Fixed IPv6 addresses not supported

Spenser

Active member
In the last months I see a growing number of users with IPv6 addresses. While testing I found that xf won't even save their ip address to the database, mostly because data type for ip addresses seems to be int(10) unsigned internally.

While full support for IPv6 is not yet necessary now, at least there should be a way to handle that addresses in postings for logging reasons.
IPv6 today is not as far away as it was last year so I consider this to be a bug now.
 
It was actually a conscious design decision. There was some IPv6 support in the early days, but there is a lot of challenge (and wasted memory actually) supporting both IPv6 and IPv4 in all of the IP-related functions that we have.

This likely will change in the future, though I really don't know when.
 
Here in Germany the major ISP will support IPv6 by the end of 2011.
I don't think that it will take too long to have IPv6 even with private internet connections.
 
BTW: from my point of view it would be enough to store IPv6 correctly in the database. Using it for all the different functions (blocking,...) isn't really necessary right now.
 
There is no need for two distinct columns "ipv4_address" and "ipv6_address" in the database. IPv4 addresses can be stored as "IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses

To put it another way: A subset of the IPv6 address-space has been reserved to represent IPv4 addresses. So you just need a single 16 byte "ipaddress" column. And I think that it does not make any noticable difference whether an IP address in the posts table requires 4 or 16 byte. Consider that every single text character requires (at least) 1 byte! Of course, IP addresses have to exist in the session table as well. But again, that's just 12 additional bytes per entry.
 
I guess it's not a matter of handling the ip addresses, it's a matter of making all background funktions compatible to new needs.
At least address handling is slightly different with IPv6.
As an example most ISP will give 64-bit-prefixes to their customers. Blocking a single address won't make any sense as every customer can use a 64bit-network just as he wants.
How addresses are handled in relation to the geographical location isn't clear at the moment, too.
 
I guess it's not a matter of handling the ip addresses, it's a matter of making all background funktions compatible to new needs.
At least address handling is slightly different with IPv6.
As an example most ISP will give 64-bit-prefixes to their customers. Blocking a single address won't make any sense as every customer can use a 64bit-network just as he wants.
How addresses are handled in relation to the geographical location isn't clear at the moment, too.
We have already "ipv6" in switzerland using 6rd (using swisscom as ISP).. So I would be happy to see an ipv6 support :D
 
I had my 1st successful spam bot pass all my security.... Using IP v6 address ...... Oh what fun :rolleyes:

Please update this in the next release please
 
cPanel bleeding edge builds now support v6.. This is going to lead to a lot of the proxies hosting on cheap VPS for throw away IPs very soon. At the very least, ability to ban v6 needs to happen soon.
I know of proxy list that already offer v6 IP's .... It's out there.
 
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