For the Internet to make use of the advantages of IPv6 over IPv4, most hosts will eventually need to deploy this protocol. While many individuals are looking forward to the full deployment of IPv6, the transition to IPv6 doesn’t mean the networking world will somehow be totally secure. This was made clear by the recent report that Arbor Networks has reported the first IPv6 DDoS attacks against their networks. This is a clear paradigm shift since just a few years ago there were hardly more than a few thousand IPv6 systems connected to the Internet. That has changed, and as more and more users transition to IPv6, so will the threat of new network attacks.

“When are we going to implement IPv6 ?” is a question I get to hear every time I deliver my IPv6 course.
IPv6 has been looked upon very seriously since 1998. It was supposed to take over in the early 2000s, but we continued to use IPv4 solutions.

Now we are facing the same issues that happened in the late 90s. We are more and more concerned with IPv6 as we receive warnings each year about the official end of IPv4.

There are lots of articles and resources around the internet on IPv6 – especially since World IPv6 Day is today.

Rather than recap them here, I thought I’d share a few of the less frequently asked questions about IPv6.

Now that the IANA (International Assigned Numbers Authority) doled out the remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses, it’s time for companies to get serious about IPv6. To help companies prepare their services for IPv6, the Internet Society is hosting World IPv6 Day on June 8^th.

The end of the year is typically the time we say goodbye to the old and hello to the new. Might this also be the case for IPv4? IPv4 has had a good run since its deployment in the early 1980s, and it has been with us for about thirty years. The Internet grew rapidly (and still is) during the years that IPv4 has been used. Yet with this growth, IPv4 addresses are being depleted quickly.

IPv4 address exhaustion and the move to IPv6, the need to implement DNSSEC, and the switch from 2-byte to 4-byte Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs), which marks a change to the Internet’s inter-domain routing structure, will ultimately change the way the Internet functions. Any one of these changes represents a significant architectural and operational challenge for […]

The true transition of the global Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 is expected to span many years. And, during this period of transition, many organizations introducing IPv6 into their infrastructure will support both IPv4 and IPv6 concurrently. There is not a one-size-fits-all transition strategy for IPv6. The incremental, phased approach allows for a significant period […]

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is considered to be the next generation protocol for the Internet. It is designed to support continued Internet growth in the number of users, along with greatly enhanced routing functionality. The current version, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), was developed in the 1970s and provides the basis for today’s Internet […]

Migration from IPv4 to IPv6: It is Easier to Nail Jell-O to the Wall than Understand the Mandates and Timing It has often been said that anything can be proved with statistics, and that may well be the case. This post describes an exercise in statistical analysis, in order to make some predictions about when […]

Unless you have been living deep inside the Amazon rain forest, totally cut off from communicating with anyone, anywhere, you know that the world has changed tremendously over the last 20 years. Although almost every area of our lives has been affected with these sweeping changes, in this post I want to focus on those changes […]