Ocamlnet 4 Reference Manual : Ipv6

# Ipv6

# IPv6 Support

We need to distinguish between:

- IPv6 is compiled into OCamlnet
- IPv6 is enabled

If the Ocaml runtime detects that IPv6 is available on the OS, IPv6 will also be compiled into OCamlnet. The does not mean, however, that IPv6 is enabled at runtime, which should only be done if IPv6 traffic can be routed.

## How to enable

For Linux and BSD systems IPv6 is automatically enabled when a network interface is detected with a global IPv6 address. This check is done by `Netsys.is_ipv6_system`.

You can override what this function returns by calling `Netsys.set_ipv6_system`. This is needed on other OS where the automatic check does not work, and of course also when IPv6 needs to be turned off.

## String-processing functions

Recognize IPv4 and IPv6 addresses with `Netsys.is_ipv4_inet_addr` and `Netsys.is_ipv6_inet_addr`, respectively.

The `Neturl` module can parse URLs containing IPv6 addresses, e.g. `http://[fe80::224:7eff:fedf:59ff]/path`. The address must be included in square brackets, following common Internet standards. These square brackets remain in place if the host part of the URL is extracted from the URL with `Neturl.url_host`. Note that `Unix.inet_addr_of_string` cannot process such brackets. Because of this, another function `Neturl.url_addr` has been added which returns the IP address directly.

For simple host/port pairs like `localhost:3128` another abstraction has been added, `Netsockaddr`. With `Netsockaddr.socksymbol_of_string` one can parse such pairs, and IPv6 addresses are supported. Again, these addresses need to be enclosed in square brackets.

Note that it is possible to map IPv4 addresses into the IPv6 address space. Such addresses have the form `::ffff:XXXX:XXXX` where `XXXX:XXXX` is the IPv4 address. Such addresses are normally written `::ffff:x.y.z.u` so that the IPv4 address is denoted as the well-known dotted quadruple. You get such addresses when a server socket is bound to `::` and receives IPv4 traffic. The consequence is that the same IPv4 address exists in two forms, namely as native IPv4 address and as IPv4-mapped-to-IPv6 address. Use `Netsys.norm_inet_addr` to normalize an address and `Netsys.ipv6_inet_addr` to enforce the mapped form.

## Protocols

The protocol interpreters for HTTP, FTP, and SOCKS have been carefully reviewed, and the necessary changes have been done.

The implementations for SMTP, POP, and the web connectors do not contain IP addresses (or are uncritical).

Regarding SunRPC, the Portmapper protocol does not support IPv6. To cope with that, some support for RPCBIND, the successor of Portmapper, has been added. First the required RPCBIND requests are tried, and if it is detected that RPCBIND is unavailable, the old Portmapper requests are done instead. Note that in the latter case IPv6 is not possible.

## Name service

The central name service module is `Uq_resolver`. The name resolver is now pluggable, and there are two versions:

- `Uq_resolver.default_resolver` bases on `gethostbyname`, and is typically IPv4-only (but this is OS-dependent).
- `Uq_resolver.gai_resolver` bases on `getaddrinfo`, and supports both IPv4 and IPv6. One can set which address types are enabled. `getaddrinfo` may not be available on all platforms, but it always available for platforms supporting IPv6.

If `Netsys.is_ipv6_system` returns `true`, the standard resolver is automatically changed to `Uq_resolver.gai_resolver` in order to allow IPv6 name lookups.