(APNIC 28 - APOPS) IPv6 representation, by Seiichi Kawamura of NEC Biglobe

RFC4291 is a document that describes the IPv6 address architecture, but a canonical representation format has never been defined. In real operational situations, the flexibility of IPv6 address representation can cause problems. For example, 2001:db8:0:0:1::1 and 2001:db8::1:0:0:1 are the same addresses but as "text", they are two different figures and will not match on a simple search. One example: an operator can take the result of a traceroute and try to search for the address in a configuration repository, but a simple text search may result in a 'no match'. I would like to present cases where this causes problems and describe ideas on what we can do to avoid them.