IPv4's 32-bit addressing scheme, which created about 4.3 billion addresses, ran dry years ago, with North America's allocation exhausted in 2015. ISPs have papered over the shortage using carrier-grade NAT, which shares public addresses among groups of customers but can break peer-to-peer connections like online gaming. IPv6, standardized in 1995 with 340 undecillion possible addresses, is meant to solve this permanently but currently coexists with IPv4 rather than replacing it, with Google measuring global IPv6 usage at just under 51 percent.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-25
FreeDNS, the dynamic and static DNS hosting platform run by Afraid.org, lists 7,161,451 registered members, 13,834,565 DNS records and 1,276,001 zones on its site. The service offers free and premium subdomain, domain and reverse IPv6 DNS hosting, along with a shared registry of 23,236 domains that users can attach their own hostnames to.
freedns.afraid.org
· 2026-10-24
A networking blog post describes hands-on testing of RFC8950, a BGP extension that allows IPv4 routes to be advertised with IPv6 next-hops over IPv6-only sessions. The post notes the standard is already supported in Juniper JunOS, Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS, Mikrotik, Huawei, BIRD and FRR, and includes a demo lab setup to illustrate it.
anuragbhatia.com
· 2026-10-16
Dutch student network group SNT ran 'SNTPings,' a collaborative pixel-art event where participants sent IPv6 ping packets encoding coordinates and color values to draw on a shared 4K canvas. The event ran from October 9 through October 11, coinciding with the launch of SURFnet Infinity, and used a 1.6Tbps receiver hosted at Nikhef with uplinks from Nikhef and SURF.
pings.utwente.io
· 2026-10-10
A FreeBSD contributor has implemented GRAND (Gratuitous Neighbour Advertisement), a mechanism that addresses an asymmetry in IPv6 Neighbour Discovery where a host can reach its router immediately but the router may not yet know how to reach the host. Under GRAND, the host proactively announces its new IPv6 address so the router already holds a Neighbour Cache entry before any return traffic arrives.
labs.ripe.net
· 2026-09-15
NASA Lewis Research Center's Satellite Networks and Architectures Branch relies almost entirely on NetBSD to test proposed TCP protocol changes, including selective-acknowledgement retransmission and larger initial windows, for both satellite and terrestrial links. Separately, the KAME project used NetBSD as the base for implementing IPv6 and IPsec, with its stack merged into NetBSD-current in June 1999, while Germany's Institute for Media Communication built network access control tools on the OS.
netbsd.org
· 2026-09-06
A programming-focused post lists dozens of widely believed but often incorrect assumptions about local area networks, covering NAT behavior, MAC address uniqueness, DHCP configuration, protocol assumptions, and reachability between devices on the same subnet. The list format deliberately states each falsehood as if true, following the popular 'Falsehoods Programmers Believe' meme style used for other technical domains.
dreamstation.systems
· 2026-09-05
GoKawiil