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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

>> I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all...

I am not doubting you, but I feel this story is too hard to believe without adding further nuances...

MIT 6.829 teaches IPv6 since 2002: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-829-computer-networks-fall-200...

In Portugal and other countries, there are subjects on Computer Science before College or University, and they teach it on High School...

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The issue is that it’s not taught with IPv6 first. Networking courses do all kinds of stuff using IPv4 to demonstrate various protocols on top (e.g. http, tcp, icmp, etc).

Then there is usually a chapter on IPv6 that just briefly covers the differences.

I.e. the exercises all tend to use IPv4 as the foundation so people don’t practice v6

But TCP or HTTP don’t care about the underlying transport. They’re higher level protocols that are payloads to either IPv4 or IPv6. It’s irrelevant what the transport is when dissecting HTTP and very little time should be spent on it.

IPv4 is, for all intents and purposes, still the default transport. It’s also simpler than IPv6 in some regards. When teaching layer 3, it makes sense to teach both, and teach IPv4 first. Though I fully agree that they should be taught with equal emphasis. I don’t doubt there’s a good number of programs out there that don’t into sufficient detail on IPv6.

No, this is wrong and it’s why academia is failing.

IP addresses show up everywhere when you are working with both TCP and HTTP. Sockaddr is all over sockets programming, IPs show up in HTTP headers, etc.

They absolutely care about the underlying protocol because the underlying protocol is how you address the other end.

Well it makes sense, no one uses ipv6 anyhow. Most I know are waiting for ipv8.

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