Week 5 Midterm: What is IPv6?

What is IPv6 and what does it do? When I think of the internet and its components, I think of a cluster of streets and neighborhoods. And every house that resides on those streets needs to have an address. IPv6 is much like each one of those distinct street addresses with maybe some slight differences. “Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a network layer protocol that enables data communications over a packet switched network. Packet switching involves the sending and receiving of data in packets between two nodes in a network.”(http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-v6)

Also known as the backbone to the internet IPv6 is the newest version of the protocol. It is actually not widely used yet today and industry professionals are just now starting to get concerned about the limited number of distinct IP addresses that are still available. Before IPv6 and what we use more commonly today is IPv4. You might say “hey what about IPv5, what happened to that standard?”  IPv5 ended up being implemented by a lot of private industry like Apple, IBM and NeXT. Another reason that the industry is moving to IPv6 is it increased the number of bytes used in addressing from 4 bytes to 16 bytes. That can and will increase the available number of IP addresses for people and organizations to use. With all of the new devices and appliances now coming out on the market like smart phones, video game consoles, and new internet TVs the need for more distinct IP addresses is greater than ever. One bad thing to note about this unfortunate circumstance is that a lot of the internet’s routers and switches in both the home and throughout the rest of the web will need to be updated.

Week 5 Midterm: What is the octet?

When we talk about the word “Octet” it actually has several meanings. Of which there are octets in music, engineering and chemistry. But the one that I am talking about pertains to computing. The word’s root “octo” means eight. There are eight bits inside of an octet. So in a way you could say that an octet is the same as 8-bit and if you think about it a megabyte is also called a mega-octet. But the difference between a byte and octet is the number of digits in an octet is 8.“Computer networking standards almost exclusively use "octet". It is prominently used in Request for Comments (RFCs) published by the Internet Engineering Task Force.” (http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/2060979) An octet commonly is used in a numeric value form, although it can be used in a variety of ways like hexadecimal, decimal, and other number systems. It can also be used as a string which uses only letters instead of numbers.“The OCTET STRING type is used to specify octets of binary or textual information. There is no limit to the maximum number of octets in a value of this type specified in SMI v1.”( http://www.webnms.com/net-snmp/help/developing_management_applications/datatypes/smi_datatypes/octetstring_datatype.html) Octets are use in across the internet and even on your home network. “Octets most commonly refers to any of the four bytes of an IPv4 address. In dotted-decimal notation, an IP address appears as follows - [ octet ] . [ octet ] . [ octet ] . [ octet ] “ (http://compnetworking.about.com/od/workingwithipaddresses/g/bldef_octet.htm) Each one of the octet in a IP address should and do add up to a total of 256, that being a number anywhere between 0 and 255. So as you can see this complicated use of a combination of numbers can provide many different possibilities.
You can actually identify, based upon the first or the last octet whether it represents a “Net” or a “Host/Node”. A “Net” is always contained in the first octete while a “Node/Host” is always contained in the last. So just by looking at computer or a device on the internet or network we kind of can tell what type of a system it is and what it does. As you can see this important when looking at “Class A” networks. “In the “classful” IP addressing scheme, a Class A network contains addresses for about 16 million network interfaces; a Class B about 65,000; and a Class C, 254.” (http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_IPAddressClassABandCNetworkandHostCapacities.htm)
If we take a look at other aspects of computing we can see pretty much the same thing, for instance, file compression. One popular form of file compression is MIME attachment.“A MIME attachment with the content type "application/octet-stream" is a binary file. Typically, it will be an application or a document that must be opened in an application, such as a spreadsheet or word processor.”( http://kb.iu.edu/data/agtj.html) In order for file compression to work both the sender and the receiver must use the same type of compression. The algorithms on both ends have to be the same meaning each octet in the algorithms should line up.