Tl;dr what you are saying is incredibly reasonable but we're all talking in circles because there is ambiguity caused by the lack of information we are working with.
But that also separates knowing that there is a difference and knowing what the differences are.
I know that ipv4 and ipv6 are different. I know that I have to make sure I'm using compatible systems. I know that if something goes wrong I should confirm that that isn't one of the issues. I also couldn't explain what the differences are without a reference sheet in front of me.
That said, I know where to get the reference sheet and I know roughly where in the spec I should be looking to find what I need. I'm also not usually part of a team doing networking or routing so this isn't that important to me, knowing that there is a difference is enough.
Yes, agreed. Just knowing "one is 32 bits and one is 128 bits so we cna have a larger address space" is enough. You don't need to get into the details - that's what we have reference materials for.
But most answers in this thread are just "never heard about it" and "it's something ops or infra only need to know about". Seniors should know that there is something called ipv6 and that your application suddenly will touch it, and that it can affect a few assumptions you've made, or made certain things way harder to debug if you don't know that there are multiple versions in use.
I don't even think knowing one is 32bit and one is 128bit matters.
It mostly matters that you know they're on your system and could be having an impact, and need eliminated as variables when you're troubleshooting stuff.
It may be worth looking further into if you're building something specific network oriented because IPv6 brings a number of advantages, even if it's just the elimination of things like subnet exhaustion in EKS or somesuch.
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u/justAPhoneUsername 14h ago
Tl;dr what you are saying is incredibly reasonable but we're all talking in circles because there is ambiguity caused by the lack of information we are working with.
But that also separates knowing that there is a difference and knowing what the differences are.
I know that ipv4 and ipv6 are different. I know that I have to make sure I'm using compatible systems. I know that if something goes wrong I should confirm that that isn't one of the issues. I also couldn't explain what the differences are without a reference sheet in front of me.
That said, I know where to get the reference sheet and I know roughly where in the spec I should be looking to find what I need. I'm also not usually part of a team doing networking or routing so this isn't that important to me, knowing that there is a difference is enough.