So what's the goal here. Lil' Marvin, like any good project in the lab, is built from a variety of parts you might have laying around. And because Dr. Frankenstein has had to cut back his R&D budget, all the parts will be free if possible. (It was really bad -- we don't even have an assistant here -- we had to let Igor go...)
Our goal, when done, is to have a fully functional IPv6 network on our local LAN, with IPv6 out to the Internet. We will be able to use V6 internally and communicate to sites like Google via IPv6.
So let's scrub up, and get started.
What Is IPv6?
IPv6 is the logical successor to IPv4. (Thanks! That helps a lot....) IP Version 4 is the TCP/IP you're used to seeing on anything with a network today. What happenned to IP version 5? Well, let's just say it went to live on a farm...
IP Version 4, or IPv4 as we now call it, assumed that the entire world of the Internet could be represented in 32 bits of address space. That seemed reasonable at the time given 32 bits is over four billion addresses. 30+ years later however, we know we may be just a little off. We need more.
To make sure this never happens again, let's start with just a few more bits -- 96 more. The 128 bits of address space isn't all used for normal addressing, but for all intents and purposes, one can obtain 80 bits of address space for a total of over 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses. Given the size, one typically refers to it as a subnet and a 48-bit address.
Having such a large address space means two things:
- First, given the current world population, even if it doubles every five years, it is unlikely we will run out of addresses for a very very long time.
- Second, typing in the address of a node is now only for the very hardcore type. DNS is your friend.
For our example, we will confine ourselves to a 64-bit address. Don't worry, you won't run out. That's over 16 billion billion addresses for your network alone. In honor of the Great One, we'll refer to it as 16 Segan address units.