We could also have bumped 255.255.255.255 to 999.999.999.999 = 1 trillion IP addresses, easy-to-remember and backward compatibility with legacy devices.
Modern clients and servers get IP addresses in these new whole IP ranges and can communicate together.
Relatively easy to adapt the code of modern software also since it's about removing a restriction from a client-perspective.
Load-balancers and legacy clients use IP addresses from the old pool.
If you have Windows XP you can communicate only to legacy IPv4 (in practice only loadbalancers from Cloudflare, GCP, AWS and co) and your other legacy stuff.
Others happily communicate together.
But no, we got this wonderful IPv6.
Sad because it was really doable, theoretical maximum below 512 GB of memory for routers to store the whole routing table, it's manageable, versus the 2.176×10^22 exabytes (!) of IPv6.
dbdoskey|1 year ago
rvnx|1 year ago
Modern clients and servers get IP addresses in these new whole IP ranges and can communicate together.
Relatively easy to adapt the code of modern software also since it's about removing a restriction from a client-perspective.
Load-balancers and legacy clients use IP addresses from the old pool.
If you have Windows XP you can communicate only to legacy IPv4 (in practice only loadbalancers from Cloudflare, GCP, AWS and co) and your other legacy stuff. Others happily communicate together.
But no, we got this wonderful IPv6.
Sad because it was really doable, theoretical maximum below 512 GB of memory for routers to store the whole routing table, it's manageable, versus the 2.176×10^22 exabytes (!) of IPv6.
chippiewill|1 year ago