he old IPv4 protocol supports 4,3 billion addresses for the world wide web. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to deal with the long-anticipated IPv4 address exhaustion, published in December 1988. The new Internet Protocol IPv6 supports 340 sextillion IP addresses, that is the 2^96 times IPv4 range.
IPv6 design
The difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is the notation. IPv4 addresses are written in four blocks with eight bit per block, like 127.0.0.1
IPv6 addresses are written in eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons, for example:
2001:4ba0:fff1:0001:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
Leading zeroes within a 16-bit value may be omitted. For example, the address:
2001:4ba0:fff1:0001:0000:8a2e:0070:7344 may be written as
2001:4ba0:fff1:1:0:8a2e:70:7344
A single occurence of consecutive groups of zeroes within an address may be replaced by a double colon. For example 2001:4ba0:fff1:1:0:8a2e:370:7334 becomes 2001:4ba0:fff1:1::8a2e:370:7334.
IPv6 as a webaddress
IPv6 addresses are written in squared brackets to seperate the port definition from your IPv6 address. IPv6 addresses are written in squared brackets to seperate the port definition from your IPv6 address.
IPv6 webaddress: http://[2001:4ba0:fff1:0001:1319:8a2e:0370:7344]/
IPv6 webaddress with port definition: http://[2001:4ba0:fff1:0001:1319:8a2e:0370:7344]:8080/
