News - Facebook and Google join web future warning

[HEXUS]

Web giants to turn on IPv6 for a promo day.

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[miniyazz]

I'm confused. What's happening? Are they turning off ipv4 that day? Or just turning ipv6 on? The latter doesn't really make sense, seeing as how you can already use the ipv6 versions. And does it mean 99.8% of people running on non-ipv6-compatible hardware? And how is this meant to raise awareness, unless it's actually turning ipv4 off..

[BullDogg]

Basically, what they're doing is turning it on simultaneously. So, people who run IPv6 but don't realise it will go to that version.

The benefit is that they can test all the IPv6 hardware out and make sure everything is running like it should be on a very large-scale. Even 0.2% of web users is a pretty big number of people, and a lot of those will go to one or all of yahoo, google and facebook in that day.

The vast majority of users (and this is the idea) won't actually know what's going on, as it should be totally transparent - assuming all goes to plan.

I think it's more to raise awareness among businesses and network providers/ISPs. If they see that high-traffic sites like Google and FB can do it, switching over a site that gets 'only' 10m hits per day should be easy.

[Biscuit]

Does this depend in any way, on if the ISP provides your router with an IPv6 or IPv4 address?

Pretty sure all my hardware is capable.

[Singh400]

It is wholly dependent on your ISP I think.

[aidanjt]

Doesn't make a slight difference to me. My ISP is still IPv4. Hell, I don't even think the crappy router they gave me even handles IPv6.

Anyway, hopefully that'll change, it's getting a bit absurd that IPv6 equipment still hasn't been assigned addresses and taken the pressure off the IPv4 address pool.

[directhex]

Does this depend in any way, on if the ISP provides your router with an IPv6 or IPv4 address?

Pretty sure all my hardware is capable.

Entirely depends on your ISP.

You need an IPv6 subnet for your network, and a DNS server with AAAA records, to be part of the glorious IPv6 future. Or you can go the lame route of 6to4, where you send all your IPv6 data to a bridging server, over IPv4.

The global IP address overfiends, IANA, will completely run out of IPv4 addresses in about a month. IANA hands out IPs in blocks of /8, and they have *seven* left before they're out of a job (a /8 is 16 million IPs, i.e. a value for x in x.*.*.*). The regional authorities (AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE) are the ones who receive blocks from IANA, and they have varying numbers of free /24 blocks to hand out to companies (a /24 is 256 IPs, i.e. a set of values for x, y and z in x.y.z.*). AfriNIC has only used up about 40% of its allocation, and has about 200k /24's left - whereas ARIN has a whopping 0.5m left - but that's only 10% of their total allocation.

Best estimates say the regional bodies will run out of IPs in Q3 or Q4 this year. From then, companies (read: ISPs) will no longer be able to get new blocks of IPs, and eventually end users like you or me will no longer be able to get new IPs.

The biggest offenders for introducing IPv6 are the ISPs, IMHO - they NEED to have it in place, but are actively dragging their feet over putting IPv6 into place for consumers.