IPv6 - Now with Nethack

Oil. Uranium. Coal.

There are many limited resources in the world, but with all our gadgetry we have now created a new one - IPv4 addresses.

Our numeric friends which help all our technology communicate are in fact a rapidly disappearing commodity - less than 3% remain to be allocated, with an estimated depletion between June and December this year.

Of course you may already have heard that - the cries of IPv4 end-times have rung for some time. People have been content to ignore them as long as the status quo works, even though we have a perfectly suitable alternative that we really ought to start using. That is, IPv6.

IPv4 was invented many years ago, before the potential of the modern internet was realized. As such, IPv6 offers a number of enhancements - better mobile support, mandatory security, larger packets, and so forth. But the most obvious difference, and the raison d'etre,  is that it supports a much larger address space. That is to say, you can have more of them.

This of course makes them longer and lets them use more characters (letters). Here's an IPv6 address: 2a00:1018:801:1000::4d3f:a9c8

Note that this address is in fact abbreviated. There are rules allowing you to omit leading 0's from IPv6 addresses. The full address being represented above is: 2a00:1018:0801:1000:0000:0000:4d3f:a9c8

An IPv6 address consists of 8 groups of four characters (16 bits), totaling 128 bits and allowing for approximately 3.4 x 10^38 addresses. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits and allow for approximately 4.3 x 10^9 addresses.

In other words, there are already more human beings than IPv4 addresses, while there are more IPv6 addresses than there are stars in the observable universe. As an aside, according to current estimates there are actually still more atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses.

Of course, if you read the title of this post you're probably wondering "what about Nethack?". Well, the IPv6 address I used as an example is actually pointed at a Debian VPS that I fought long and hard with that now serves Nethack (much like nethack.alt.org). Just telnet to it and you'll be greeted with Nethack, and you can be one of the first to play this classic game in a brave new internet realm.

But those long addresses are a pain to bandy about, so thankfully DNS works just peachy in IPv6 as well. I assigned nethack.proles.net to be the above IPv6 address, so if you have IPv6 access you can telnet right to that and be on your way.

Now you probably don't actually have IPv6 access. If you're on *nix you're in luck - Miredo is easy to install and configure and gets you IPv6 access without even needing to set up an account. Otherwise, I'd suggest Tunnelbroker. It'll take some doing, but you'll be on the forefront of where the internet is going (or at least needs to go).

And that's that - I'll close by just saying that the layers of geekery inherent in Nethack over IPv6 bring me great joy. Thanks for reading!

Addendum - nethack.fi also supports IPv6 (and IPv4, whereas my offering is IPv6 only). Oh well, still cool to add something to the IPv6 world.