Wed 8 Jun 2011

Before the day is out, I thought I owed it to my friends to explain what World IPv6 Day was, what IPv6 is, and its significance. Some of my former Eagle colleagues at The American University will remember me spending days and nights running Ethernet cable around the Eagle’s office ceilings, buying Ethernet connectors and “wiring-up” the office. Initially it was simply a way to speed up the old Apple LocalTalk network so that we could play NetTrek and Marathon, but the grand plan was to get the office network connected to the Internet and ultimately start publishing the student newspaper on the Web.
To some, this may have seemed like a computer geek’s crazed addiction, but it was the thing to do in the mid-nineties. My fellow IT-savvy friends Nanther, Jamie, John, Rushi and Todd helped confirm my instinct to get connected to this thing called the Internet. One of the setup steps when attaching all the computers to the network involved giving each machine a unique number. The protocol all computers connected to the Internet speak is called IP or the Internet Protocol. The first true release of this protocol was called version 4, or IPv4. And part of this protocol involved these unique IP addresses, which are the computer equivalent of ones telephone number, and they look like this “69.171.228.13″. That’s one of Facebook’s IP addresses, btw.
When our Internet-connected computers speak with one another, they typically each have a unique IP address, and all communication relies on the fact that the messages between the computers is properly routed. Should lots of computers start using other computer’s IP addresses, the Internet could stop to work properly. The numerical representation of these IP addresses allowed for nearly 256 times 256 times 256 times 256 unique numbers. That’s a 32-bit number with over 4 billion unique IPs. Plenty, right?
Well, what happened was that people started to actually use this Internet thing, and now, believe it or not, we’ve almost run out. With all the laptops and iPhones and Web servers out there, not to mention over 6 billion people, there’s just not enough uniqueness to go around. We’ve actually been close to running out for many years, but with various routing tricks we’ve extended the inevitable — the various IP devices in your home all share a single IP belonging to your router when speaking to the Internet.
Fortunately, this problem was predictable and as early as 1999 a new version of the Internet Protocol was introduced to replace IPv4, called… (no we skipped 5)… IPv6. Among some technical changes to the protocol, the most important aspect is that the total possible number of unique IP addresses in IPv6 is 128-bits, which is approximately 340 undecillion. That’s a lot!
The problem is, with IPv4 working just fine, how do we get everyone to switch. It turns out that we don’t have to switch just yet, but that over the next several years more and more systems will be able to speak both IPv4 and IPv6, and have the ability to choose which protocol to use in communication with other computers. Chances are your MacBook or Windows PC is already capable speaking this new protocol, and in fact prefers it, but is not able to since most of the Internet is still only on IPv4.
Today, that started to change. Many of the world’s most popular web sites, including Google and Facebook, as well as the US Federal Aviation Administration and my employer Akamai Technologies enabled their web sites to be accessible via both protocols. It is a 24 hour “test run”, after which things get changed back to normal and we all review what problems happened.
Did this mean that today you were surfing the Web over IPv6? Probably not.
Although your computer is ready, the web sites you want to visit are ready, and many sections of the Internet are ready, chances are your home router, office network, Internet Service Provider and possibly some links in the middle of the Internet are not. So, your computer probably was using IPv4, like normal, all day long. If you were one of the lucky few to have full IPv6 connectivity, then you probably saw what looked like the normal Internet, but behind the scenes things were different. It was also possible that sites were breaking a bit, and likely the performance was not as good as normal. This was all expected. And the Internet Service Providers in particular are now looking at how things worked and fix what broke.
Not very exciting, I know, but a very important step in the gradual transition of the Internet to IPv6.
One rather interesting aspect (to a tech geek anyway) is that the IPv4 Internet is today much bigger, more connected, better tested, safer, and performs better than the new IPv6 Internet. So until the new IPv6 Internet comes up to speed, it’s pretty OK to stick with the tried and true stuff.
What I think is significant, however, is that as with any new change, come opportunities for inventions and changes to established processes. The large number of IPv6 addresses, along with some of IPv6’s other features, open up opportunities (and risks) for an interesting future. Just as we didn’t quite know what was awaiting us before we hooked The Eagle’s office to the Internet, we can’t know what awaits us now.
So what does one of these newfangled IP addresses look like? Well, let’s take a look at one of Facebook’s IPv6 addresses and see if you can catch the geeky sense of humor.
2620:0:1c08:4000:face:b00c:0:2
Certainly we must follow certain rules in society, and learning often starts by following in the footsteps of others. When we’re growing up our parents tell us what we can and cannot do, but often we’re unsettled by those rules and rebel by not following. Why do we feel that way, and why do we have such a strong urge to chart our own course?
I’ll cross-post to facebook for comments, in case you have anything to add. And I’ll leave you with the thoughts of another famous philosopher, Douglas Adams who wrote: “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”