June 8 is World IPv6 Day, when Google, Akamai, Facebook, and Limelight test their IPv6 stacks. Find out now if your home and corporate networks are ready<snip>
You probably already knew that the Internet is running out of 32-bit IP addresses. You may not have known that 98 percent of the available 4,294,967,296 addresses are already allocated.
According to the automatically generated Potaroo IPv4 Address Report -- you can even download a Windows gadget to perform the countdown in real time -- we'll run out of unallocated address pools on Feb. 19, 2011, or about five weeks from now. That doesn't mean the Internet will come crashing down, but it does make life much harder for those who have to assign IP addresses.
The world has to move to IPv6, with its 128-bit addresses. But that's easier said than done.
Generally, it isn't a question of getting clients to run IPv6. The various Windows, Mac OS, and Linux OSes all have IPv6 support. <snip>
While the world makes the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 -- a process that will take many years -- websites will need to run "dual stacks" to allow access via either the IPv4 or IPv6 protocols. That's the source of most of the problems: If your network supports both IPv4 and IPv6, but the IPv6 access isn't working right, and you go to a site with dual stacks, your system may hang for more than a minute trying to get into the IPv6 part of the site.
ISOC, the international Internet society, just announced World IPv6 Day -- the largest IPv6 testing experiment to date -- which will run for 24 hours on June 8. On that date Google (and YouTube), Facebook, and Yahoo will all turn on their IPv6 stacks, as will the major behind-the-scenes delivery networks Akamai and Limelight Networks.<snip>
If you want to test your connection right now, hop over to the Test-IPv6 site and see if you have IPv4 and IPv6 running properly. If your corporate network isn't set up to browse
http://test-ipv6.com">IPv6 sites just yet, not to worry. That will come with time. The forced cutover to IPv6 is many, many years away. For now, you primarily want to know if your connection will fall over with a site that has both IPv4 and IPv6 stacks running. Test-ipv6 will tell you.
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/network-testing/are-your-networks-ready-the-cutover-ipv6-485http://test-ipv6.com