Well, as of Friday the 4th of February 2011 IANA is officially out of IPv4 addresses. It’s now up to the regional registries to dole out the remaining addresses as they see fit, which will be increasingly sparingly.
To celebrate the beginning of the end of IP as we know it, Haltcondition.net is now available over IPv6:
- haltcondition.net -> dual IPv4/IPv6 version
- ipv6.haltcondition.net -> IPv6 only version
I’ve also added an IPv6 detection widget on the right, courtesy of Patux. The IPv6 connectivity is provided by a Hurricane Electric tunnel to my Linode box; the fact that I even need to use a tunnel at a professional hosting site is sign of how painful the next couple of years are going to be.
Luckily my ISP are currently trialling consumer-level IPv6, so I can at least test the site. However at this point setting up IPv6 in the home is far from simple; I had to convert from DD-WRT to OpenWRT on my router and do a lot of manual configuration to get an end-to-end connection. It’s going to be a painful transition.
Update: Linode have announced provisional support for IPv6, so this blog is now native end-to-end if your ISP has support. The Linode setup is a bit odd (they only provide a single IP rather than the usual /64) but appears to work.
One of the more intriguing speculations doing the rounds is that Linode rolled this out early as Slicehost are gearing up for IPv6 as they transition into Rackspace’s cloud. If so this is promising, as I hadn’t expected IPv6 to be product differentiator for some time.
1 Comments.