"Programmers can't get IPv6 thus that is why they do not have IPv6 in their applications"....

david peahi davidpeahi at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 18:30:50 UTC 2012


Many years ago the standard books on application network programming were
based on C language. Books such as "Adventures in UNIX Network
Programming", and Professor Comer's "Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol 3"
detailed how to write C programs using BSD sockets where binding to a
socket brought the program up in listening mode on an 2 tuple IP v4 IP
address/TCP well known port. Once the program opened and bound to a socket
"netstat -n" would show that program to be "listening" on the 2-tuple.

Do today's programmers still use basic BSD socket programming? Is there an
equivalent set of called procedures for IPv6 network application
programming?

On the practical side: Have all programmers created a 128 bit field to
store the IPv6 address, where IPv4 programs use a 32 bit field to store the
IP address? This would seem to be similar to the year 2000 case where
almost all programs required auditing to see if they took into account
dates after 1999.

David

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:07 PM, Jeroen Massar <jeroen at unfix.org> wrote:

> On 2012-11-27 20:21, mike wrote:
> > On 11/26/12 9:32 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> >>
> >> The main problem with IPv6 only is that most app developers (most
> >> programmers totally) do not really have access to this, so no testing
> >> is being done.
> >>
> > This is a point that is probably more significant than is
> > appreciated. If the app, IT, and networking ecosystem don't even have
> > access to ipv6 to play around with, you can be guaranteed that they
> > are going to be hesitant about lighting v6 up in real life.
>
> I cannot be saf for the people who claim to be programmers who do things
> with networking and who do not care to follow the heavy hints that they
> have been getting for at least the last 10 years that their applications
> need to start supporting IPv6. Especially as APIs like getaddrinfo()
> make it really easy to do so.
>
> The following excellent article by our beloved true IPv6 Samuarai Itojun
> is from 1998: http://www.kame.net/newsletter/19980604/
>
> Thus it is not like the information is not out there either.
>
> As for actually getting IPv6 at home or at work, there are so many ways
> to get that, thus not having it is a completely ridiculous excuse.
> (It might not be native, so wh00p, you can test fine also on a local
> link in the extreme case)
>
> Remember that silly thing called the 6bone and what the purpose of that
> was back then, indeed, for getting connectivity to the people so that
> they could fix their code and that ran from 1996 till 2006, 10 years
> where one could have fixed up those apps that was already 6 years ago
> again.
>
> As such, if an application does not do proper IPv6 today the people in
> charge of the thing simply did not care...
>
> Greets,
>  Jeroen
>   who proudly has been providing IPv6 connectivity and IPv6 patches for
>   over more than a decade...
>
>
>



More information about the NANOG mailing list