VirgoBrain’s Vision of the World

Oct

13th

About IPV4, IPV6 and future hostnames

Files under WWW | Leave a Comment | 13 Saturday October 2007

In this post I shall talk about IPV4 and IPV6 addresses and the respective hostnames for both standards.

IPV4

The current IPV4 standard allows the allocation of a total of 2³²= 4,294,967,296 billion addresses.

According to the latest internet census study peformed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute ISI, a total of 2.8 billion addresses have been probed with ICMP ping messages. In this study it is stated that from a total of 4.29 billion IPV4 addresses, a total of 73% has been allocated and 1.16 billion addresses are reserved for future use. On the other hand the unallocated IPV4 address pool is predicted to be exhausted by the year 2010/2011 (IPV4 Address Report).

IPV6

Nevertheless the new IPV6 standard will allow 2¹²⁸ addresses or 5.0788×10²⁸ addresses for each of the 6.7 billion Earth inhabitants.

Future IPV6 addresses will have the following format:

instead of having 4 groups of 4 decimal digit addresses as in IPV4 (i.e www.wordpress.org 72.233.56.138) they have 8 groups of four hexadecimal digits (i.e. 2010:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344 )

Internet hostnames

Regarding internet hostnames we do not have the exhaustion problem as compared to the total IPV4 address pool.

hostnames can contain up-to a maximum of 255 characters. hostnames are ASCII based, not being UNICODE compliant although some anecdotical exceptions are allowed such as the Spanish ñ character for Spanish speaking domains.

Each character can be either:

A plain ASCII letter: ‘a’ to ‘z’ (case insensitive), that is 26 letters and/or
‘0′ to ‘9′ decimal digits, that is 10 digits and
the ‘-’ hyphen character

Therefore it adds up a total of 37 ASCII-based options for each of the 255 characters:

255³⁷=1.1 e⁸⁹ combinations or almost infinite possibilities (although from a semantic or language perspective a lot of them will be non-sensical for the human being)

In other words we do not have a problem regarding availibility of hostnames according to the current standard mapped to the almost unlimited future IPV6 address pool.

hostnames can be divided by periods, for instance we can specify a fully qualified domain name such as:

myHost.myDomain.myTopLevelDomain (i.e virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org) or
subdomain.myDomain.myTopLevelDomain (i.e. wordpress.carlosfenguix.org)

Future hostnames

So Why not individuals in the future have their own personal hostnames and/or personal IPV6 addresses?

Probably we can suggest several straight-forward possibilities for referencing the hostnames of single individuals:

alias.myHost.myDomain.myTld:
- Example: cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org or
role.alias.myHost.myDomain.myTld:
- - Examples: research.cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org or
  - personal.cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org

What would be interesting is to have somehow UNICODE compliant hostnames for international languages in the future and alias for translated hostnames. For instance a chinese speaking person could have a personal hostname defined in chinese and a series of multiple alias representing the respective translations in different languages.

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