Most people don’t realize that there have been a few different versions of the network protocol used to communicate over The Internet. The vast majority of The Internet uses IPv4 which has been around for many, many years.
There are some limitations of IPv4, the most well known being there are only so many IPv4 addresses left and that number is getting smaller all the time. To fix this and other limitations, IPv6 was created. This website can be reached by either its IPv4 or IPv6 address, they now look the same. IANA, which dishes out the addresses, ran out of them to give to the regional registries around January 2011.
I now get my IPv6 connectivity via Internode, which means my IPv6 packets zip along nicely. Kudos for Internode to be the first Australian commercial ISP to be offering IPv6 to its customers.
IPv6 Links
A real big problem with IPv6 is there is no equivalent of Google in IPv6 land, though if you have IPv6 on your browser you can see the animated logo on Google’s IPv6 page. This makes it hard to find useful pages on The Internet. I’ve got some useful links below, but I am always happy to add some more.
- My IPv6 posts
- My IPv6 traceroute page
- 6bone server list
- Ghost Route Hunter for finding those Ghost (not properly routed) routes