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Not Working IPv4
By Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
As some of you may have noticed a new category of nodes was added to
the list of IPv6 nodes as published weekly here in the Snooze. The new
category is NWI4. It stands for "Not Working IPv4".
Until about a month ago I did not even know they existed but thanks to
Dmitry Protasoff I became aware that there are nodes that advertise
dual stack capability but that are only reachable via IPv6. *1) They
are not reachable via IPv4 despite the fact that the hostname in the
nodelist resolves to both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address.
What is remarkable is not really the fact that these nodes exist, an
error can easily occur, but that they apparently can exist for quite
some time before the sysops concerned become aware of it and take
steps to correct it by fixing the problem with IPv4 or by removing the
A record from the DNS and adding the INO4 flag to the nodelist. But
nothing like that has happened yet. 3:770/1 for example has been
unreachable via IPv4 for almost two months now. That is not just an
obscure end node, it is a busy hub with many links in Fidonet and some othernets. Nevertheless nobody noticed or so it seems.
What does that tell us other than that many systems seem to run on (semi)autopilot? Well, I say that it also shows that the era of IPv4
dominance is coming to an end. IPv6 is the future but IPv4 is still indispensable and will be with us for decades to come has been the
word since the turn of the millennium. But if dual stack systems can
continue to run for months with broken IPv4 and nobody noticing, by
now IPv4 would seem to not be all that indispensable anymore I'd say.
Earlier this week Google's statistics on global IPv6 adoption peaked
above 50% for the first time in IPv6 history. *2) So maybe we are
finally getting somewhere and the era of IPv6 dominance and the phase
out of IPv4 has begun.
This article was written without the use of AI.
References:
1)
https://nodelist.fidonet.cc/analytics/ipv6-only
2)
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.htm
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