New millennium bug ahead

This may have seemed like a lot in the 1980s when there were some 200 users per (mainframe) computer, but it’s a ridiculously small number for what is to come.

“Within the coming decade we will move towards a ratio in the order of 200 devices per person,” says Dr Jos Vrancken, an internet protocol expert at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. “Not only mobile phones, PDAs and desktop PCs but virtually any appliance will contain computing and (wireless) communication devices: from cars, vacuum cleaners, to refrigerators and clothes. All of these will need an identification.”

Luckily there is a solution at hand: IPv6, which was designed as early as 1994 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to succeed its predecessor IPv4. Version 6 uses a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. The new system supports a mind boggling 2128 addresses. Vrancken: “It allows you to give every grain of sand on earth its own IP address.”

According to Vrancken, the IETF has been trying in vain for years to persuade countries and big companies to migrate to IPv6. “These people are nerds; they thought they could just agree on a moment in time at which everyone would change system simultaneously, thus avoiding any compatibility problems.”
For individual citizens, moving from one system to the other may not be a big deal – routers are now being adapted worldwide to work with both systems – but when companies shift from IPv4 to IPv6 they have to adapt all their proprietary applications that communicate over the internet to the new system. “For this reason companies like banks which use thousands of programs to manage bank accounts, are not eager to use IPv6,” says Vrancken. He compares the problem they face to that of the year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K or millennium bug.

Companies have therefore been looking for alternatives. “The main alternative is a network address translation (NAT) that allows the internet to grow a thousand times bigger. With that technique we can continue using IPv4 for the next two to three decades.”

The trick is in essence very simple: behind a so-called NAT-router you can link thousands of computers with private IP addresses, which together form a local area network, to a single public IP-address.
In spite of this alternative, some countries, like China and India, have started shifting to IPv6. And in de Volkskrant, Erik Huizer, the chairman of the Dutch Taskforce IPv6, says that telecom company KPN is planning to adapt all of its customers’ modems.

According to Vrancken however, the end of IPv4 isn’t near. “I think both systems will coexist for a long time. And during this coexistence companies that use many internet applications might be confronted with quite some bugs and communication problems.”

Bedroefd en geschokt delen wij u mede dat woensdag 6 januari 2010 collega Frank de Josselin de Jong na een kort ziekbed is overleden.
Frank de Josselin de Jong was sinds 2005 werkzaam als universitair docent bij de leerstoel stedebouwkundig ontwerpen (afdeling urbanism), waar hij zich vooral richtte op het ontwerp van de openbare ruimte. Eerder werkte hij vanuit de Universiteit van Wageningen al samen met de faculteit Bouwkunde in een interdisciplinaire afstudeerstudio.
Frank de Josselin de Jong was een toegewijde, enthousiasmerende en energieke collega, die op voorbeeldige wijze onderzoek en onderwijs en wetenschap en praktijk met elkaar wist te verbinden. Frank de Josselin de Jong was onder studenten bovendien een zeer geliefde docent.
We zijn ontsteld door het plotselinge verlies van deze fijne en inspirerende collega.
Er zal in besloten kring afscheid worden genomen van Frank. De komende twee weken ligt er op het secretariaat van Urbanism een schetsboek waarin studenten en medewerkers een persoonlijke boodschap kunnen achterlaten. Dit schetsboek zal aan de echtgenote en kinderen van Frank worden overhandigd.

Ir. Wytze Patijn, decaan faculteit bouwkunde.