Manipulating IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in python

Eighteen months ago, after many years of programming in perl for most of my systems programming needs, I decided to give python a go after much coaxing by a colleague, Alec Thomas. At the time I had started developing an IP address management system, designed for ISPs/Telcos who need to manage hundreds of address blocks and allocations to customers and internal infrastructure. I did a quick evaluation of both Ruby on Rails and Django and decided on Django for a few reasons:

• I didn't have to manage my database schema and models separately. Django allowed me to define my data models in a single place and it handled the job of creating the database tables. (This was before Rails had migrations).
  
• Django's built in administrative interface was a huge time saver and allowed me to focus on developing my application rather than designing forms.
• After programming in perl for so long the cleanliness of the python language really appealed to me. Ruby to me just seemed like OO-Perl done properly but with all the $@!#{} perlisms left in.
  

While developing the application I found an extremely useful python module called IPy (originally developed here), that handles IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and networks.

Here's a sample of how you can use it:

>>> from IPy import IP
>>> ip = IP('127.0.0.0/30')
>>> for x in ip:
...  print x
...
127.0.0.0
127.0.0.1
127.0.0.2
127.0.0.3
>>> ip2 = IP('0x7f000000/30')
>>> ip == ip2
1
>>> ip.reverseNames()
['0.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.', '1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.',
'2.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.', '3.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.']

I'll be discussing some tools I've developed with this module at a later date.