Birth of IPv6

Well tonight's the night. For the first time, IPv6 domain resolution will be possible from a root server. Just a few addresses mind you, according to this article. You may ask "what took so long?". The answer is that we did not really need it. IPv6 bakes in some security that was addressed by SSL in IPv4 so that driver did not help. The other issue, a rapidly depleting address space, was managed by NAT(Network Address Translation). But now depletion is really staring us in the face. It is getting hard to get address space. Soon you will see the first bidding wars for owners of large blocks of free IP addresses. Technically you are not allowed to sell IP addresses so don't expect a market for them. But do expect high valuations for shells that control IP address blocks.

So soon there will more than enough IP addresses to go around. How many you say? Here is a great excerpt from Wikipedia:

For example, IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people[1] alive today. In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every star in the known universe [1] – a million times as many addresses per star than IPv4 supported for our single planet.

That should do it.

Get ready for several years of growing pains. Not the least of which will be all the exploits for the newly deployed IPv6 stacks that have not been well tested in the real world. Routers, servers, desktops, all will have their turn. The bad guys will have fertile ground to work.