I am studying for my CCNA, and a lot of it focuses on IPv4. IPv6 was first developed in the 90’s and has been gaining traction for a while. How long will it be until version 4 is left in the dust?
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
A decade, at least.
There will still be loads of embedded devices using IPv4 in 10 years.
Providers of network content have this fetishistic fixation with geolocating client systems in order to enforce the will of their media overlords (i.e., region-fencing of content. Think, "we can’t release this movie in Europe until 6 weeks after it’s released in the US, so we embargo it online from European IP addresses as well.)
Apparently, the technological marvel which is IP-based geolocation doesn’t work for IPv6.
Until Netflix and the other media net providers can figure out how to geofence you, IPv6 is a nonstarter.
If you’re just looking into start a networking career now, I feel fairly confident in predicting that the for first third to half of your career (assuming it’s a full career in the field) you will deal with IPv4 primarily. Maybe less if you work with a larger service provider, more if you’re working in a corporate environment.
The primary drive for IPv6 is the lack of new address space for new devices. There’s no real incentive to go and redesign working networks, so there’s no real reason to assume they’re going to go away anytime soon.
It depends. If you are planning on working at an ISP or something like that you’ll be using it already. If you are planning on working pretty much anywhere else though, realistically it will be with you for your entire career…IMHO. It certainly will be here for the duration of my own career anyway. Once RFC-1918 was implemented (and yeah, I was around in the bad old days before that), it basically took a lot of the pressure off. As we have basically hit the wall (in 2011 IIRC) already and we leveraged past it (using technology that embeds IPv4 in IPv6 packets), and with RFC-1918 it’s just not a huge priority. There is just such a huge base of IPv4 both in use and knowledge base that it’s not going away…we will just keep kicking the can down the road for decades at least.
YMMV, but my guess is, at a CCNA level you will never even see IPv6. Unless you go on and get your CCIE and work for an ISP or the IANA or something involved in the core internet you probably won’t see it at all. Your ISP connections will LOOK like IPv4 to you, and your internal RFC-1918 network will be IPv4 most likely, unless you just want to be different.
ETA: Your instructors might tell you something completely different, of course…and, basically, it won’t hurt you to learn it. It’s really not all that difficult or complex, especially with all the tools available today.
Nope. The internet is moving to IPv6 out of sheer necessity.
From last September:
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2985340/ipv6/arin-finally-runs-out-of-ipv4-addresses.html
They’ve been saying that since the 90s…
I’ve worked in Network Support for the last 2 years. During my product training we covered 6to4 and NAT64 and IPv6 DNS and a pile of IPv6 config.
Since then, I’ve worked well over a thousand tickets for customers all over the world and have never had an IPv6 case. I know some of our customers do use it, but the vast, vast majority of our customers use IPv4 for everything.
That said, we sell CGNAT solutions as well, which help to maintain the status quo in a world running out of IPv4 addresses.
For the company I work for, we actually turn off IPV6 on some computers, because the machines can’t handle it, and it causes issues in their network connections.
Simply, its kind of like asking “Do I need to learn DOS? Nobody uses DOS anymore…”. You end up using many simplified DOS commands on a daily basis to check things, or to clear things.
IPV4 isn’t going away any time soon.
Right. The Windows command shell is still heavily based on DOS, so a good knowledge of DOS helps immensely in using it. Understanding the history of DOS also tells you quite a bit as to WHY the Windows command shell is a little quirky compared to other systems (e.g. Unix).
Every time it looks like they’re going to run out, something is done to fix it. In the 90s we were doomed and then people started using NAT. It’s to the point where I’m starting to think that this will happen indefinitely.
IPv4 will be around for a long, long time. Most business networks don’t need the address space, Subnetting a 10. will provide all but the largest businesses all the space they need.
IPv6 will be used at the edges.
The CCNA v2 has a bit of IPv6. The CCNA v3, coming in Spetember iirc, has a lot more. And it has a ton of other stuff as well, BGP, Etherchannel both PAGP and LACP, OSPF v3 for IPv6. EIGRP for IPv6, HSRP. And a lot more.
I hope to get mine before the new test. About the only area I really need to work on is IPv6 bcause I never use it.
Slee