World IPv6 Day June 8, 2011 -- Get Ready

An excellent article by Stephen Shakland on CNET about the conversion from IPv4 to IPv6.  The crunch is looming, and conversion to the longer IPv6 Internet addresses looms. He rightly points out that in some ways it's similar to the Y2K problem: some hardware and software will not be able to handle the new addresses. It's not a lights-out scenario (despite a lot of media hype Y2K wasn't) but there are important points raised. Chief among them is that in buying new routers and networkable printers and other devices, you can be ready by looking IPv6-ready devices. They're becoming more available all the time thanks to articles such as this one and World IPv6 Day, June 8, 2011.

There's no impact on most operating systems and most modern software. As with Y2K, however, the traps remain hidden in some of those ancient products that often have no upgrade path. (On Y2K, we definitely saw 40-year old software still running, and I'm sure that some of that is still around.)

You can visit the IPv6 readiness test page for more information about your configuration.