When I look at the logs via the google app engine dashboard/log
I see things like this:
90.221.1.202 - - [19/Jan/2012:08:45:34 -0800] "GET ..."
...
...
I learnt that 90.221.1.202 is the ip-address of the person who’s visiting my website.
Sometimes (not very often though)
my logs look like this:
2b01:e35:7b75:b750:c835:f3ad:ed1:d3a8 - - [19/Jan/2012:12:57:39 -0800] "GET ..."
...
...
is the above 2b01:e35:7b75:b750:c835:f3ad:ed1:d3a8 an ip-address ?
and if it is how do I work out its 4 bytes representation ?
Note: for privacy reasons the reported examples have been tinkered. so they are not real ips.
It’s an IPv6 address.
The xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx addresses you’re used to seeing are IPv4 addresses (version 4 of the Internet Protocol). IPv6 is a new version with a larger address space (IPv4 has 2^32 possible addresses, IPv6 has 2^128 combinations).
Since there are more IPv6 addresses than IPv4, it is also not possible to convert the former into the latter.
Also noteworthy is that, although IPv6 has existed since 1996, it is still not widely used. You can read more about it on Wikipedia. It’s expected that IPv4 and IPv6 will be used alongside each other for the foreseeable future.