OK, it seemed that Microsoft was one of the participants in World IPv6 Launch day. It was a great opportunity for the company. For me, I took a great opportunity to get IPv6 enabled as well as I’ve been using the GogoClient for this. It may be an important protocol for the future of technology and if you’re not aware of it and you’re still surfing the net like that, I can say it’s a shame on you. The shame is even more real for saying that the IPv6 is not important and you’re forcing us to keep on surfing the net like that without the use of it over various purposes. Finally, simply excluding IPv6 as part of educational learning for technological students and teachers is another complete shame on the campuses and schools but thankfully, the students and teachers who are into learning computer stuff a lot like me are already aware of running out of IPv4 addresses.
For several years, Microsoft has been working to roll out IPv6 across various devices, services and network infrastructure. So how does this work? Well, starting with Windows XP SP3, there will be IPv6 supported which is possible for IPv6 transition. And the future of the internet with IPv6 is likely to be now or even later.
They have been working on the deployment of IPv6 to ensure that we have continuous access to the internet. However, upgrading the entire Internet and technology to IPv6 is not as instant task. It is even more difficult to learn than IPv4 as there may be more tons of subnetting than IPv4 has. Furthermore, the address is long and the numbers are all hexadecimal. This may have taken them many years to where are today and they have lots of work to do. Currently, the percentage of devices connected to IPv6 is quite low if not, starting to increase thanks to the awareness of running out of IPv4 addresses.
Man, I hope that my ISP is fucking aware of this as the entire Internet here is still IPv4. I already told some of the staff but it seems that not all staff are aware of running out IPv4 addresses. Where’s the progress? Why is this still serving customers like there’s no new work?
There are three categories for the network transitions.
- IPv4-only network: This is what many users have today and the ISP doesn’t even have the IPV6 technology or perhaps the ISP is still working on the transition. On Windows, it provides IPv6 connectivity by tunneling the traffic inside various transition technologies such as the use of Teredo, where IPv6 packets are encapsulated in IPv4 UDP packets. By default, the top protocol version priority is IPv6 in Windows 8 so Windows 8 attempts to choose IPv6 connectivity when the device is not using IPv4. The Teredo is enabled by default only on non-domain networks and it may not be available if your network blocks the UDP.
- IPv4 and v6 networks: This is way obvious to prevent the Internet cut-off so the IPv6 is another important option not all users will notice. If the ISP has both IPv4 and v6 in which your computer is starting to have these two protocols, it may be the fact that the broadband device is supporting the IPv6 provided that the ISP has support for that protocol besides IPv4. Last year, websites from Microsoft like www.microsoft.com, www.xbox.com and www.bing.com had IPv6 enabled in World IPv6 day so it is obvious that they are having IPv6 support in addition to IPv4 support so there’s no reason to worry about.
- IPv6-only network: If you have a device that is IPv6 only, then the luck during the transition process is not quite easy. While many websites still use IPv4, the ISPs must use a translation device to allow IPv6 network devices to access IPv4 websites. This is known as NAT64 and is becoming popular in the mobile environment because having only one kind of IP between mobile device and the operator’s infrastructure is simpler to deploy and cheaper than using dual-stack configuration. This is already the time we are going to run out of IPv4 addresses and the exhaustion is serious severe so don’t even think or say that the transition is not important.
Address sorting relies on Windows being correctly configured by your router. Windows analyzes the routing information provided by the router and uses that information in conjunction with address sorting to ensure fast connectivity to named resources. If IPv6 is configured by your router, it should be preferred.
Compared to this year’s IPv6 connectivity event, the last year was unfortunately flawed. Some clients were configured with IPv6 routing information but there was no IPv6 access whatsoever. This may be the result of misconfiguration by some ISPs or buggy home routers. Personally, those who are not aware of this network transition at all while working at ISP are likely to be at some faults. Using some kind of priority, Windows attempted to connect to websites using IPv6, expecting it to work but it didn’t. Eventually, it fell back to IPv4 connectivity and that was a BULLSHIT MOMENT to the people.
