[TriLUG] Preparing Applications for IPv6

[Kevin Otte via TriLUG]

On Wednesday ARIN released a guide for software developers working with
networked applications.

https://www.arin.net/announcements/2015/20150708.html

(or if you want to skip the announcement and start reading:
https://www.arin.net/knowledge/preparing_apps_for_v6.pdf)

There was one comment on the Facebook IPv6 group by Paul Saab, a
Facebook engineer I think worth including:

'''
So this is a good start and I'm happy that people are starting to think
about this stuff. I worry that when you're talking about storage of IP
addresses to support both IPv4 and IPv6, I think normalization of all
addresses is extremely important and to treat all addresses as 16 bytes
and representing IPv4 addresses as V4MAPPED. By normalizing our data in
both binary and string format (represented as fully qualified and not
zero compressed), it simplifies all other logic in code.
'''

I think this is important because it shows that we need to think of IPv6
as the new normal, not this oddball thing. Or, as Geoff Huston put it at
NANOG 64 "Dual stack is not the goal. It's turning off IPv4."

Happy Friday!

-- Kevin