Today is World IPv6 Day

Today is a special day in the geek world, it’s World IPv6 Day. Don’t worry people; you don’t need to by a gift for your significant other or anything. Today marks the first 24-hour test of the IPv6 system around the world by major websites. The goal of the test day is to motivate organizations across the industry to prepare their services for IPv6 so the transition goes smoothly since IPv4 addresses ran out and IPv6 addresses are going to be handed out moving forward. The target industries for the day are ISPs, hardware makers, OS vendors, and web firms.

The Internet Society says to take part you need to do a few things depending on what sort of company you are associated with. Normal web users don’t need to do anything according to the internet Society. Website owners needed to have sent a request in to bring their site online using IPv6 by June 3. If you missed that deadline and wanted to participate, you are out of luck for now.

Some of the largest web sites on line are participating today though. Among the giant sites are Google, Yahoo, Akamai, Limelight, and Facebook. For those of us that just use the services provided we will not notice anything different. The sites you know and love should be accessible just as they always were. If you missed what exactly IPv6 is, it is the new addressing system after the IPv4 addresses ran out in February. IPv6 can provide 340 undecillion addresses, which is 34 and then 37 zeros. I wanna be a undecillionaire so freakin’ bad.