While you’ve been asleep in your beds with visions of iPad 2s dancing in your heads, network administrators have been wide awake getting ready for World IPv6 Day. And, what’s that?
As the The Internet Society explained, “The goal of the Test Drive Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers [ISP], hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 [Internet Protocol version 6) o ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.”
Well, they’ve been motivated all right. Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! and important content delivery network (CDN) providers, including Akamai and Limelight Network will be offering IPv6 networking as well as the usual IPv6 on June 8, 2011.
We’ve been running out of IPv4 addresses for some time on the Internet, but few sites already offer their services via the next generation of Internet addresses, IPv6. Despite the fact that we’re now down to the last few IP addresses, indeed Asia is already out, of major sites, only some of Google’s sites; Netflix, to a degree; Germany’s Heise Online; Facebook at www.v6.facebook.com; and Limelight currently offer IPv6 addressing on a regular basis.
So it is that The Internet Society and others decided to star World IPv6 day. It’s both a way to encourage ISPs, CDNs, and Web sites to start moving to IPv6 and to see what, if anything goes wrong when they try to support both TCP/IP networking protocols at once.