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What is IPv6? |
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IPv6 stands for Internet Protocol version 6. IPv6 governs the addressing and routing of data through a network.
IPv6 is intended to replace the IPv4 standard, whose limits on network addresses are beginning to restrict Internet growth and use, especially in China, India, and other heavily populated Asian countries]. But the new standard will improve service all around the globe; for example, by providing future cell phones and mobile devices with their own unique and permanent addresses.
IPv4 supports 4,294,967,296 addresses, inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less cars, phones, PDAs, and toasters; while IPv6 supports about 340 undecillion addresses.
Adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1994 (when it was called "IP Next Generation" or IPng), IPv6 accounts, so far, for just a few percent of the addresses in the publicly-accessible Internet, which is still dominated by IPv4. The adoption of IPv6 has been slowed by the introduction of network address translation (NAT), which partially alleviates the problem of address exhaustion. But NAT makes it difficult or impossible to use some peer-to-peer applications, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and multi-user games. Currently, the big drive for IPv6 is new uses, such as mobility, quality of service, privacy extension and so on. The U.S. Government has also specified that all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by 2008.
Excerpted from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6 |
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Why is there a need for IPv6? |
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Because IPv4 is 32 bits, it has about 4,300,000,000 address space in a decimal number. This amount is absolutely insufficient for the Internet world wide because it is smaller than the population of the world. According to calculations, that will exhaust the addresses in about year 2008 +/- 3. |
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What are the advantages of IPv6 over IPv4? |
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Trillions of times more addresses will make it a mathematical certainty that in the future there will be orders of magnitude more devices with IPv6 than IPv4. |
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IPv6 is easier to configure. Neighbor discovery finds other IPv6 systems and stateless (and stateful) autoconfiguration enable more automated set up of systems. |
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IPv6 is compatible with 3G wireless (near) broadband and has other features that support greater mobility. There will be two billion mobile phones by 2006 and (at least) two addresses are required per mobile phone, so just enabling every mobile phone will require more IP addresses than are left with IPv4. Static addresses can also double battery life by not wasting power by checking whether a call is completed so the carrier can grab back the dynamic IP address, which wastes a great deal of power. |
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IPv6 supports ad hoc networking, given the features just mentioned, enabling many different people, vehicles, weapons, etc. to all become networked when brought into proximity without special programming. |
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IPv6 supports more efficient usage of broadband, both via the Jumbograms, in which packets increase from 64 KB in IPv4 to 4 GB in IPv6 (and soon 32 GB), and via the Flow Label, which enables network utilization to triple, from 27% efficiency to 81% efficiency. |
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Headers in IPv6 are leaner, with six unnecessary fields removed, and one entirely new field added, enabling more efficient routing. |
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IPSec is mandatory, bringing authentication (of users, of networks, and even of applications) to the entire IPv6 Internet and creating a “trusted bubble” according to Microsoft. IPv4 has no “trusted bubbles”. |
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Quality of Service is including in IPv6 headers, enabling premium pricing for guaranteed delivery, and prioritization of defense or other critical government Internet-based communications, even when networks are full. This is a big advance for actions against terrorist attacks or natural disasters, when virtually all communications channels are swamped and first responders and warfighters need prioritized packets to save lives. |
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IPv6 allows for many new possibilities, including a new geolocation system that lines up IPv6 addresses with squares or hexagons across the earth's surface, in a new and novel latitude and longitude system that can be scaled down to nearly microscopic granularity, potentially.
IPv6 allows for the possible new boom in new and novel applications to enter into the world. In some cases, IPv6 tips the balance toward upgrading vs. keeping an older version, as with Microsoft Longhorn. In other cases, IPv6 will enable completely new applications and systems of applications, such as IPv6 enabled conference badges, bar codes, or RFID tags. |
| There was also an IPv5, but it was not a successor to IPv4; rather, it was an experimental streaming protocol, intended to support voice, video, and audio.
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Who created IPv6? |
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In late 1990, The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), together with engineers from within the Internet community, recognized the usage trends and the then current shortcomings of the Internet. Rather than scrap the existing Internet, these people wanted to maintain all the good things about it, while extending its capabilities. To do this they created IPv6. Designed to interoperate with existing products that use IPv4 (for example, hosts and routers), IPv6 provides both the infrastructure for the Next Generation Internet and a means to deploy new services that leverage the enhanced and new features of the protocol.
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How do you know that IPv6 will be relevant any time soon? |
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The U.S. Government is putting its considerable weight behind a push towards IPv6. For example, the Defense Department — with its $30 billion budget — has been buying only IPv6-compliant networking gear since October 2003, and aims to have full IPv6 compliance by 2008.
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Will IPv6 change as it continues to evolve? |
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IPv6 is a rapidly evolving standard. Some of the information provided in this FAQ may have been made obsolete at some point by newer developments.
If you notice such a change or have additional information to add to the FAQ please let us know.
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Will Wireless Internet Utilize IPv6? |
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Current and future challenges of mobile and wireless Internet can only be met by IPv6. IPv4 can merely provide costly, limited, inefficient, insecure, and patchy solutions to today's and tomorrow's problems. IPv6 further improves upon its predecessor by allowing new services to be added over time.
IPv6 appears to be the only solution for the truly mobile and wireless Internet, both from the users' and the service providers' perspective.
