Howard,

While in some respect, I share your sentiments (in wanting to get people to think about the move to IPv6) I still think you are way too early. I have been doing network designs and consulting for a the very biggest corporate and government bodies for the last 18 years or so. I have been watching IPv6 as it began its gestation about 10-12 years ago. But guess what - I see almost *no* interest from even the largest of end-user enterprises. Only large software (read Microsoft) and networking companies (read Cisco) have made any sort of effort to promote. While it is built into the core of most current OSes and the higher-end network equipment - that really is about it.

It only will really become meaningful when it becomes the default option from the major ISPs and carriers for the carriage of IP traffic. And even then I would suspect that for the most part, end-users will be able to choose to be shielded from the intricacies of IPv6.

Even in the briefest look around, you will realise how far away real-world adoption really is. Most configuration dialogues and web forms today still try to parse/display an "IP address" as a dotted quad (eg 1.2.3.4). That is, they ignore the IPv6 format of IP addresses. The other simple matter is that I would wager that if you took 10 experienced (10+ years) network engineers and ask them about IPv6 and what it is about and have they even played with it, 9 of them would probably have told you about the huge new size of the address space, but the need for it has been pretty well removed with private IP address space ( 10.x.x.x etc) and NAT, and no they haven't played with it. IMHO it really still is only of real interest to propeller heads (myself included).

On the other hand I do believe it will come into play at some stage (because as Vint Cerf once said - every light buld will need an IP address in the future) but my current hunch is that it might be at least 5 years before any credible moves need to be made (by us end users).

I'm happy to be contradicted.

Regards, Martin

On 10/5/06, Howard Lowndes <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
I'm thinking that its about time I started thinking about planning for
IPv4 to IPv6 transitions for my SMB clients.

What knowledge base is there out there, esp. any "Been there, Done that,
Got the {T shirt|Scars} to prove it".

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Howard.
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Regards, Martin

Martin Visser
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