Four Root DNS Servers Go IPv6 On February 4th

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 4th, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers. With this transition, it will finally be possible for two internet hosts to communicate without using IPv4 at all. Certain obsolete software may face compatibility problems due to the change, but those issues are addressed in an ICANN report (pdf)."

Re:Why did they skip 64-bits?

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea with IPv6 is that the address space will be large enough that we will never have to transition to a 256-bit (or greater) address space. Rather than build an "intermediate" 64-bit address space, the intention was to prevent any future exhaustion of IP addresses by using a very large space.

will 256 be far off

Given that IPv6 would provide over 10^28 addresses for each of the 6.5 billion inhabitants of Earth, I think it will be sufficient for the foreseeable future.

But the intention with IPv6 was not merely to create an exhaustively large address space, but to fix a number of problems with IPv4, make routing simpler, etc.

(Whether or nto IPv6 achieves those intentions is a separate question.)

Re:Why did they skip 64-bits?

[romiz]

I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.

Human readability

[ddoctor]

So, we've got lots of IPv6 addresses, thus we can assign static IP's to everything. Catch: IPv6 addresses aren't very readable/memorable. I can remember all of the IPv4 addresses on my network, but I wouldn't remember the v6 ones.

So, what's the solution there: well there's DNS and DHCP... man I hate DHCP. What if my local DHCP server or DNS server goes down? And, then I try to ping it to diagnose... oh, if only I could remember its address!

What about web hosting providers? Dear Hosting Support, can you please change my www IP to 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334? Much easier to screw up then if I say 66.35.250.151.

Also, IPv6 means we can throw away NAT... which is good, because NAT sucks, and its basically only there because we don't have enough IPv4 addresses. But, hang on ... so every machine I have on my local network has a public IP address. Great. Do I really want that? Yes, I have a firewall; yes, its secure... but its still more secure to have every machine (except 1) completely non-addressable from the internet.

I know a lot of less secure networks would be screwed if every machine was publicly-addressible. They may have a poorly-configured or nonexistent firewall, and are only getting a semblance of security by using NAT.

Don't get me wrong, IPv6 is definitely a good idea; the address space rocks, and there's a whole host of other benefits. There's just a bunch of simple, practical issues that IPv4 solves better.

*ducks* This has got to be flamebait on a place like /.