Both threedeegrees and the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer SDK are now available. Haven’t tried them out yet (new baby) but I have been working through Understanding IPv6 during off moments. I’m very impressed with IPv6. It really rectifies the issues around internet addressing beyond just providing a huge number of addresses (2125 to be exact). In IPv6, interfaces typically have multiple addresses – an auto-configured link-local address, and a dynamically configured site-local and global address. IPv6 also provides a mechanism for neighbor discovery, which allows a node to determine what other devices (esp. routers) are on the local link. Many of these features are supported as add-ons to IPv4, but they aren’t very cleanly designed since they weren’t included in the original design.
One funny thing about IPv6 – the first 13 bits of an IPv6 address is called the Top Level Aggregator Identifier, or the TLA ID. I thought TLA stood for Three Letter Acronym! 😄
I did install the WinXP P2P SDK and poke around enough to notice it is C++ based. I wonder if the next version of the .NET Framework, with it’s built in IPv6 support, will get it’s own P2P SDK soon?