CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ipv6ipv4
gCoh
gCoh

Reputation: 3089

ip v6 and ip v4 requests and trasitions

I'm trying to understand the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

My main question is, what if a machine using IPv6 makes a request to IPv4 service.

Can it handle it? Can a machine have both IPv6 and IPv4?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 135

Answers (1)

kasperd
kasperd

Reputation: 2042

They are two separate protocols running independently of each other. Each packet is marked with a version number such that IPv4 and IPv6 can share the same physical link.

A machine can run both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time, and that is the recommended configuration which all networks should have been upgraded to before IPv4 addresses ran out early 2011. Most ISPs have decided to ignore this and keep running IPv4-only providing their customers no access to IPv6. If you are a customer of such an ISP, you can get yourself a tunnel, a dual stack VPS, or both in order to get some experience with IPv6.

Translation between IPv4 and IPv6 is possible. At least one ISP have publicly stated that they will run new deployments as IPv6-only and use NAT64 to translate between the two such that their customers running IPv6-only can still reach IPv4-only servers. Other translation methods exists, but are not widespread.

Upvotes: 3

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