Noticed unusual IP addresses? Don’t panic; this may be the simple IPv6 protocol. which, at first glance, may appear completely different from a normal IP address that we used to know.
Because it is not usual to see letters in the IP address. But you need to get used to it, we will see letters in the IP address more and more often because the number of IPv4 addresses is running out. The authors of the protocol did not foresee that their work would be so successful.
The IPv6 IP address looks like that – 684D:1111:222:3333:4444:5555:6: 77, and the IPv4 IP address looks like that 19.117.63.126.
Let’s start with what an IP address is and what the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols are.
What is IPv4 and IPv6
IPv4
The first version of IPv4 was deployed 40 years ago, in 1982, and is still widely used for most internet traffic today.
The creators of the IPv4 protocol did not expect that there would not be enough IP addresses, which could be as many as 4,294,967,296 unique addresses.
From IBM documentation:
An IPv4 address has the following format: x . x . x . x where x is called an octet and must be a decimal value between 0 and 255. Octets are separated by periods. An IPv4 address must contain three periods and four octets. The following examples are valid IPv4 addresses:
1 . 2 . 3 . 401 . 102 . 103 . 104
IPv6
The IPv6 Internet protocol was introduced in 1995 and is the most recent Internet Protocol (IP) version.
It won’t be easy to use all IPv6 IP addresses because, theoretically, there can be up to 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.
An IPv6 (Normal) address has the following format: y : y : y : y : y : y : y : y where y is called a segment and can be any hexadecimal value between 0 and FFFF. The segments are separated by colons – not periods. An IPv6 normal address must have eight segments, however a short form notation can be used in the Tape Library Specialist Web interface for segments that are zero, or those that have leading zeros. The short form notation can not be used from the operator panel.
The following list shows examples of valid IPv6 (Normal) addresses:
2001 : db8: 3333 : 4444 : 5555 : 6666 : 7777 : 88882001 : db8 : 3333 : 4444 : CCCC : DDDD : EEEE : FFFF
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- Killer e2200 gigabit ethernet controller. Explained.
- Latency vs Bandwidth. Is faster Bandwidth means lower Ping?
Conclusion
So, an IP address that has letters and looks a bit unusual (like that – 684D:1111:222:3333:4444:5555:6: 77) is simply a newer version (IPv6) of the Internet Protocol that was created to replace the older IPv4.
So eventually we will all move from the IPv4 version to the newer version of IPv6.
If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them in the comments section.
