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SILICON SILIC CHIP www.siliconchip.com.au Publisher/Editor Nicholas Vinen Technical Editor John Clarke – B.E.(Elec.) Technical Staff Bao Smith – B.Sc. Tim Blythman – B.E., B.Sc. Advertising Enquiries (02) 9939 3295 adverts<at>siliconchip.com.au Regular Contributors Allan Linton-Smith Dave Thompson David Maddison – B.App.Sc. (Hons 1), PhD, Grad.Dip.Entr.Innov. Geoff Graham Associate Professor Graham Parslow Dr Hugo Holden – B.H.B, MB.ChB., FRANZCO Ian Batty – M.Ed. Phil Prosser – B.Sc., B.E.(Elec.) Cartoonist Louis Decrevel loueee.com Founding Editor (retired) Leo Simpson – B.Bus., FAICD Silicon Chip is published 12 times a year by Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd. ACN 626 922 870. ABN 20 880 526 923. All material is copyright ©. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Subscription rates (Australia only) 6 issues (6 months): $72.50 12 issues (1 year): $135 24 issues (2 years): $255 Online subscription (Worldwide) 6 issues (6 months): $52.50 12 issues (1 year): $100 24 issues (2 years): $190 For overseas rates, see our website or email silicon<at>siliconchip.com.au * recommended & maximum price only Postal address: PO Box 194, Matraville, NSW 2036. Phone: (02) 9939 3295. ISSN: 1030-2662 2 Editorial Viewpoint IPv6 is growing in popularity IPv4, the internet protocol introduced in the early 1980s, has been the backbone of the internet ever since. But it has a fatal flaw: its address space is only 32 bits, limiting the number of unique addresses to 4,294,967,296. That might sound like plenty, but with over eight billion people on Earth, there aren’t enough addresses to go around – especially once you factor in businesses, governments and infrastructure, who also need many addresses. There are a few reasons for this limit. Nobody thought the internet would grow to the size that it has. Also, since every internet packet contains a source and destination address, each 8 bits of address space adds two bytes to every single packet traversing the ‘net. In practice, the problem has been managed with network address translation (NAT), where many devices share a single public address. NAT has kept the internet running, but it adds complexity, can cause reliability issues and it breaks the end-to-end principle of networking. IPv6 solves these problems. Instead of 32 bits per address, it uses 128, giving 2128 or about 3.4 × 1038 unique addresses. That’s so vast that instead of receiving just one address, each user gets a block of them, often hundreds or thousands. Every device in your home or office can have its own globally routable address. Despite being standardised back in 1995, IPv6 adoption has been slow. Change is always difficult, and IPv6 is more complex to administer. Still, progress is being made; on the 2nd of August this year, Google measured IPv6 usage at 50% of all internet traffic. Large providers like Amazon Web Services are also pushing customers towards IPv6 by charging for scarce IPv4 public addresses. Ironically, some of their tools are still not fully IPv6-ready, making the transition more difficult than it should be, as we recently found out. We enabled IPv6 across our public and private networks last month, including our web and mail servers. The process wasn’t trivial, but it was much easier than expected. And the best part is that IPv6 runs alongside IPv4 in ‘dual stack’ mode. For example, our website can now be reached via either 54.79.90.108 (IPv4) or 2406:da1c:f0:271c:adb0:cae7:e127:5cf8 (IPv6). If your ISP and router support IPv6, you’re probably already using it without even realising. My home router and ISP support IPv6, so it was just a matter of enabling it in the router settings, then the inevitable fiddling with opaque configuration variables until it sprang into life, with my local machines receiving globally routable IPv6 addresses. Unsurprisingly, countries with large populations like India and China already make extensive use of IPv6. Australia and many other ‘western’ countries, which got large IPv4 allocations in the early days, lag behind in adoption. I think that may start changing soon as the tide turns and IPv4 is no longer the default. The transition won’t be quick, but it is inevitable. Over time, IPv6 will restore the simplicity, reliability and scalability the internet was meant to have. Printing and Distribution: Update to our Vintage Radio Collection: it now includes articles from 1987 to 2024, a total of nearly 500 individual articles. Like before, it is available as a download or on a USB. Previous purchasers can download the new articles at no extra cost. See siliconchip.au/Shop/3 for details. 14 Hardner Rd, Mount Waverley VIC 3149 54 Park St, Sydney NSW 2000 Cover image: the TOCABI robot by Mathew Schwartz https://unsplash.com/photos/a-person-wearing-a-helmet-td116npEPgQ Silicon Chip by Nicholas Vinen Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au