Aaron Toponce posted some interesting “libraries of congress” analogies about the size of the IPv6 address space. I loved how he said that “18,446,744,073,709,551,616…may not look large” compared to the (less than) 2^32 addresses available in IPv4 — he seems to think about future compatibility in the same way I do 
Anyway, I did find the article a little disappointing. When I read up to the first visualisation on the currently used IPv4 space, I thought the rest of the article would be talking about the uptake of IPv6 by comparison. Instead it was really just about the size of IPv6 as designed. Otherwise known as “is it happening”
I know that many OSes and distros are installing an IPv6 stack now, but how many are actually using it for browsing, tunnels, crypto, etc.? What rate is this happening at, and when are we projected to have a similarly pervasive IPv6 that we have now with IPv4? It’s a large address space, but how is the usage of those IPs comparing to the expected usage? We thought IPv4 was big too, but I guess we didn’t count on people putting toasters on the net, and other people owning huge unused blocks.
I recently signed up with SixXS, but haven’t yet bothered to do anything with it. Mainly that’s just lack of time, but I’ve also been surprised a little by my lack of interest. For me, IPv6 is still just an interesting experiment, of which there are many, and it gets low priority.
Tags: FOSS, ipv4, ipv6, networking
