IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6

Chapter 1. What Is IPv6?

	There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
	--Oscar Wilde

Somewhere between 1993 and 1995, the Internet started entering the everyday lives of the general public. As the number of websites grew rapidly in those early years, several different "Internet Yellow Pages" books where published to catalog the hundreds of new cyber-destinations to which to travel. These books appear to modern "surfers" more like fictional parodies than the serious reference works they were then. In today's Google/Yahoo world, the idea of going to a book to look up a website or newsgroup sounds as archaic as requiring a week to cross the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, in those bygone times of more than 10 years ago, a technology still associated with the future today was being forged. In December 1995, RFC 1883 presented one of the first introductions to a new internetworking protocol: IPv6.

Perhaps the architects of the Internet suspected a revolution was coming and the infrastructure that had served the networks of research labs and universities well for some 15 years wasn't going to be up to the task. Surprisingly IPv4, the fifth version of the defining protocol upon which the modern Internet is based, has held up an additional 10-plus years, but, change is in the air. Those interested in the predecessors of IPv4 can find a list of references for where to read about IPv0 (yes, there was a version 0) through IPv3 in RFC 762. The ...