IPv6 -Internet Protocol version 6
Introduction – IPv6 is the Network or Internet Layer protocol in ISO/OSI or TCP/IP model. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the current version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 address space is extremely large. For example, IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses (4 billion addresses) while IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses (3.4×1038 addresses). Although adoption of IPv6 has been slow due to many reasons… Most transport- and application-layer protocols need little or no change to work over IPv6; exceptions are applications protocols that embed network-layer addresses such as FTP or NTP.
- The main feature of IPv6 that is driving adoption today is the larger address space.
- IPv6 hosts can be configured automatically when connected to a routed IPv6 network using ICMPv6 router discovery message.
- Multicast is part of the base specifications in IPv6
- IPsec – the protocol for IP network-layer encryption and authentication, is an integral part of the base protocol suite in IPv6.
How to write IPv6 –
IPv6 addresses are normally written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits, where each group is separated by a colon same as IPv4. like 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab
::1/128 — the loopback address is a localhost address.
IPv6 addresses can be split into network and host parts using subnet masks- 128 bit number of bits are separated into a network part (upper 64 bits) and a host part (lower 64 bits), to facilitate auto-configuration.
root@arunbagul:~# ping6 ip6-localhost
PING ip6-localhost(ip6-localhost) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from ip6-localhost: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.040 ms
………………………………..
— ip6-localhost ping statistics —
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2997ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.035/0.037/0.040/0.004 ms
root@arunbagul:~#
Thank you,
Arun