Very soon, all of us will face one of the greatest changes in the global network in last 30 years: moving to the IPv6. So many system administrators will have to decide, how to handle this problem: which tools and techniques to use to connect their IPv4 networks to IPv6, how to protect the IPv6 networks and after all, just to know: when to start worrying about it?
There is already a bunch of questions about IPv6 problems here, on ServerFault, but I think there is should be a quick briefing information about all that stuff that we will face in the first days, on the very beginning of the "Ran Out Of The IPv4 Address Space" era. So everyone new to this topic, who haven't really thought that this could be that soon, could briefly get enough information to not stay out of a board, but to be able to learn that one Need to know.
So, that is the question:
- What is this IPv6 thing is all about?
- What to read, where to look for a brief info?
- How to protect network after getting rid of all this NAT stuff?
- Do I have to buy a new hardware?
- What do I have to know, that necessary to not be lost in the IPv6-world?
- Do I have to get rid of my IPv4-world and forget everything I've learned of it, or shall I carry it with me to the next generation networking?
For example:
- System administrator of a small corporative network reads the news on his favorite tech site and fells uncomfortable that he don't know nothing about this stuff. Not good, we got to help him set up his network and prepare his knowledge base to work in a new era.
- ISP's administrator just woke up this morning and realized that a Big-Bada-Boom is comming very soon and he knows nothing of the problem neither he know what to start with. He must find his way out of troubles here, and become a happy IPv6 guru.
- A girl reads a Cosmopolitan magazine and finds out that she could be closer to the cutting edge of technology if she would be able to ping ipv6.google.com, but she doesn't know, if her ISP ever support this feature, how to check this and what to do to make her proprietary router or her Awesome Edition work with the new protocol. At the end, she marries the one who posts the best answer here.
- Web-server administrator wan't to be sure that his server could be reached using both protocols. Let's help him!
And so on. Links, general info, best practices, different scenarios for a different environments are very appreciative. Thank you very much.