What’s Good About IPv6? More Addresses. Oct06

What’s Good About IPv6? More Addresses.

In Breakroom, WeBreakTech staffers staffers chat about the last couple of weeks in tech. What’s new? What’s broken? What are we working on? What makes us want to hurl things into traffic? Sarcasm, salty language, and strong opinions abound. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Trevor.Pott: So we could discuss the transition to IPv6, which is apparently what I need to do for a client this weekend. Josh.Folland:  F*ck IPv6. Trevor.Pott: Dude. Josh.Folland: I get that it’s a necessary evil and it’s got all kinds of great things, but I like remembering *.*.*.40 Katherine.Gorham: What great things? I thought the foot dragging about the move to IPv6 was because there WEREN’T great things. Just vulnerabilities and administrative headache. Trevor.Pott: There aren’t. But we have now reached the point where ISPs aren’t handing out IPv4 addresses to people in the North, and other not-major-urban-centers. If you aren’t on IPv6, you’re not going to be able to serve all customers anymore. And that is a big switch that I have only started to see in the past few months. Katherine.Gorham: Wait… IPv4 doesn’t talk to IPv6? Trevor.Pott: It does not. IPv4 is 32-bit addressing. It CAN’T talk to Ipv6, which is 128 bit addressing. It simply has no way to do so. In order to “transition” to Ipv6, you need to get IPv6 from your ISP (or ask Sixxs nicely for a tunnel and a subnet), then implement BOTH stacks. Katherine.Gorham: But most of the world is still IPv4. Surely someone thought up a workaround? Josh.Folland: …There is not an algorithm to translate it? I never thought they were entirely mutually exclusive. Trevor.Pott: No, there is no direct, supported workaround.  There are totally unsupported ways to do it, but in general it was decreed by the ivory tower gods 20 years...