About 2 weeks ago I purchased a new Dlink DIR-825 home router to replace my Dlink DGL-4300 that died. I'm not digging the DIR-825 as much, but one thing that has peaked my interest is that this is the first router I've owned that supports IPv6, the next addressing system of the Internet.
For years now my Mac/Linux/Windows machines have had blank entries in their networking preferences for their IPv6 addresses so I thought I'd finally check this out and see if I can get it working.
Turns out it's really easy. Even overlooking the bugs in the DIR-825 itself, with a few settings all the machines on my home network magically had IPv6 addresses and could bring up ipv6.google.com. I'm still playing around with the IPv6 settings on the router (debating 6to4 vs 6in4 Tunnel atm) but I'll be damned if a lot of this just works. Comparing back to the early internet days (remember MacTCP?) this stuff is completely autoconfiguring and drop dead simple.
So what is it good for?
Right. Ummm... well. It's an internet address. It's not going to do backflips or make you breakfast in bed, it's sexy because it just works connecting you to other computers.
The big advantage everyone talks of right now are "more addresses" than we have with IPv4. Right now my router and every computer on my home network has a "real" IPv6 address. I haven't seen computers on a home LAN have "real" IP addresses in a decade, they're too few to go around, so you get one real IPv4 address from your ISP and using all sorts of networking voodoo on your home router it slices that up for everything on your home network to use. But it's not pretty, not particularly fast, flexible, or reliable.
Having a real IP address is the hallmark of the Internet. It's how the whole system was intended to work. If I want to video chat with you my computer finds your computer, they handshake, and we video chat. Not this translated, forwarded, server/client model we've had to adopt since we don't have enough real addresses. I found a presentation by T-Mobile about how they get their phones to connect to the internet and it's all sorts of awful network hacking. Double/Triple/Quad NATs, hijacked IPv4 address blocks, huge data aggregation to a central point. No wonder it takes so long to load a web page over 3G and you can't use the cellular data network for anything neat yet, it's a total networking clusterfuck.
So far I've stumbled across two neat things IPv6 lets me do. When I'm running uTorrent I've noticed that some peers connect with IPv6 addresses. If you know anything about torrents then you know port forwarding and NAT are two of the hardest obstacles to overcome to maintaining a connection to other machines. IPv6 eliminates that concern since both machines have real routeable addresses and they just talk directly to each other. The other fun thing I found is with the tunnel at home and on my work machine I can suddenly VNC to either machine without changing any of the networking further up the line. Again, no NAT, no forwarding, just connect and go.
The thing is, these ideas are just reusing what we already have in a sense with IPv4. With IPv4 you get one real IPv4 address from your ISP. With IPv6 your little home network gets 18 billion real addresses. Your home network, everyone's home network. 18 billion things that can all talk to each other as peers, along with everything else on the entire internet.
What can you do with that? We don't even know yet. The coolest, most killer app isn't even a glint in someone's eye. It's like trying to guess the benefit of the Internet before household electrification. You can't even fathom it. This is the shape the Internet is suppose to take, not what we have right now. All we have now will look like just a big home network in 10 years.
My big hope and dream is that in the future you just get whatever you want from the net without giving a thought to the network. The network doesn't matter. It's always there around you, and your device just uses whatever it can see (wired, wifi, 3G, p2p, mesh, etc.).
So go check it out. Try setting it up. Poke and prod and see if you can get connected. It's not exactly fireworks if you can, and it's not the end of the world if you can't. But maybe by exploring now you unlock something later on while other people play catch-up.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/IPv6_IGD.mspx - A nice look at what IPv6 is and how to setup your home network to use it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6 - An overview of the next internet with all the technical details.
http://test-ipv6.com/ - Check your system to see how ready you are for the next internet.
http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ - Get your IPv6 Tunnel if Teredo or 6to4 aren't an option.
http://ip6.me/ - Check to see if you have an IPv6 address
http://www.cnri.dit.ie/cgi-bin/check_aaaa.pl - AAAA record checking for IPv6 DNS sites
http://aboveaverageurl.com/atom.xml
http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/index.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ipv6_blog - Blogs dealing with IPv6
http://freedns.afraid.org/menu/ - Free DNS setup and hosting. Point a real DNS name to your (really long & hard to remember) IPv6 address.
http://sixy.ch/ - Sites that are IPv6 enabled.
http://ipv6-test.com/ - Pretty IPv6 & IPv4 Speed Test
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