Most web workers have probably heard that “the Internet is running out of addresses.” In response, The Internet Society, together with such major players as Facebook, has announced World IPv6 Day. What will this mean for web workers, businesses and individuals?
The Problem

A website address like gigaom.com is actually an easy-to-remember alias or nickname for a numeric address like 74.200.247.61. (GigaOM actually has several, to deal with the traffic that the website receives.) These addresses can be in the range 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Because some of the possible numbers are reserved, there are theoretically somewhat over 4 billion internet addresses available under this system, which is known as IPv4.

Unfortunately, it’s been known for some time that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses. By some measures, only 2 percent of the available addresses remain, and they will be exhausted in mid-February, in just over a month.

So the internet will need to move to IPv6 addresses, which will give us a bunch more possibilities: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 of them, in fact. There’s some great information available if you want details.
Getting Ready

A lot of the infrastructure of the internet will need to be updated in order to support IPv6, but very little of it has yet been deployed. It won’t be possible to make the transition to “native IPv6″ in the time available. Therefore, a number of short-term fixes are in the works, but the FCC, in a recent paper [PDF], calls them “kludges.”

Most users won’t see any immediate effects when the IPv4 addresses run out. But large site operators, like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, will be affected, so they have agreed to test their readiness for IPv6, or at least the short-term solutions being worked on today, on June 8. In the long term, major infrastructure upgrades will be needed. As the FCC paper says:

As for the rest of us, we probably won’t need to do anything in the near future. It will be up to our internet service providers to make the necessary changes to their systems. A few people may need to reconfigure routers and VPNs, and web hosts will need to add some new DNS records.