On looking at the various protocols in network communication, the most puzzling version numbering is with IPv4 to IPv6 without version 5, 3, 2 or 1. Most people believe that IPv5, 3, 2 or 1 were not even developed, but this is not true. This article aims to clarify the history of IP and answering potentially difficult about the version numbers.
When the internet was known as ARPANET – a US government research project, the TCP protocol had a lot more functionality than what we are now used to. The research scientists that developed TCP were designing it for not only host-level point-to-point transmission but also for encapsulation and routing across the ARPANET network. After the scientists realised that they were using the one protocol for too much work on the network, they decided to fork the encapsulation and routing to another protocol called the Internet Protocol, IP. But by this time, the researchers had done enough work on this protocol for it to be deemed in its third version, so was informally known as IPv3. After the full TCP/IP stack had been fully developed as we now know it, further work had been completed on IP and so was called IPv4.
Soon after this, IPv4 was standardised by the IETF. Many different scientists and professionals alike noted that IPv4 would not scale well as it was in the future, and so in the 1970s work on the next version of IP was started, the Internet Stream Protocol (ST). The ST protocol was designed to be the connection-oriented complement to IPv4 and used the same link-layer framing as IPv4. ST used the same addressing scheme as IP and was always intended to run concurrently with IPv4. The researchers were attempting to ue a connection-oriented IP so that real-time internet applications such as VoIP, multiplayer gaming etc. will have more latency garuantees and be generally more reliable than IPv4.
ST was considered a great advance at the time against IPv4, but at the same time as ST was being developed, so was IP next generation (IPng). IPng was developed in 1994 and was aware of the dwindling address space offered by both IPv4 and IPv5/ST, and so used a 128-bit addresses for destination and source which offers a much broader availability of addresses. The IPng protocol was therefore seen as future proof in the eyes of research scientists and the industry in terms of solving the IPv4 addressing problem, so IPng was adopted as the next defacto standard of IP. IPng was given the version number IPv6, as a direct future replacement for IPv4 in the RFC in 1996.
Post taken in part from CS revision Wiki at Microplop.com.
User is asked whether they would like to beat a record for the most casualties in a terrorist act.
The remaining free space on an iPod is reported to be greater than the actual size of the drive itself.
I really see the mark down in the price of guitar hero here...
During all of this recent global economic kerfuffle one of the more recent retail closures in the UK has been music and games retailer Zavvi. I went in today and took the above picture of their so called ‘Closing down sale’…
Well… after a little (make that a lot) tinkering and attempting to make Rails work on Mediatemple.net, I have decided to run all the way back home to WordPress for my blogging platform of choice!
No more Rails for blogging here at least, but that’s not to say I don’t really really enjoy programming in Rails, I just think that Wp has a lot more to offer than what I can cook-up in Rails with the time I have!
Yes revision has begun, and I had a novel and possibly unique idea in regards to a wiki – I could use it to formalise my revision work, by slowly adding my work up as a wiki.
Here’s the thing… I’ve been busy of late, very busy.Â
I have been looking frantically for ‘internships’ for my next University year. I spend a year in the computing industry working for a real company on a real project, earning real money and hopefully setting me up for my career after I leave Uni.
