Oh Noes!: The Internetz Is nearly Out of IP Addresses [Internet]

In case your grandmother’s Facebook account wasn’t a tell-tale sign that the net has come of age, here’s another: after this week, the net will run out of latest IPv4 addresses. But don’t fret, because we’re moving on up to IPv6!

For those unfamiliar with what IP addresses do, they serve as the net’s navigation system in some ways. After you type in a URL/domain name to visit a domain, it’s attached to an IP address which handles all of the dirty work of connecting you to the server the website is stored on. Identical to the Wall Street Journal says, it is a lot like the moment when phone companies inside the U.S. switched to 10-digit numbers.

The IPv4 addresses theoretically range between 4 and 12 digits, have a size of 32-bits and have 4.3 billion possible address combinations. I’m fairly certain all of you’ve handled IPv4 addresses, which look something like this:

68.127.78.247

(or http://68.127.78.247, when entering them into a browser)

With the change to IPv6, addresses might be 128-bits in size and up to 32 digits long, taking into account 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. When it’s finally implemented, it is going to look something like this:

2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

(or http://[2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334] in a browser)

And with an entire gang of other notation rules , configuring your router is going to be a bitch . Oh, ALSO, we’ll all need to get new routers! (Naturally)

But IPv6 continues to be in its infancy and continues to be a couple of years from being put into use on any type of widespread level. Until then, the web will get by on a diet of repurposed and recycled IP addresses. But for a single day in June, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and a pair of other internet giants will switch over to IPv6-compatible servers to discover out the most recent protocol and find out if there are any major kinks inside the system. [ WSJ ]

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This post is tagged: compatible servers, internet giants, ipv6 addresses, navigation system, url domain name, wall street journal