In 1998, a textual convention was defined for IPv6 addresses only. But this implied the partition of IPv4 and IPv6 management information bases, in other words, it would take double the effort to get all MIBs ready for both versions of IP. Fortunately, another approach is underway based on a “unified MIB convention” where the same MIB can handle both IPv4 and IPv6. To be able to achieve this, the address data structure had to be changed. But it is worth the effort.

This new convention defines an IP address as a structure {inetAddressType, inetAddress}, where:

• inetAddressType is an INTEGER which specifies if the following address is, for example, an IPv4 or IPv6 one, and
• inetAddress is defined as an OCTET STRING(SIZE(0...255)), in order to be able to save the value of an IPv4 or IPv6 address, as the value of a DNS name (cf. RFC 2851 [RFC2851] updated by RFC 3291 [RFC3291]).