by Edward
30 May 2012 20:25
On 6 June 2012 it will be World IPv6 Day. On this day the IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) will be switched on and co-exist with IPv4.
What is IPv6:
From wiki
"IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is a version of the Internet Protocol (IP) intended to succeed IPv4, which is the protocol currently used to direct almost all Internet traffic.[1]
The Internet operates by transferring data between hosts in packets that are routed across networks as specified by routing protocols. These packets require an addressing scheme, such as IPv4 or IPv6, to specify their source and destination addresses."
The main advantage of IPv6 over IPv4 is its larger address space. The length of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4.
What does IPPv6 look like:
IPv4 IP addresses consists of four bytes (32 bits) and this is written in dotted decimal as 10.0.0.1
An IPv6 address is represented by 8 groups of 16-bit hexadecimal values separated by colons ":"
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
2607:f0d0:1002:0051:0000:0000:0000:0004
All IPv6 addresses are divided into two parts:
- a 64-bit network prefix, and
- a 64-bit interface identifier.
Another interesting fact is that the hexadecimal digits are case-insensitive.