Peter writes:
> With all the talk about IPv6 in the news, is there any hope of IPv6
> networking on the HP3000...ever?

I suspect the answer is almost certainly "no", but I don't expect that to
ever really become a problem.  Lots of things in the world are never going
to support IPv6 but are going to remain in use for a long time.

I suspect there will be gateways that make IPv4 and IPv6 interoperate in a
completely transparent manner, something like the way that NAT works today.

When an IPv4 client like your 3000 wants to talk to an IPv6 device, it will
do a DNS lookup on the IPv6 system's host name and some "gateway" will see
the DNS request and response and discover that the requested system has an
address that can't be represented as an IPv4 address, so it will allocate a
temporary private IPv4 address and change the DNS reply to return that to
the IPv4 client.  When the client subsequently asks to establish a
connection to this dynamically allocated address, the same gateway will
translate the addressing back and forth between IPv4 and IPv6 as the packets
cross between networks.  Again, this would be very similar to the way NAT
works today.

But this is mostly speculation on my part.  IPv6 may very well define other
specific mechanisms for interoperability with IPv4.

G.

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