IPv6 enabled Bots / Server Farm

[Ocean10000]

I am currently making plans to move away from my current self hosting solution. I am doing a bit of research on IPv6 so I can update my bot blocking/management code to handle those address's properly, if I move to a provider that has enabled IPv6. Currently all my code handles is IPv4, and will choke on IPv6 address's.

I haven't found many recent threads on IPv6 issues, Bot, Server farms this year, so I am creating this thread to start putting this information in one spot for the time being.

[incrediBILL]

My servers don't support IPv6 so I'm still in ostrich mode on that topic. It was optional on my last server so I opted for IPv4 only ;)

But my next server will fully support IPv6 so I too and very interested in what bots are using IPv6 and hosting companies with those IPv6 ranges as well.

[Ocean10000]

Does Azure support IPv6? [azure.microsoft.com]

Microsoft has played a leading role in helping customers to smoothly transition from IPv4 to IPv6 for the past several years. To date, Microsoft has built IPv6 support into many of its products and solutions like Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Microsoft is committed to expanding the worldwide capabilities of the Internet through IPv6 and enabling a variety of valuable and exciting scenarios, including peer-to-peer and mobile applications. The foundational work to enable IPv6 in the Azure environment is well underway. However, we are unable to share a date when IPv6 support will be generally available at this time. For more information on IPv6 technologies and IPv6 support available in the Windows operating system today, see Microsoft’s IPv6 information site which includes business, technical, and developer resources: [technet.microsoft.com...]

[wilderness]

They've been multiple threads on the conversion from IPv6 to IPv4 and one thread even offered a conversion formula for the change.

Fortunately/Unfortunately, the IPv6 to IPv4 never seems to set an internet-wide implementation dates, thus most are still using IPv4.

[not2easy]

Lucky for you there was a discussion that may help point the way, almost a year ago here: [webmasterworld.com...] (We have some most helpful people in those discussions.)

I haven't implemented any of this yet, I don't know what my access logs would look like if they had IPv6 traffic anyway. I just keep watching what's going on and hopefully we'll figure it out by the time it is common.

[wilderness]

lucy gave a brief explanation in this 2013 thread [webmasterworld.com]

[Ocean10000]

Part 1:

Has anyone put together a list of IPv6 Address bots have used too date? Which bot used what range? etc..

Part 2:
Anyone have a list of service providers who support IPv6?

Part 3:
What issues have you guys ran into when using IPv6 or running dual stacks?

One of the issues I ran into was my code was setup to convert IPv4 address into a unsigned integer. IPv6 address will not fit in any integer currently available in dot.net so it blew up. So I had to rewrite most of my IP Address handling code now using System.Net.IPAddress [msdn.microsoft.com], which can either version with out a hickup. So the conversion back and forth isn't much of a problem. I had to rebuild the compare functions using the IPAddress objects instead of the unsigned integers.

[bhukkel]

I have IPv6 enabled for two years and i dont see any large botnet operating over IPv6. Of all IPs automatically blocked by my algo 0,29% is IPv6.

There is one difference in a blocking IPv6 strategy. For example every dedicated server at Hetzner or OVH gets a /64 subnet. Thats 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different IPs. So a simple blocking strategy like more then xx visits from a single IP and it gets blocked doesnt work.

For mysql users: change your IP field to varbinary(16) and you can store IPv4 and IPv6 address in the same field. Use the inet6_* functions instead of inet_* to translate IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.