Title: Introduce IPv6
Course: CIS 208: Linux/UNIX III: Intermediate System Administration, Networking, and Security ~ For IGNITE Review > Section: Learning Modules

Introduce IPv6

As a Linux system administrator, you will be managing systems that use internet protocols and networking, so it is essential to have a basic understanding of the underlying concepts. The OSI and TCP/IP are the two main models used in networking. Networks have physical and logical addresses, and addresses can be assigned manually or dynamically. IPv4 was the protocol used to address hosts, until the Internet became so large that all the numbers were used. IPv6 was developed to add more addressing capability. Decimal (base 10), Binary (base 2) and Hexadecimal (base 16) are the three numeric methods used to represent addresses to a computer. Port numbers map to different services, such as FTP and HTTP. Linux commands allow detection of the NIC and provide powerful troubleshooting functions. These concepts are included in four CompTIA domains, and are included in this lesson.

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol (IP) address standard that will supplement and eventually replace IPv4, the protocol most Internet services use today.

Why It Matters

An IP address is basically a postal address for each and every Internet-connected device. Without one, websites would not know where to send the information each time you perform a search or try to access a website. However, the world officially ran out of the 4.3 billion available IPv4 addresses in February 2011.

Yet, hundreds of millions of people are still to come online, many of whom will do so in the next few years. IPv6 is what will allow them to do so, providing enough addresses (2^128 to be exact) for everyone and all of their various devices.

A lack of Internet addresses would have caused many problems; your favourite web programmes would slow down, computers would find it more difficult to communicate with one another, and your privacy could be compromised because it will be hard to tell the difference between you and another computer user down the street.

To allow the Internet to continue to grow and spread across the world, implementing IPv6 is necessary.

Source: This material came from the Internet Society at this link: http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/internet-technology-matters/ipv6.