[mrtg-developers] Re: IPv6 patch for MRTG: final version

[Lorenzo Colitti]

Rafael Martinez Torres wrote:
> 
> Another interesting contribution : your mrtg-2.9.28 was succesfully tested
> on
> 	SuSE-8.0
> 
> against:
> 	-  a PC-box running net-snmp
> 	-  HITACHI GR2000 10-H router  ( They are SNMP IPv6 enabled !!)
> 

Heh, good to know it works on real routers. We only had the opportunity 
to test it on Net-SNMP... :-)

>>We think this is ready for inclusion in the next version of MRTG.
>>We hope you agree. :-)
> 
> OK, we will  test your new patch and installing it from
> a final user's approach.  See who the program reacts when you ask for IPv6
> and you have no support... things like that...

Great, it would be good to have someone else test it on another setup.
The patch has been integrated into the 2.10.0pre1 pre-release, so maybe 
you could test that?

As regards IPv6 "corner cases", it should handle them gracefully. If you 
try to enable IPv6 but don't have the necessary libraries, it will warn 
you and refuse; if you have everything but not kernel support it will 
return an error creating the socket; and if you ask for a numeric IPv6 
address and IPv6 is not enabled it will fail when trying to resolve it 
to an IPv4 address, etc.

But of course testing is much appreciated.

> BTW, concerning design iussues, about the "IPv4only" way ( routers like
> Cisco, processing IPv6, but not supporting SNMP IPv6 ).
> 
> Do you keep this iussue ? Maybe it make the code a bit more complicated
> and can be avoided, in order to reduce the code again. You can always ask
> for IPv6-MIB entries from IPv4, as
> the old MRTG use to do.
> 
> But it's up to you. I have no deep knowledge on your code.

Actually it's not as complicated as you might think, because in any case 
you have to have two code paths, one for for IPv4-only (e.g. if you 
don't have the IPv6 libraries), and one for IPv4/IPv6. Once you have two 
code paths, adding support for enabling and disabling IPv6 on a 
per-target basis is not all that hard.

It could always be taken out in the future, of course, but you'd still 
have to have an IPv4-only code path for systems without IPv6 support, so 
you wouldn't really simplify the code all that much.


Regards,
Lorenzo

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