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IPv6: Coming soon?

Have you used the Internet this week? Did you feel the seismic shift that occurred on the 4th February? No, I thought not. But there was a distant rumble – change is coming.

Anyone who has installed Windows Vista in the last year or installed the beta version of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 will have noticed that you get two TCP/IP stacks for your money IPv4 and IPv6, both active by default. You may even have been tempted to do a quick IPCONFIG to have a sneak peek at the new way of addressing.  We are all happy with addresses such as 192.168.100.1:80, but as soon as we have seen that our brand new Vista install also has the IPv6 address 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 we may quickly reach for the network configuration pages to click the box to remove it. After all, who needs it?  The short answer to that question is – we all do, and the move towards the change started this week.  Windows Server 2008 supports IPv6 as both a Domain Controller and DNS server, Vista also supports IPv6 so, the bottom line is, assuming any routers between the two are up to the job, when Windows 2008 server ships you could deploy a pure IPv6 network. Always assuming you can work out how the addressing works. But what about that seismic shift?  Well, this week, the root servers for the Internet were updated to include records prepared in IPv6 format. The revolution has begun.  Lets all welcome AAAA records to the party.

There are only around 14% of available addresses left unassigned in the older IPv4 format.  The BBC reported recently that we’ll run out by 2011. I suspect it may be sooner, I’m adding about one IP enabled device a quarter to my gadget collection…My Server, Slingbox, Smartphone, XBox...  I, like everyone on the planet could have 5×10²⁸ with IPv6 – we’d better start saving now !

Of course there are other benefits beyond an increased address range – when IPv4 was evolving, I doubt anyone would have said “hang on, people at home will be downloading gigabytes of music and streaming high definition video…we need to support jumbograms”.  With a limit of “just” 64k for the payload in IPv4, the support for larger payloads on IPv6 will be welcome. It’s reminiscent to me of the move from Novell and IPX to NT4 and TCP/IP, we all had a massive learning curve to get up to speed with TCP/IP on the Wintel platform, does anyone remember Microsoft’s Network Essential book? We still get requests for it.  That learning curve is back, so there is no surprise that networking is a key part of the Windows Server 2008 course set.