Technical Computing
by John Lalande
You may have recently heard in the news that the Internet is "running
out of addresses." The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
recently assigned the last four blocks of usable IP version 4 (IPv4)
addresses. The practical effect of this is that the University and
Internet Service Providers like AT&T can no longer get new blocks of IP
addresses, but they can continue using their existing IPv4 addresses.
The University and SSEC have enough IPv4 addresses to get by for now, but many countries, especially those in Asia, do not. Adopting IPv6 early will help SSEC continue to collaborate with other researchers around the world.
Technical Computing's goal is to be able to participate in World IPv6
day on June 8, 2011. Ideally, we will have IPv6 addresses assigned to
client computers (user desktops and laptops) so that those who wish to
visit the IPv6-compatible websites of other World IPv6 Day participants,
like Google, can do so. We'll also work on having a few key servers,
such as the SSEC web server, available via IPv6.
This change will not happen overnight, and we anticipate having to run
IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side for a number of years, but we're excited to
take the first few steps toward IPv6.
** More information about IPv6 **
In case you're wondering IPv...what? When you go to a web site like www.ssec.wisc.edu, that web site has a corresponding IP address. Our web
server has an IPv4 address of 128.104.108.105. An IPv6 address looks
like this: 2607:f388:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 or,
2607:f388:1090::1 for short. You can see by the length of the IPv6
address that it has a much larger address pool.
There are about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses. By comparison, IPv6 will
have 340 undecillon addresses (an undecillon is 10 to the 36th power).
That's 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses.
So, hopefully those will last a bit longer than our IPv4 address pool,
whose 4.3 billion addresses also sounded impossibly large when IPv4 was
created in the late 1970s.
TC requested and received an IPv6 address block from the University last summer and has been testing IPv6 internally since then.
If you have any questions about TC's IPv6 plans, or are interested in
participating in IPv6 testing, please stop by or email us at unix.admin@ssec.wisc.edu.
