It seems that the Internet Engineering Task Force is doing some work on getting the IPv6 protocol implemented worldwide. A workshop, of sorts, is being run in Philadelphia, to show the people involved with implementation how much of the protocol works without a hitch, and the spots where trouble is being encountered.

On paper, everything works, as it has been worked out over a period of ten years. In practice, problems are occurring in hardware due to the idiosyncratic behavior of some firmware - which was designed to make things easier in the world of IPv4. The little tricks that made things smooth with 4 octets of information, just does not work correctly with 6. If instantaneous transformation could take place, no real difficulties would be encountered. Since a transformation period is required, some technical difficulties must be worked through.

One area where things have not been smoothed yet is the syntax of Zone IDs. A paper from Cisco is available for perusal in PDF format, which discusses the problems relating to the use of the percent character.

All concerned with the changeover are working feverishly, as it is estimated that less than two years is left before all the IPv4 octets are exhausted. This situation is not helped by the growing number of appliances which have internet connectivity - from refrigerators to washing machines. Private networking can only take care of this so long, so the task continues, and the address exhaustion looms.

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Tags: ipv6, ipv4, private networking, network address translation, cisco, internet engineering task force, icann