Archived News

IPv6 support

As many might (or might not) know the number of free IPv4 addresses is nearing it's maximum. Many experts expect that the IPv4 addresses will be exhausted within a few years. As a result of this IPv6 was developed about a dozen years ago. Since 2008 all major OSes have support for IPv6 and (some) ISPs are starting to offer IPv6 addresses. This meant that we had to start thinking about IPv6 support.

This has resulted that a few weeks ago we started making all OpenTTD services accessible over native IPv6, graciously provided by LeaseWeb for which we want to thank them. We also added IPv6 support to the development versions of OpenTTD (the nightlies and trunk) so they are capable of handling both IPv4 and IPv6 side-by-side. At the moment of writing approximately 30% of the servers with an OpenTTD version supporting IPv6 are reachable over IPv6. Even if we look at all servers 3% is reachable over IPv6 (average IPv6 penetration is around 1%).

All in all this means that 0.8.0 will support IPv4 and IPv6, although it will still take a while before we release 0.8.0, and that you can reach all OpenTTD services over IPv6, so no need for IPv4 anymore.