hi, the old UK reverse name notation actually comes from some sensible ideas - firstly from the big-endian processing methods - but also the most important part of the address comes first - ideal for global routing decisions early. who cares about the actual hostname , get to the actual TLD ;-) anyway, a little unfair as that decision was made before the Internet domain standard was agreed/established. hey, competing systems...one of them usually wins. in this case the other one did ;-) as for IPv6, the topic of this thread. having done campus IPv6 deployments, working out addressing schemes, sorting out kit upgrades (and broken by many 'oh, IPv6 is in a future release' or 'its on our roadmap' vendor promises) a few things. it gives us native end to end on a network that is now too big to handle that with IPv4 - NAT etc causing all kinds of new things to be cooked up to ensure things dont break. deploying it is trivial-ish (these days) - you have so much choice...and eventually decent routers doing SLAAC will finally be able to serve other details such as DNS/time/etc via SLAAC - servers? give them static addresses...simple ones that dont populate all the last half... that gets me on to my small annoyance... /64 bit subnet masks for local networks. really? ALL of that address space and then throw such a large range away on subnets commonly populated with no more than a couple of hundred clients...maybe a few thousand at worst. what a mistake. I come from a background where we had IPv4/DECNET/AppleTalk/IPX all around the place - to be honest, 2 fairly simply IP protocols being handled/routed has never kept me up at night and I enjoyed many times of cleaning things up and getting people to realise what access their systems needed...a quick refresh of access rules (on hosts and in network kit) and monitoring ('you monitor that service on its IPV4...why not IPv6' was said way too many times) address format? at least you can put :c01d:c0ff:ee and dead:beef etc in your addresses... as others have said, IPv4 is only a number in a superficial sense (who HASNT been burnt by an engineer putting a few 0's into IP address boxes on kit that forces all fields to be populated? we had A6 and AAAA mess, things took a while to iron out and just like BSD dying, IPv6 deployment (and DNSSEC!) just really hasnt been 'completed' yet. but thats okay, because I'm still curious why the US techies didnt just bite the bullet and got for IPv8 ;-) alan