Wakanda’s ready for IPv6!

Today is IPv6 day (http://www.worldipv6launch.org/).

And guess what? Wakanda Server supports IPv6, in its development branch. We are very excited about this feature. It’s the result of a lot of hard work by our developers in charge of the low-level parts of the network layer, in the C++ code. And now it's ready for D-Day!

Just a quick reminder about IPv4/IPv6:

You may know that most of IP addresses in the world are currently IPv4 addresses. This means the address is coded with 32 bits, in 4 bytes. In "123.456.789.012" each set of numbers is a byte, each value is in the range of 0-255. At the end, there are about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses available since the protocol was invented and began to be used, way back in the 1980s.

But in the last 30 years, the internet has become something normal, beyond the realm of geeks. Omnipresent, even. And just about everybody can (and wants to) have their own Web site. The problem is, we’re about to reach the limit of available IP addresses.


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

The IPv6 protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6) fixes this problem. An IPv6 address is coded in 128 bits. Which allows 2128 (3.4 x 1038) addresses. The good news is that the people in charge of addresses say everything will be fine. 96 More Bits, No Magic is a kind a baseline for this move. Using such long addresses has three main benefits: Easier address allocation, efficient route aggregation, and special addressing features. A cool side-effect of the new protocol is that we could even cover every person on the planet with several IP addresses!

As of today, we have added IPv6 support in Wakanda’s development branch. Enjoy!