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How to turn on IPv6 in XP? |
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Windows XP (SP1 + Update q817778)
Windows XP with Service Pack 1 was the first Microsoft OS to include IPv6 officially out of the box. It is not switched on by default though. In order to switch it on one has to open a command shell (MS DOS box) and type
c:\ netsh interface IPv6 install
c:\ netsh interface IPv6 set privacy disabled persistent
Without update q817778 it's "IPv6 install".
In an output of "ipconfig /all". The host had no native IPv6 connectivity and also did not find an ISATAP server although it did configure the interface ("Automatic Pseudo Tunneling-Interface") with only link-local ISATAP-addresses. You can see that your host last resorted to configuring 6to4 and also assigned link-local IPv6 addresses (fe80::/10) to all interfaces.
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How to turn off IPv6 in XP? |
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To uninstall IPv6, simply enter
c:\ netsh interface IPv6 uninstall
in the command shell.
Please note that unlike after installation, a reboot is necessary to fully uninstall the protocol.
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Can IPv4 and IPv6 co-exist? |
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Yes, there is no need for special equipment.
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What if my ISP doesn't support IPv6? |
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Then you can try and find a tunnel broker that gives you a IPv6 in IPv4 address. This is transmitting everything about IPv6 over protocol 41 and you will get a IPv6 address, with which you can browse the IPv6 internet.
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Do Windows 95/98/NT support IPv6? |
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Microsoft itself does not support IPv6 for Windows 95/98 or NT4. There is however an IPv6 implementation from Trumpet by the name of Winsock which can be installed on these Windows versions (and even on Windows 3.1). The software is not free. There is also a try-out version available for a 30 day trial period, downloadable on their website.
Unfortunately the authors of this How to have no experience with using this software and would like to refer the interested reader to the documentation that comes with Trumpet's Winsock implementation itself.
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Does windows 2000 support IPv6? |
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Microsoft released an IPv6 Technology Preview for Windows 2000. This software can be installed on Windows 2000 hosts with Service Pack 1 installed. It is pre-productional and was derived from a research IPv6 implementation that was originally only intended for application developers.
The "Microsoft IPv6 Technology Preview" packages includes the following command line utilities (executable via the command shell) used to configure and monitor the IPv6 functionality of the host:
* net.exe: Utility that stops or starts the IPv6 protocol and unloads/loads it from/to the memory. The relevant commands are
c:\ net start tcpipv6
c:\ net stop tcpipv6
* IPv6.exe: Basic utility that configures network interfaces and updates the routing table. It also retrieves and displays information about the IPv6 protocol.
* 6 to 4 cfg.exe: Utility that sets up and configures 6 to 4.
* ping6.exe, tracert6.exe: The IPv6 versions of the well-known utilities.
* ttcp.exe: Utility that sends TCP or UDP data between two network nodes. Useful to test speed and throughput both for IPv4 and IPv6.
* ipsec.exe: Utility that configures policies and security associations for IPv6 IPsec traffic.
The Preview supports stateless IPv6 address autoconfiguration. Therefore, if there's a router on the link advertising a global prefix, the Windows 2000 host will automatically configure a global IPv6 address for its interface and set the IPv6 default route correctly when tcpipv6 is started (s.a.). Stateless Autoconfiguration is usually sufficient but if addresses should rather be configured manually the tool IPv6.exe tool is used.
1. To see, how all or a specific interface are configured, use the following command:
c:\ IPv6 if [if#]
2. To add an address to a specific interface, the following command is used:
c:\ IPv6 adu / [lifetime VL/PL] [anycast] [unicast]
If neither preferred nor valid lifetimes are specified the default is "infinite". If the parameter is set to zero the IPv6 address is removed.
3. The following command configures a few special attributes of an IPv6 interface. It enables or disables the interface to forward IPv6 packets or to send router advertisements both of which features are needed when the host should be used as a router. It also sets the MTU and the "site identifier" (aka prefix to advertise):
c:\ IPv6 ifc [forwards] [advertises] [-forwards] [-advertises] [mtu <#bytes>] [site ]
4. The tool is also used to configure routes. The following command adds a route entry to the routing table. Aside from the route itself also a time to live, preference value and wether or not the route should be published via some routing protocol can be set.
c:\ IPv6 rtu / [liftime L] [preference P] [publish] [age] [spl ]
5. To display all IPv6 routes, use the following command:
c:\ IPv6 rt
Warning: IPv6 configuration is not saved permanently. If not added to an executable start script any configuration will be lost upon reboot/restart of the IPv6 stack.
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What do I do to connect to IPv6 portion of the Internet? |
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There are a number of ways you can connect. |
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The first is to have a pure IPv6 network, where your computer(s) all use IPv6 exclusively, and connect to an Internet provider that provides IPv6 connections. This can be very difficult, as you have to find a provider that provides IPv6, which isn't common in many areas. |
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Another method is using IPv4 tunnels (RFC2893), where you have any normal Internet provider (using IPv4), and your router/ gateway connects via IPv4 to an Internet provider that will transfer the packets using IPv6. |
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Next, you can use 6 to 4 (RFC3056), where you have a normal Internet provider, and your router/ gateway sends the packets via IPv4 to a special IPv4 address that routes to a gateway that will transfer the packets to/from IPv6. |
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There's also something called 6 over 4 (RFC2529), but that requires multicast addresses, which can get even more confusing. |
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Finally, you can use a Tunnel Broker (RFC3053), which is a "virtual ISP", requiring authentication (it seems that the RFC does not specify the protocol used by Tunnel Brokers, however!). |
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