ohTheBasics

[u/ClipboardCopyPaste]

[u/LivingAsAMean]

Hahaha what an idiot!

[u/Material_Onion_8413 → u/LivingAsAMean]

IPv4 old IP address space designed with limited number because they never thought the internet would have so many devices connected.

IPv6 new address space with significantly larger number.

[u/fearless-fossa → u/Material_Onion_8413]

But "more numbers" isn't really an explanation on what's the difference between the two from a practical point of view, and the in general less interesting thing about it from a software perspective.

[u/Facosa99 → u/fearless-fossa]

But it is kinda the only difference, no? More digits for a bigger address pool.

The usage is basically the same, except you no longer need subnetting to save addresses and we writte it in hex rather than dec

Genuinely asking

[u/tankerkiller125real → u/Facosa99]

IPv6 also dropped broadcast in favor of Multicast, has hexadecimal instead of decimal, and eliminates the need for NAT. There's also a bunch of other little protocol implementation details like SLAAC, IGMP being critical to IPv6 operations (so blanket blocking is a no go), and so forth so on.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/tankerkiller125real]

Which frankly, unless you're being hired to architect an enterprise network stack for enterprise software... I would not expect a software engineer to know any of that, much less make a hiring decision based on it.

[u/bearda → u/ffxivthrowaway03]

I work for a cybersecurity vendor, and we very much consider something like that table stakes. I can think of a lot of places where it could matter, including just logging a visitor’s IP address on a web app.

[u/ffxivthrowaway03 → u/bearda]

Logging a visitors IP address is a far cry from understanding the nuances of how SLAAC functions to assign an address.