Supporting IPv6

• IP address size increased to 128 bits, from 32 bits in IPv4, allowing everything to have a globally routable IP, and eliminating the need for NAT. It is also the answer to IPv4 address space exhaustion.
• reduce the size of the global routing tables by improving aggregation: the abundancy of IP address space allows for reserving a contiguous block of addresses for an ISP for it's future expansion, so where an ISP would need many v4 netblocks as it grows, it only needs one or a few v6 netblocks.
• eliminated the header checksum. in ipv4, each router had to recalculate the header checksum because the TTL (hopcount) changes on each hop.
• routers no longer fragment packets. the minimum MTU has been increased from 576 to 1280.
• standardize the subnet prefix length and allow for stateless autoconfiguration to simplify network management

an IPv6 address is notated as 8 hexadecimal 16 bits words (number between 0 and ffff), separated by colons, and the longest run of zero words can be reduced to "::"; an example would be: 2001:db8:1:23::456

I made the 88x31 button after not finding something like it in a brief search, with the intention of showing to others that one is "for" ipv6, and puts effort into supporting it technically. You can use the button image for similar purposes, without my permission, however, the turtle is from the KAME project, copyright status is unclear, and i will stop using it on request from the owners.

my goals met to support ipv6:

• IPv6 support and acceptable internet connectivity on servers - each server (at a different provider) has native connectivity
• ipv6 glue (now directly on bircd.org domain)
• IPv6 support for all offered services (HTTP, FTP, DNS, MX, NTP, etc)
• ipv6 support and internet connectivity on home network. connectivity is native.
• released/publicly available software with IPv6 support: beware sntp, lcore, beware ircd, beware irc services (CVS), bgb gameboy emulator

link with both ipv4 and ipv6
link with only ipv4
link with only ipv6