[Bacula-users] Feature request: fallback to IPV6 when available

Item <TBD>:  Fallback to IPV6 when available
  Origin: Luc Maisonobe <Luc.Maisonobe AT free DOT fr>
  Date:   2012-03-19
  Status: <TBD>

  What:

Bacula does support either IPV4 or IPV6 for communication between the
various daemons. However, there are some caveats for dual stack
IPV4/IPV6 systems which for now are more and more widespread. If for
example a host is declared as

  [FD|SD]Addresses  = { ip = { addr =  fully.qualified.name } }

then bacula only looks for an A record for IPV4. If the machine has an A
record, it is picked up. However, if the host does listen only on its
IPV6 address or if a firewall prevents the connexion on IPV4, bacula
fails and says the connexion was refused, without even trying to get an
AAAA record that would succeed. If the machine does not even have an A
record and has only an AAAA record for IPV6 under that fully qualified
name, bacula does not try to get this record, it fails and says there is
not host. So the only way to use IPV6 is to explicitely us ipv6 = {...}
and not ip = {...}.

Also for the FD and SD records in the client resources in
bacula-dir.cof, putting column separated IPV6 address seems not to work.
Such addresses are only accepted in the bacula-fd.conf and
bacula-sd.conf themselves. This forces to declare all hosts in a local
DNS server.

  Why:

This is important because more and more network are IPV6 enabled now,
but we still are in a transition period with many IPV4 addresses too. So
most environments are dual stack IPV4/IPV6 and machines are migrated
progressively.

  Notes:

The main concept I would like to stress out is to have a consistent
scheme, both in the daemons configurations ( Name = ..., Address = ...)
and in the references of the daemons in the director (client resources).
Specifying a host should be possible eveywhere with either fully
qualified name, or IPV4 dotted addresses, or IPV6 colum separated
addresses. When names are used, then bacula should not stop if the first
record provided by the name server fails. Other records should be tried
if possible. The first try could be hardcoded (and could be either IPV4
or IPV6), or the user could provide a hint (Prefered = IPV6 or something
along this line).

best regards,
Luc

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