Imprissoned

I had today off work. After breakfast and a morning dog walk I thought I'd do a few essential jobs now I'd upgraded everything and could confirm all was working. However I hit a problem - which this time was outside of my control.

Computers on a network now mostly use a scheme called Internet Protocol (IP) and that gives every device a unique number or a special local number which is only unique locally. Most of us are used to the old version of this called IPv4, with addresses that look like 10.11.12.13, but there is a newer version called IPv6, where the addresses are much longer and look like this 2001:db8:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff.

My French Internet Service Provider gives me one IPv4 address which is shared by all my computers using NAT, so all the IPv4 address of my computers use a locally unique private address. Plus an IPv6 block, so all my computers have a globally unique IPv6 address, to which I add a private IPv6 address. This has worked well for a few years, but today my ISP stopped giving me an IPv6 address and I spent all day arguing the toss (in bad French) trying to get them to understand that I have IPv4 but no IPv6 and that this is a problem as I need IPv6.

The dog's evening walk was much shorter and later than he would have liked as a result of this waste of time, and the blip of the inside of our old garden gate that's been modified and rehung sums up our day.