IPv6: What it means for you and me
In the past month and a half I’ve been slowly but surely teaching myself the principles of IPv6. I really like what I’m seeing, and to be honest, it’s left me asking: why doesn’t everyone else have this yet?
Seriously, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses can’t be wrong. I own 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 of them – that’s 281,474,976,710,656 times bigger than your entire Internet – and yet the fraction of the IPv6 Internet I own is smaller than the fraction of the IPv4 Internet that you own. Enough with the numbers, eh?
What that means is that everyone will gain the ability to integrate more digital devices into their life, and everyone will be able to take advantage of networking due to IPv6′s multicast and discovery features as well as the sheer number of IP addresses. Just think, maybe your car keys will someday be pingable. (That’s when this quote really applies.) Not only that, but we won’t have to deal with the madness that is virtual hosting, way-too-complicated FTP configurations on shared hosts, or port conflicts. A shared hosting server can have 3,000 IP addresses if it needs to (though admittedly that’s going to overload your OS’s network stack a little).
So over the past couple months I’ve been working at deploying IPv6 onto my home network, and I think it’s very close to being ready for production. The first IPv6 service that will be used for production is CUPS, possibly followed by Greyhound and other stuff that isn’t used externally at all.
Oh yeah, and it’s fun too! Who doesn’t love finding words that can be made entirely with hex characters? I mean, c’mon, there’s at least face, fece, b00b, a55, deadbeef (sorry Justin Frankel), cafe… you get the picture.