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Comment by jedsmith | Hacker News Reader

> Do I need to request something from my ISP? Lobby them to see if they take it seriously?

Yes, but it's less crucial for you. Ask for a timeline for IPv6, if you'd like, but don't expect much.

You can also set up IPv6 for yourself or your home network via a tunnel (which is a pretty fun exercise), and get access to the IPv6-enabled Internet. All recent operating systems have very good support for it -- even Windows 7 will hear RA and autoconfigure itself.

Start here: http://www.ipsidixit.net/2010/02/24/228/

You can get a tunnel here: http://tunnelbroker.net/main.php

Other people use this, but I prefer HE: http://www.sixxs.net/

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Or if you don't have static routable v4 address but have at least dynamically allocated v4 routable address you can use 6to4.

I use this to configure my Debian-based router to change used v6 addresses to match DHCP-allocated v4: https://gist.github.com/806333 (bit of an ugly hack)

I strongly recommend this or 6RD. It's a very straightforward and easy way of getting into IPv6 before ISPs start offering IPv6, as comcast did recently ( http://www.comcast6.net/ ).

From the Comcast link:

Each user has been delegated a /64 block of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses.

This seems like a ridiculous number of addresses, until you realize that this basically allows for 18 quintillion users, each with 18 quintillion addresses, before we exhaust the IPv6 space.

I think /64 was the guideline for the smallest divisible network an ISP should hand out. It basically allows for a household or organization to grow indefinitely while assigning anything that can hook up to the network a real IP address, with little restrictions on topology and/or address allocation layout. No need to reuse the addresses either, just give the new device a new one.

EDIT: I forgot to add that it also allows network devices to use their 64-bit link layer (ethernet/MAC) address as a host identifier.

Actually, /64 is the smallest indivisible network. You can divide that further, but then you lose this network/host identifier split and IPv6 features that require that (stateless autoconfiguration, privacy extensions...). So in case of normal network, ISP handing out /64 restricts topology of you network in that you can have only one network (with normal end-user devices).

Using smaller networks than /64 is certainly possible, but it's not something you want to do on end-user network and it's best left only for things like point-to-point connections and intra-datacenter networks.

18 quintillion is much much bigger than you think.

The peak estimated birth rate on Earth was 173 million in the 1990s. If 200 million people were born every year and we gave every person a /64 block, we could allocate addresses for the next 92 billion years. The sun will be long dead by the time we use up that address space.

That's what we all think right now. They'll be laughing at us in the future when every nanobot needs an IPv6 address.

No, really- 18 quintillion is a huge number.

92 billion years is a long time to imagine. Let's say we won't have a use for these addresses after the sun dies in approximately 5 billion years, so we're going to try to use them all up by giving every person 1,000 /64 blocks.

Wolfram Alpha gives the surface area of earth as 5e18 square centimeters. 2^64 is approximately 1.8e19. With a single /64 block you could put two nanobots in every square centimeter on earth. That's not really practical over the oceans, but whatever.

With 1000 /64 blocks, you could cover the earth with nanobots that take up only 0.05mm^2 of space each.

Pixels on the average computer display take up 0.055mm^2.

You could address a display that covered the surface of the entire earth with just 1000 /64 blocks, and you could make one of these display for every person born until our sun dies.

It's an astoundingly huge number.

>You can also set up IPv6 for yourself or your home network via a tunnel (which is a pretty fun exercise), and get access to the IPv6-enabled Internet. All recent operating systems have very good support for it -- even Windows 7 will hear RA and autoconfigure itself.

In fact, even Windows XP will automagically set up a 6to4 tunnel with no configuration needed if you have a public IPv4 address. Just enable IPv6 support for your connection and it does it all for you.

Comments like these make me wish HN had a save feature. Thanks, you just got bookmarked.

HN does. Anytime you upvote a story, the HN thread can be accessed again through the "saved stories" link on your profile page.

> Ask for a timeline for IPv6, if you'd like, but don't expect much.

This is actually one of the best things you can do. One of the frustrating things is when I talk to vendors about IPv6 and they say "oh, you're the only person to ever ask about that.."

Just drop a quick line to any networks you do business with (home ISP, hosting provider, hosted DNS, etc...) and politely ask them what their IPv6 rollout timeline is. Their response will give you a lot of information about how on the ball they are in general.

As for fun exercises, you might want to try out the Hurricane Electric Free IPv6 Certification: http://ipv6.he.net/certification/ It consists of a series of small and manageable tasks that will get you up to speed in no time.

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