The other big item in the news is that the long countdown is finally over, and the last IPv4 addresses have been handed out. Or, more accurately, they have been handed out to the people who will actually hand them out to other people who will hand them out to their customers or whatever. The last batch of IP addresses therefore haven’t been actually assigned to anything yet, so we don’t run out in that sense until later this year. In the meantime, though it’s time to see who has prepared for this day and who has been lip syncing their IPv6 hymns.
The powers that be are of course saying that the average person won’t even notice. Wanna bet? Every year someone somewhere fat-fingers an IP address or three on a router somewhere in the world and causes some sort of very public outage. As we transition to addresses that are in hexadecimal and more than twice as long, there are going to be some very public miscues even if every last bit of the technology and planning works out perfectly. Never fear though, there is World IPv6 Day to the rescue, which will be sort of like those old Y2K tests where you had everybody turn their computer’s clock ahead and saw if the lights stayed on.
But in the end, the transition will work out fine because the engineers will make it work, whether it be the easy way or the hard way. There’s too much money at stake not to. Look at it this way… At least it’s not written in COBOL. It isn’t, is it?
For now though, as a small website operator, I’m not entirely sure if I’m on the “won’t even notice” team, or the “oh my god, you aren’t ready yet?” team. I mean, I have an IPv4 address and nobody’s given me anything else just yet, so I’m certainly not on the ‘Haha, we told you so’ team. Time will tell. In the meantime, this is Cisco’s tongue in cheek look at it:
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Categories: Internet Backbones · Internet Traffic
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It will be interesting to see how the secondary market develops for IPv4 addresses. There are still large numbers of unused “legacy” IPv4 addresses that were assigned to large R&D organizations before the regional registry organizations were around. Also, ARIN has set-up a secondary market place to facilitate transfers of IP addresses.
There’s the ‘where to get an IPv4 address now’ question, and then there’s the ‘is my website still visible to everybody?’ question. Should make for some fun all around.
This company worked well in advance of the curve. It’s so uncanny that it seems insane. What’s the definition of “insanity” again? 🙂
http://www.level3.com/downloads/Level_3_Federal_IPv6_Brochure.pdf
Yes, Heard about it late night that IPv4 is full and time to shift to IPv6.