Network Address Translation – A Black Mark on IPv4’s Name Why do people use Network Address Translation? Because they always have, that’s why. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is one of the dumbest reasons we do things. It precludes continued thought and absolves us the responsibility to think about why we are doing…
…about the IP address of your default router (default gateway in IPv4-speak). It’s tough to argue against the fact that most IPv6 addresses are not much fun to type. Being four times longer than IPv4 addresses and expressed in hexadecimal means things can get ugly on the keyboard pretty quickly. For people in the IT…
I wrote this post several years ago. By writing it I was trying to get people to begin to think about how the size of the IPv6 address space, when combined with RFID technologies, was going to change everything about how they manage their lives. I wrote this way before NetFlix began streaming content, before…
The IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority) distributes IPv6 address to RIR’s (Regional Internet Registry’s) around the world. At the moment there are five RIR’s and each of them is responsible for allocating IPv6 address space to ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) and, in some cases, End-User organizations. Once a block of addresses is allocated to an…
The IPv6 address space is huge. On paper each IPv6 subnet (/64) supports more than 18.4 quintillion hosts (millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions and then quintillions). It’s an amazingly large number. By every conceivable measure today we can’t contemplate a situation where anything but the tiniest portion of that address space will actually be utilized. Assuming…
Most DNS servers these days are glad to resolve IPv6 addresses from clients who send the queries packaged in IPv4 packets. In the grand scheme of things the DNS servers don’t care how you sent the question, they just care about the question. And because almost everybody still relies heavily upon IPv4, most of us…
“You hear that? That is the sound of inevitability…” – Agent Smith, The Matrix. You will migrate to IPv6. It is happening. You will not be able to resist. The IANA gave out the last IPv4 allocations on 2/1/2011. There are no more. As I write, the RIR’s will completely run out of IPv4 addresses…
One very cool and highly promoted feature of IPv6 is stateless address autoconfiguration. If you don’t already know, this feature enables a node to automatically derive its IPv6 address(es) without the help of of a DHCP server. That is a big departure from the world of IPv4. In IPv4 you either had to manually configure…
The beloved UNC path name, familiar to all who administer Microsoft. After all these years there is something comfortable and familiar in the simple act of cracking open open that run line and busting out a pair of backslashes followed by the name or IP address to which I want to connect. Simple. Easy. Classic.
The Domain Internet Groper, or dig, as most of us know it, is considered by pretty much everybody in the ‘nix community to be the replacement to nslookup. And I have long been madly in like with it. Not sure why, though. nslookup has never been a disappointment. Maybe it’s because dig is newer and…