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Oct 2, 2013, 07:05 AM
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I think for the following 30 years we will be having dual stack dominating the Internet, meaning most people will be on both IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 support is only essential for those people that don't have an IPv4 address.


Implementing IPv6 with IPv4 mapped addresses is a simple way to allow dual stack (IPv4- and IPv6-enabled) clients to connect to IPv4 servers (dual stack servers to accept IPv4-only clients) without us developers having to fiddle with the different protocols, provided that their system supports the IPv4 mapped addresses feature so that somewhere down the line the IPv6 packets we would produce would be translated into IPv4 packets, and IPv4 packets that we receive are translated into IPv6 packets, automatically. Note that IPv4-only clients will not be able to join IPv6-only servers since they have no way of addressing that server. Similarly, IPv4-only servers are unable to accept IPv6-only clients.

In tabular form:
 IPv4 serverIPv6 serverDual stack server
IPv4 clientWorks currently via IPv4;
Would work via mapped addresses
ImpossibleWorks currently via IPv4;
Would work via mapped address
IPv6 clientImpossibleWould work via IPv6Would work via IPv6
Dual stack clientWorks currently via IPv4;
Would work via mapped address
Would work via IPv6Works currently via IPv4;
Would work via IPv6


When (or if?) we come to this, we'd probably want to consult RFC 4038 for further advice.
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Last edited by Jerrythabest; Oct 2, 2013 at 07:22 AM.