IPv6 and the traffic monitors demise.

While working on a project of mine, I realized something. Once IPv6 becomes globalized, many traffic monitors will fail to work properly.

This comes as some crucial foundations in the network interface (Winsock) which traffic monitors rely on for their functionality, are unsupported by IPv6.

This will not only apply to Windows-based systems, but also "possibly" those who use the original "Berkely Sockets" interface, which includes Unix.

For software which this affects, there will need to be quite an extension rewrite of their architecture.

Since this information is only quite new, it may be some time before developers realize this quite substantial problem.


Technical Detail
For an application to capture network traffic, it will typically create a raw socket and bind it to 255.255.255.255. The socket will then further receive "all" incomming TCP/IP traffic.

This capability is not supported on IPv6 sockets.


-Matt