On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 10:18 -0400, James Knott wrote:
At the moment, it appears all the IPv4 address blocks will be taken in about a year. This means ISPs will no longer be able to get those addresses and will be forced to hand out NAT addresses. Pretending all is well with IPv4 and NAT is extremely short sighted.
+1
In addition, the current situation with IPv4 requires complex routing tables, which slows down router performance at ISPs. With IPv6, addresses are allocated in a hierarchical manner, which greatly simplifies routing.
+1
There are other advantages, such as extention headers vs variable length headers, which will also improve router performance. There are also other features with are built into IPv6, such as mobile device routing, IPSec and others, which are simply tacked onto IPv4.
"tacked onto IPv4" is being *very* kind. I'd prefer the phrase "savagely grafted onto". And nothing in IPv4 can match IPv6's mobile support [which you mentioned]
On thing that's nice is automatic address assignment. When I use a computer on my network, it talks to the router to determine the network address. It then combines that with the NIC MAC address to determine it's IPv6 address. No configuration is required.
+1
But they did fail to resolve the obvious issue of name service discovery
- you still have to provide the address of a DNS server to the node
[although maybe something can solve that in some non-standard way,
possibly via Avahi].
--
Adam Tauno Williams