(2010-10-18) Ipv4 Addresses Almost Gone

IP-v4 addresses are almost gone. Home Server issue?

Any transition to IP-v6 could get ugly. All IPv6 systems support stateless autoconfig; MsWindows Vista and 7 support DHCP-v6, but Windows XP and MacOs X don't; on open source OSes a DHCPv6 client can usually be installed if one doesn't come with the distribution; and Vista and 7 also use the temporary, random number-derived addresses by default, whereas other OSes don't... Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has a serious bug in its DNS code that makes it ignore IPv6 in the DNS when there is a CNAME record involved, a case which is not uncommon. One year and four point updates later, the bug is still there... Architecturally, NAT is a bad thing. It breaks all kinds of assumptions built into protocols, so it can get in the way of applications. This is especially true for peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, but also VoIP (including Skype).