NewWorld Consulting Group

Understanding IPv4 vs IPv6

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) will succeed IPv4 as the standard networking protocol of the Internet. IPv6 provides a number of advances over IPv4 but the primary reason for its replacing IPv4 is its limitation in addresses. IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses which means there is a theoretical limit of 2 to the power of 32. The IPv6 address scheme is based on a 128 bit address or a theoretical limit of 2 to the power of 128

Possible Addresses:
• IPv4 = 4,294,967,296 (over 4 billion)
• IPv6 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (over 340 undecillion - We had to look that term up. We didn’t know what a number followed by 36 digits was either).

Assuming a world population of approximately 8 billion people, IPv6 would allow for each individual to have approximately 42,535,295,865,117,200,000,000,000,000 devices with an IP address. That’s 42 quintillion devices. There is little likelihood that you will ever need to worry about these numbers as any kind of serious limitation in addressing but they do give an idea of the scope of the difference in the available addressing.

Aside from the difference of possible addresses there is also the different formatting of the addresses that will need to be addressed.

A computer would view an IPv4 address as a 32 bit string of binary digits made up of 1s and 0s, broken up into 4 octets of 8 digits separated by a period “.”

Example:
10101100.00010000.11111110.00000001

To make number more user friendly for humans we translate this into decimal, again 4 octets separated by a period “.”which works out to: 172.16.254.1

A computer would view an IPv6 address as a 128 bit string of binary digits made up of 1s and 0s, broken up into 8 octets of 16 digits separated by a colon “:”

Example:
1000000000000001:0000110110111000:101011000001000:1111111000000001:0000000000000000:0000000000000000:0000000000000000:0000000000000000

To make number a little more user friendly for humans we translate this into hexadecimal, again 8 octets separated by a colon “:” which works out to:

8001:0DB8:AC10:FE01:0000:0000:0000:0000:

Because any four-digit group of zeros within an IPv6 address may be reduced to a single zero or altogether omitted, this address can be shortened further to:

8001:0DB8:AC10:FE01:0:0:0:0
or
8001:0DB8:AC10:FE01::

Some of the other benefits of IPv6 include:
• More efficient routing
• Reduced management requirement
• Stateless auto-reconfiguration of hosts
• Improved methods to change Internet Service Providers
• Better mobility support
• Multi-homing
• Security
• Scoped address: link-local, site-local and global address space

Clear as mud??

172.16.254.1

Problem Steps Recorder

As the local PC guru you're probably very used to friends and family asking for help with their computer problems, yet having no idea how to clearly describe what's going on. It's frustrating, but Microsoft feels your pain, and Windows 7 will include an excellent new solution in the Problem Steps Recorder.

When any app starts misbehaving under Windows 7 then all your friends need do is click Start, type PSR and press Enter, then click Start Record. If they then work through whatever they're doing then the Problem Steps Recorder will record every click and keypress, take screen grabs, and package everything up into a single zipped MHTML file when they're finished, ready for emailing to you. It's quick, easy and effective, and will save you hours of troubleshooting time.