge* increase. This decision ensures that we won't need to go through this whole process again in the foreseeable future. -Erik