For the last few days, we’ve been working on IPv6 support on our hosting platform. We got the routing working properly, but the control panel we use (H-Sphere) only supports IPv4 at the present time.

IPv6, for those unfamiliar with it, is a replacement for our current Internet addressing system. An IP address right now is a series of four numbers, separated by dots (for instance, thoughtbug.com is 74.174.201.76). This system only gives us a maximum of around four billion addresses, and even then, some of them can’t be used.

This is a lot, you might say. Actually, we’re set to run out in 2010. Meanwhile, IPv6 has 2^128 IP addresses, a number too big to type here. That’s why it’s so important to prepare to switch to IPv6. Thoughtbug will hopefully be able to provide IPv6 hosting to its clients, once we figure out how to make it work properly with H-Sphere. In fact, we already have an IPv6 tunnel through he.net, and the 2001:470:1f00:3686::/64 network block (ping to 2001:470:1f00:3686::1 and 2001:470:1f00:3686::d should work, but both are development systems).

As always, we’ll let you know when IPv6 (and other features) are available to our hosting customers.