“You hear that? That is the sound of inevitability…” – Agent Smith, The Matrix. You will migrate to IPv6. It is happening. You will not be able to resist. The IANA gave out the last IPv4 allocations on 2/1/2011. There are no more. As I write, the RIR’s will completely run out of IPv4 addresses…
One very cool and highly promoted feature of IPv6 is stateless address autoconfiguration. If you don’t already know, this feature enables a node to automatically derive its IPv6 address(es) without the help of of a DHCP server. That is a big departure from the world of IPv4. In IPv4 you either had to manually configure…
The beloved UNC path name, familiar to all who administer Microsoft. After all these years there is something comfortable and familiar in the simple act of cracking open open that run line and busting out a pair of backslashes followed by the name or IP address to which I want to connect. Simple. Easy. Classic.
The Domain Internet Groper, or dig, as most of us know it, is considered by pretty much everybody in the ‘nix community to be the replacement to nslookup. And I have long been madly in like with it. Not sure why, though. nslookup has never been a disappointment. Maybe it’s because dig is newer and…
When discussing IPv6 addresses folks are often quick to say, “FE80 …that’s link-local.” And it’s true. The prefix FE80::/10 is reserved for link-local IPv6 addressing. But a lot of people overlook the fact that the 10-bit prefix only covers two of the four bits represented by the third character in the address. The ‘F’ and…
By now most of us know that the IPv6 address space is 128-bits. That’s 96-bits larger than the 32-bit IPv4 address space. By now most of us also know that the IPv4 address space has (on paper) 4,294,967,265 possible address. So just how big is the IPv6 address space? Well, it’s 2128 (2 raised to…
In an earlier post I offered some perspective on just how big the 128-bit IPv6 address space is. The ridiculousness of the number of addresses offers plenty of opportunity for levity. Earlier today I was thinking about what other ways I could show the size of the address space in a way that was meaningful.…