Will IPv6 Make My Life Easier?

No one that isn't heavily involved in computers and network probably pays much attention to the discussion of IPv6, or Internet Protocol Version 6. For those of you that don't know what it is, it is basically (very basically) a new addressing scheme for computers on networks.

I am sure if I gave you an IP address like 192.168.2.1, you'd probably have some idea that it is an address of a computer. But what if I gave you something like 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334? Still look familiar, or would you be more likely to guess that it was the serial number on my new Jedi Light Saber? Well, get used to it, because that just might be your computers IP address in the near future.

See, back when the designed the numbering format we are used today, IPv4, was designed, they didn't really expect the Internet to get as big as it has. IPv4 supports 4,294,967,296 different addresses. Sure, that sounds like a lot but think about how many computers are really out there. The computer industry has done many things to try and extend the life of IPv4 but the inevitable conclusion is that we are going to run out of these addresses.

Anyway, back to the original topic. Based on that IPv6 address you saw two paragraphs ago you are probably thinking, "How can an address that compliucated make my life easier?"

Well, if all I had to remember in life was IP addresses, it wouldn't. If 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 and 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7335 were two different computers, I am sure things would start to get confusing quickly.

So, what's the answer? The answer already exists and you use it every day...DNS. DNS provides us with the friendly names, known as host names, that we all remember: google.com, yahoo.com, sourceforge.net. All of these domain names map to IP addresses so we don't have to remember all of those numbers. It's been around since the beginning of the net, and we all take DNS for granted.

But never in the history of the Internet has DNS been as important as it will be in an IPv6 world. In my industry, as in many others, there have always been a few computers that just didn't have host names. Since everything that communicated with them already knew the IP, there wasn't a real need to waste space on a DNS server assigning a unique name.

This practice, or maybe lack or practice, has led to a lot of confusion, especially on private networks where hot names are even less common. Not a day has passed where I haven't asked a coworker what IP 172.16.125.12 was for, and I know that almost everyone in any computer field has a spreadsheet they keep all of their IP addresses on. In a network that uses IPv6, that means that every host has an address of up to 32 digits. Not only is that a pain to remember, it's a nightmare to type.

Enter our old friend DNS.

DNS is going to be the savior of IPv6 and it's going to bring all of the same old benefits it has with IPv4 along with it. It's just going to be used more, and that makes all the difference in the world. So no longer will I be saying "What computer is this IP?" In fact, I am willing to bet that almost everyone will completely forget about IP addresses eventually. They'll be like MAC addresses today. Sure, they do something, but I bet you don't know what yours is...