Well, I was (am) working on a guide to IPv6. Sort of. Mostly about 6to4 technology. However, I’ve been pretty occupied. I noticed today that the ‘big day’ of the IP next generation (now IPv6 usually) has happened. I have not finished the article in time though, so I’ll just point out that, although I don’t have ipv6 directly at xexyl.net – it is still possible to connect here via IPv6. Curious? Try here: Xexyl via IPv6.

And in time, hopefully sooner than later, I’ll get the article done. It’s specifically aimed at manually configuring IPv6 via 6to4, including reverse DNS setup. Otherwise, some interesting statistics (credit goes to: TCP/IP Guide) about IPv6 address space size:

• It’s enough addresses for many trillions of addresses to be assigned to every human being on the planet.
• The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. If we had been assigning IPv6 addresses at a rate of 1 billion per second since the earth was formed, we would have by now used up less than one trillionth of the address space.
• The earth’s surface area is about 510 trillion square meters. If a typical computer has a footprint of about a tenth of a square meter, we would have to stack computers 10 billion high blanketing the entire surface of the earth to use up that same trillionth of the address space.

I’ll add that this is equal to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. What is crazy, is that many programmers, myself included, want more than 64 bits for bit vectors, in their programs (IPv6 has 128 bits). To be fair, though, this does not mean we get 2^64 numbers or ‘bits’ to use. Instead, it’s only 64. Binary is base 2, and therefore, each usable bit is a power of 2. This basically means 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, … all the way to 1,844,674,4073,709,551,616 where each increment is a single bit to use. Essentially, this equates to 64 different on or off flags when the width of the integer is 2^64.

In any case, we should be set for some while IF we actually get there. For now though, you can browse this site in IPv6 or IPv4 as long as you have access to the IPv6 internet.