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Earth could maintain their own dedicated range of IP addresses, and that range could be as large as the entire address space available for the Internet under IPv4!

Because any new IP addressing scheme will eventually affect every computer on the Internet, the details must be well established and migration paths must be clearly defined. It would not be feasible to suddenly switch addressing schemes and have millions of hosts unable to communicate with each other. IPv6 is currently undergoing testing, and some Web sites are not supporting the standard. Eventually, however, the Internet s entire IP infrastructure will migrate to IPv6. IPv6 is provided in Windows XP mainly for software developers. You can install IPv6 and use it for testing and application development purposes. However, it should be noted that technical support for IPv6 as a production protocol is not provided, so you ll have to experiment with it at your own risk.

The following steps will help you install the developer preview IPv6 protocol stack on your computer. Once installed, the IPv6 protocol stack will not appear in the Properties dialog box for any network interface. Not many Web sites or networks currently support IPv6 connections, but the number is growing rapidly. To install IPv6 on Windows XP, follow these steps:

1 Log on to the computer using an account with administrative privileges. 2 From the Start menu click Run.

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3 Type cmd in the text box that appears. 4 In the window that opens, type the command ipv6 install and press Enter. If

uninstall instead. Uninstalling will take a few more seconds and will require that you restart the machine.

Once the IPv6 protocol stack is installed on a Windows XP computer, it is possible to attach that computer to the publicly accessible IPv6 backbone. For details about connecting to this developmental IPv6 backbone, visit www.6bone.com. For additional information about the use of IPv6 and Windows XP as well as the available IPv6 tools, be sure to check the Microsoft Web site link that provides IPv6 information at www.microsoft.com/ipv6.

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Although the TCP/IP protocol suite is by far the most ubiquitous networking protocol suite, there are other network protocols. The remainder of this chapter examines protocols that come into play when working in a mixed operating system environment. Keep in mind that if you are on a pure Windows network, you do not need to use any other protocols besides TCP/IP. In fact, you might even be working in a mixed network that only uses TCP/IP because many other operating systems also take advantage of all that TCP/IP has to offer.

This chapter explores the protocol side of mixed networks. However, you can learn more about Windows XP s interoperability with other networks in 18, Interconnectivity with Other Systems.

Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX)

The IPX protocol was developed by Novell, Inc. for its NetWare family of operating systems. At one point in the past, NetWare was the most widely distributed server platform in use. NetWare s market share has somewhat diminished since then, but it is still possible that Windows and NetWare might be required to coexist for some time. With newer versions of NetWare, the support for TCP/IP has greatly improved. Regardless, it is still very likely that if NetWare is present, support for IPX will be useful if not required.

IPX, like IP, requires that all hosts have unique addresses. IPX addresses are 80 bits in length and include a network portion and a node portion. In addition to a node and network portion, there is a component known as the socket number. All IPX addresses