Moving to IPv6

[James Knott]

sciguy-Lmt0BfyYGMw at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Wikipedia also says there will be address exhaustion in a year. Forgive me
> if I'm wrong, but it seems the way that in the proposed IPv6, the way the
> address space will be allocated will make it possible for IPv4 to still
> work. An IPv4 address of A.B.C.D will be equal to an IPv6 address of
> A.B.C.D.0.0.0.0, for instance. Would a router have a problem with the
> trailing zeroes (the correct behaviour appears to be to toss them out)?
> The last four groups of hex digits make it possible to add more hierarchy
> to networks, making for a more finely-tuned management of the network.
>
> That may explain why there is not much of a panic, despite an agreed upon
> exhaustion of numbers by 2011. All that might really happen is your ISP
> will assign an IPv6 number, and your router will just ignore the last 4
> sequences (which are probably just zeroes anyway), if all it knows is
> IPv4.
>
>    
Not quite.  There are a couple of transition mechanism that make an IPv4 
address appear as IPv6, using an address such as ::192.168.1.1 (the 
"::"represents a string of zeros to fill out the 128 bits.  However, 
those methods can't be carried over an IPv4 network and may require a 
gateway or proxy to connect IPv4 to IPv6.  On my own network, for 
example, I can create an address that includes the IPv4 address, but is 
actually an IPv6 address to reach IPv6 capable devices by referring to 
their IPv4 address.

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