General Question about IPV6 browsing IPV4 web site

[tbergman]

This is probably pretty basic but I'm new to IPV6 and am having a hard time getting straight answers from our infrastructure provider.

If I have a Web Site running on IIS or Apache, and no specific enablement of IPV6 has been done, what happens when someone with an IPV6 IP address browses my site? In particular, I'm wondering what will be in the REMOTE_ADDR variable that we use for various logging and tracking purposes?

Thanks,

Tom

[cholzhauer]

If your site doesn't have an IPv6 address assigned to it, the person viewing it will view your site over their IPv4 address, the same way as they always have.

[tbergman]

I guess I must be confused. I've been assuming, that at some point, someone with an IPV6 address will only have an IPV6 address. After all, isn't the whole pupose that we're running out of addresses?

Will users with only IPV6 addresses be unable to use web sites that don't have an IPV6 address?

Thanks,

Tom

[cholzhauer]

someone with an IPV6 address will only have an IPV6 address

That's the end goal; obviously that's quite a few years away.

Will users with only IPV6 addresses be unable to use web sites that don't have an IPV6 address?

That's that challenge and something that many people have been trying to find a work around for.  As you state it, you're correct, if I only have an IPv6 address, I can only access an IPv6 enabled site.  There are multiple transition technologies out there..take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_transition_mechanisms for more info

[mtindle]

Will users with only IPV6 addresses be unable to use web sites that don't have an IPV6 address?

There are already some devices out there (admittedly a limited number, but they're there) that only have IPv6 addresses.  They usually use DNS64/NAT64 which provides the transition mechanism.  To your logs, they will not look any different than a normally NAT'ed connection so without any other means of detecting, you won't know that they're actually IPv6 users. 

However, DNS64 obviously breaks down if there are any IPv4 address literals used in the site.  Even if you're not planning on enabling IPv6 soon (of course everyone here would say you should :) ,) at least make sure your site uses names for all of it's links. 

[kriteknetworks]

tbergman: remember, just because we're running out of ipv4 addresses doesn't mean ipv4 itself is going away any time soon.