- Okay, now let's talk about IP version 6
and make a little comparison to IP version 4.
IP version 6 is the newer IP protocol,
and this alleviates a lot of the issues with IP version 4.
Now an IP version 6 address is gonna be 128-bit.
So it's a huge number.
You have lots of permutations when it comes to IP version 6,
somewhere in the range of 340 undecillion.
Right.
So 128-bit number it's huge.
There's tons of ability to add addresses in this range.
In addition,
IP version 6 is gonna display its,
the numbers, the addresses themselves in hexadecimal
The hexadecimal numbering system.
So you might see something like,
FE80 and a lot of other numbers and letters,
because it's a hexadecimal number.
Now let's compare this to IP version 4 a little bit.
With IP version 4,
you only have the 32-bit addresses.
And that was the main problem with IP version 4,
this limited amount of addresses.
In a 32-bit system,
you're limited to about 4 billion addresses.
And you might say, well, that sounds like a lot,
but they're all pretty much used up.
And if you think of all the mobile devices,
and the internet of things,
and all the computers in the world, and phones, and tablets,
you can understand why all those would be gone.
That's one of the reasons that
to make the jump to IP version 6,
as a society,
so that we can have more addresses.
But the other comparison here,
we were using the decimal numbering system,
instead of hexadecimal.
So as we mentioned before,
you might see an address like 192.168.1.1,
the regular decimal system.
Now, another thing about IP version 6
is it can do larger data packets,
larger data packets in comparison to IP version 4,
which is limited to only 1,500 bytes or thereabouts.
This could do a lot more.
It can really do up to 64K,
it depends on the system that you have.
And finally, IP version 6 can also be more secure,
if it's set up properly.
That's not a given,
it's all how the network administrator sets up IP version 6
and configures it.
There is ways to secure IP version 4,
but there's additional ways to secure IP version 6,
and better ways.
The comparison between the two,
IP version 6 allows a ton more addresses,
because it uses a 128-bit system
in comparison to IP version 4's 32-bit system.
It's a hexadecimal number.
You'll see something like FE80,
that's an internal private IP address in IP version 6.
And that's in comparison to IP version 4's
decimal numbers like 192.168.1.1.
IP version 6 can have larger data packets,
as opposed to IP version 4,
which is limited to around 1,500 bytes.
And IP version 6 can be more secure.
Now we're gonna go ahead to Windows
and show IP version 6 in the IP properties sheet
in the Windows GUI,
and also in the command line.
So we've talked about IP version 6
and given you some of the basics about it.
Now let's show IP version 6 configurations in Windows.
We'll show it in the GUI and in the command line,
kind of like how we did with IP version 4.
So we'll start with the Windows portion,
and we're gonna go back to our Network Connections window,
and go to the Ethernet network adapter,
right-click and go to Properties.
And that brings up the Ethernet Properties.
But this time, we're gonna go to IP version 6,
and go to Properties button here.
That brings up the IP 6 property sheet.
And you can see that this network adapter
is using a statically assigned IP version 6 address,
that I have entered,
it's 2001:7120:0:8001::1f10.
So that's the IP version 6 address.
Remember these are 128-bit hexadecimal numbers.
Now you may say,
well, that doesn't look like it has enough digits,
and there are digits missing,
and that's because the address is truncated.
You could do two types of truncating
when it comes to IP version 6.
You can take a group of four zeros,
and turn them into one zero as we have right here,
because zero is zero.
I don't care how many zeros you have there, it's a zero.
The other way you can truncate it is
by having a double colon.
And a double colon can take the place of
four zeros plus another set or multiple sets of four zeros
that would normally be separated by colons.
So really what this address is,
is 2001:7120:0000:8001:0000:0000:0000:1f10,
so that would be the whole address,
but this is automatically gonna truncate
within the IP property sheet.
So it's just a little bit easier to read.
The subnet prefix is 64 bits long,
and that is half of the address.
That's basically 2001712000008001.
And we also have a default gateway,
which is on the same network,
but this guy is using 1ab7 instead of 1f10.
And remember IP version 6 addresses,
they're so huge, we can't use the decimal numbering system,
we have to use the hexadecimal numbering system.
So you see numbers as well as letters within those digits.
So that's IP version 6.
Now, again, if you're on a client computer,
you would normally just obtain the IP address automatically
and get that from either the local system
or from a DHCP server.
And I'll explain more about that in a minute.
So that's the IP properties in the GUI side.
Let's take a look in the command line now,
and we'll bring up a command prompt again.
And to see the IP version 6 stuff,
we have to do an ipconfig/all,
like we did previously.
So we'll do that now.
Get tons of information.
And we'll go up to the wireless adapter first.
And you'll see here,
what's known as a Link-local IP version 6 Address.
And that starts with fe80.
And we talked about that,
that is a common private address.
Fe80, fe90, fea0 and feb0,
all four of those ranges,
anything that starts with any one of those four
is gonna be a link local IP version 6 address,
which may or may not be self-assigned by the computer
and is considered private.
It's a private IP address.
So this is our IP version 6 for the wireless card.
But if we go down to our ethernet card,
we'll see two addresses.
First of all a Link-local private IP address was assigned,
also on fe80.
But here we have the address that we did,
and you can see it's truncated,
so you can see this a little bit better here.
This, anything that starts with 2001
is gonna be a public IPv6 address.
So, you know, normally you wouldn't run that on your laptop,
but I'm showing this for demonstrative purposes
to show something that you would see,
for say, a server.
A server might run with this type of address
and it would be a public address or internet-facing address
that anyone around the world could access.
So there we have some IP version 6 for you.
That's about it for this sub lesson.
You should go and check this stuff out
on your system as always.
Check out whether or not you have
any IP version 6 addresses,
and take a look in the IP property sheet,
and also in the command line.