[Xymon] IPv6 support in xymon

[John.Gibbins at csiro.au]

Hi

I'm brand new to this list, so hopefully this has not already been done to death.  

We are deploying IPv6 across our organisation (spread across Australia) and use xymon for a lot of our monitoring.  We have scripts which allow xymon to ping hosts via IPv6 to monitor IPv6 connectivity although it is a bit ugly.

I understand that IPv6 support is coming in a later release.  I'm curious whether there is an estimate of when this might come out.

Also, I just hit an issue with some Windows systems that run BBwin.  They were complaining that they could not talk to the xymon server.  The problem turned out to be that clients were configured with the DNS name of the xymon server and the server had both an A record (IPv4 address) and a AAAA record (IPv6 address) in DNS.  The operating system chooses the IPv6 address first and BBWin was trying to contact the server using IPv6.  The server responded with a RST and the communication failed.  The client did not fail back to IPv4.

The workaround I am planning on doing is to have a separate DNS name for the server just for xymon use (the server does various things) which only has an IPv4 address in DNS until xymon supports server communication over IPv6.  I don't want to hardcode the IPv4 address on the clients as that would make it harder to change later.

In August, Josh Luthman suggested that most uses of xymon would be dual stack so would not need IPv6 support.  I completely agree that most people are going to be using dual-stack for the foreseeable future, but wanted to point out that we want to be able to monitor our IPv6 network as well as our IPv4 network so IPv6 support is important.  In a dual stack environment, IPv6 is used in preference, but if there is a problem with IPv6 connectivity systems will normally fail back to IPv4.  This can hide IPv6 network problems.  As a result it is important to monitor IPv6 and IPv4 independently otherwise you may not know you have a problem.

Also as indicated above, having IPv6 support on the server means we can avoid ugly kludges.

My 2c worth.

Regards
johng
--
John Gibbins
Technical Lead - IT Security/Authentication 
CSIRO Information Management & Technology (IM&T)