Are you prepared for IPv6?

Subnetting an IPv6 number isn't difficult. The theory, in so far as the pre-fix length denotes how much of the address "must match" is not a difficult concept. Other than that, it's easy enough, loooooooong numbers notwithstanding...

As far as being prepared for IPv6, if you know the basics (how to abbreviate them, how to identify them, and how they are constructed) unless you actually work on an edge device for an ISP or large corporate or multinational, there's no imperative to "be prepared". There's no compulsion, nor deadlines from any of the organising bodies to say that we must all switch to IPv6 by a certain date. We are free to use IPv4 on our internal networks for as long as we want. At least, that's what I understand to be the case. What we could do with is all those people/companies etc who are sitting on large blocks of IPv4 ddresses to release them back in to the wild :lol:
Of course, IPv6 brings some advantages with it that makes it an attractive option if you have a *large* internal network, but other than that, I can't see that the performance gain internally for small to medium sized networks would be worth the pain. Large companies with big routing tables that span many routers both across WAN's and across the internet may benefit, but even then, the migration is potentially costly and painful, especially as the ISP is probably routing with IPv6 already, and may well be looking after a dual stack edge device (or devices) for you anyway

I think the unfortunate issue despite the awesomeness of IPv6 is that it is NOT compatible with IPv4. So if we have to move, every thing will have to move. That means every layer 3 device, including routers, servers, clients. And if you were to connect to the net, every device from your PC all the way to any destination IP in the world needs to be IPv6 compatible. At least this is what I've understood till now. Here are two articles regarding this matter:

www.bgpexpert.com/article.php?article=106
cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

I hope I'm wrong, and there seams to be ideas to embed IPv4 addresses inside IPv6 addresses. Wiki mentions an organized scheme for moving slowly to IPv6:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Transition_mechanisms

In the mean time, NAT is still the savior of IPv4's tiny address space.

5 min just to ping LOL..what about network scanning??

I think cisco will have a cert just for subnetting IPv6...

Two pretty good articles there. I'll "modify" my opinion of IPv6 accordingly... :oops:

Two pretty good articles there. I'll "modify" my opinion of IPv6 accordingly... :oops:

In fact your opinion was very rational broadcaststorm. I never thought about dual/muti stacked devices until you've mentioned . I'm just trying to show different opinions here so that we get a wider picture.

All good here! I had not really properly considered the impact of the incompatibility of the two protocols until now as I rather liked the idea of dual/multi stack devices working "in the cloud" and at network edge. IE, for the moment it's an "ISP" problem, and a problem for the guys that lok after the network edge, which I don't...
Some more reading leads me to suspect that we're going to have good old IPv4 for quite a while yet, or until we are forced to change. That'll be a good day at the office!!!