VPS = Virtual Private Server? (acronym isn't coming to mind).
Yes, Virtual Private Server. I'm just trying to stay young and in the loop.
They're pretty popular these days, partly because of the possibilities of a good price. If you just want to serve a few pages, set up a proxy in another country, and things like that, then it's a good way to go. As low as $3.95 per year will let you install your own OS, and configure to your heart's content. Check out
Lowenbox. Here is a
listing by price. Then head over to
Freenom and get a free domain name (.tk .ml .cf .ga) and you're good to serve pages for a year, and you're only out by four bucks. Of course, there's much more expensive ones if you want some real power.
I'm not doing anything IPv6 personally. Not really any reason to internally unless I want more than 16 million vintage systems on the network at a time it won't be an issue.
I'm guessing that IPv6 won't be of interest for vintage computers. I'm not sure what you'd do for some kind of translation. I'm assuming that nobody's got a v6 stack that will integrate with older software. As long as the internet in general is using v4, or ISP's will let it pass, then we're OK here. I NAT everyhing on my internal network so lots of addresses anyway.
Externally I think most vendors are doing IPv6 for internet facing routing but I rarely look at that interface and don't really follow the news on how far the transition has gone. I thought there was some requirement dates though that they wanted vendors to be using things by just to get the push. I don't know if they ever convinced certain companies to not own a class A IP range anymore though. I recall a list of a few like Ford and some others that for whatever reason owned a class A (as if they'd have 16 million systems on the public internet).
I think it's moving along nicely, but only a couple of the big ISPs are making it avilable to users. I've been pinging around (ping6) and not getting much response. I think it's a headache for any smaller ISP because their users may not be ready. There's still lots of routers thata don't support it. Any Linux or UNIX box has done it for a long time, and I read the MS-Windows is just fine as well so if the routers get replaced and the ISPs get up to speed then few consumers would notice.
It's interesting about the IPv4 addresses running out. It seems like there's still lots out there, but they're owned by companies. One of the VPS services I have gives me 2 IPv4 addresses. One woders how they can do that on a $5 a year service. (
RIJX) found out how a little company can do that. They lease the numbers from a larger company who has lots of them and who would rather monetise that holding than just sit on it. It's a bit like phone numbers in that regard. Actually, from them I got a more expensive plan ($10!) and the extra memory does give it some more snap, though I can't be sure if that's just the superior LA pipe.
I did run into an issue at work where our desktop firewall product had a rule to block IPv6 enabled but something also changed our desktops to ping localhost as IPv6 and potentially some other traffic. That broke some locally installed services for folks so I had to change that rule which was interesting.
There's a few web sites that are IPv6 only. I haven't found anything that really
needed it though. Google is up to speed, as one would expect.
Anyway, I'm just trying to figure out how users, like here, are doing with it. I posted a similar question on several very tehie forums, and got no response.
* Are people ignoring IPv6? At this jpoint it's actually not that easy and in fact a bit of a headache if you don't need to do it. If your ISP doesn't offer it via DHCP, or at all, then one has to go to a place like Hurricane Electric to get a tunnel and then figure out how to configure one's router to use that. I'm currently unable to get that working, so am just using 6to4 for now which is less than ideal and won't be good in the future.
* I did get a response in a forum which is dedicated to IPv6 - as would be expected.
