One of the many Free Software projects I work on is JFFNMS, which is a network management system written in PHP. In light that the last IPv4 address blocks have now been allocated to APNIC it s probably timely to look at how to manage network devices in a new IPv6 world.
First you need to get the basics sorted out and for that it is best to use the net-snmp command line utilities to check all is well. Then its onto what to do in JFFNMS itself.
Now fixed with proper markup, I hope.
strlcpy(hostname, a1, sizeof(hostname));
if ((pptr = strchr (hostname, ':')))
remote_port = strtol (pptr + 1, NULL, 0);
Special Agent 6
All devices that are capable of being managed with SNMP have an agent. It s basically the SNMP server on the router, switch or server. The first step is to make sure it can accept and send traffic using IPv6. Depending on what the device is, it can be real simple.
For example, my little Juniper router its a matter of setting the community and access control, just like IPv4 settings:
csmall@juniper1# set snmp community public clients 2001:db8:62:d0::/64
And then run snmpget on the command line to check
csmall@elmo$ snmpget -v 1 -c public udp6:2001:44b8:62:d0::4 system.sysObjectID.0
SNMPv2-MIB::sysObjectID.0 = OID: SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.2636.1.1.1.2.41
We have success!
For Linux systems that use net-snmp you will need to make the snmp daemon listen on UDPv6 ports as well as adjusting the access control.
Access control is a matter of adding com2sec6 lines to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf They are the same format as com2sec lines and are reasonably straight forward.
Next, get the daemon to listen to requests on the IPv6 ports as well. The snmpd(8) man page says:
By default, snmpd listens for incoming SNMP requests on UDP port 161 on
all IPv4 interfaces. However, it is possible to modify this behaviour
by specifying one or more listening addresses as arguments to snmpd.
It wouldn t of killed them to put comma separated list somewhere, now would it?
My /etc/default/snmpd file now looks like:
SNMPDOPTS= -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -g snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid udp:127.0.0.1,udp6:[::1]:161
The bits in bold are the changes. Then its a quick check:
csmall@elmo$ snmpget -v 1 -c public udp6:[::1] system.sysObjectID.0
SNMPv2-MIB::sysObjectID.0 = OID: NET-SNMP-MIB::netSnmpAgentOIDs.10
And we have working agents!
JFFNMS Changes
OK, we have a working IPv6 network and snmp works across our network so we can query devices. JFFNMS uses PHP so all should be well, shouldn t it?
Database Tables
This is an almost classic problem with converting IPv4 to IPv6. You have 15 bytes for a IP address string 111.222.333.444 . Ipv6 can be much larger than that. JFFNMS has things like
CREATE TABLE hosts (
[...]
ip char(20) NOT NULL default '',
A simple fix to use a char(39) or varchar(39) will do the trick.
Fixing the JFFNMS code
One of the most troubling problems with the host entries is that the values entered by a user can be a hostname, IP address or IP address and port separated by a colon. There are lots of bits of code that separate out the port or address by just finding the colon or use non-IPv6 aware functions like
gethostbyname() that will need to be fixed.
I ve got a function to check for an IPv6 address, using the
inet_pton() function.
function is_ipv6($addr)
$net_addr = @inet_pton($addr);
if ($net_addr === FALSE strlen($net_addr) < 16)
return FALSE;
return TRUE;
PHP functions
PHP still has the old IPv4 only functions, but unlike libc does not have the Address Family independent functions. The most significant absence is the replacement functions for gethostbyname(). There is
dnsgetrecord() but it is quite low-level (it won t recurse lookups if you get alias or CNAME results).
It s a little hit and miss in PHP-land with what functions work with IPv6 addresses and what ones do not.
fsockopen() and
file() do work with IPv6.
PHP and SNMP
To query remote devices using SNMP, JFFNMS uses the PHP SNMP functions. Unfortunately, while there is some IPv6 support in PHP, it doesn t extend to the SNMP functions. The library does it, as the net-snmp command lines use the same library, it is just that the small shim between the script and net-snmp that is PHP gets in the way.
Looking at the PHP code itself you find things like
strlcpy(hostname, a1, sizeof(hostname));
if ((pptr = strchr (hostname, ':')))
remote_port = strtol (pptr + 1, NULL, 0);
which definitely need to be fixed for IPv6. There is also some simple address lookup going on somewhere as well which will also need to fixed. In short, JFFNMS won t be doing SNMP based queries over IPv6 until php5-snmp can do it.
Reachability
JFFNMS also has a different sort of query called a reachability type. It s essentially a ping from the server running JFFNMS out to the device being managed. It uses
fping to do this work, but there is also a program called fping6.
It s a simple matter of checking the address type and then selecting fping or fping6 to do the reachability work. The JFFNMS code soon to be pushed into git has this change in it now.
Anything Else?
The next stage is to find anything else that will work with IPv6. A likely candidate is the TCP and UDP port types as they use nmap to discover the ports and the fsockopen() function call to poll it. fsockopen() does handle IPv6 addresses if you escape them in square brackets.
(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?)
I think of myself as reasonably pragmatic in my approach to Free/Open Source software. I don't get worked up over which set of language people want to use. I use devices that require binary firmware to be downloaded to them (because just because I can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist). I have non-free in my 
Inspired by some chatter in IRC, and encouraged to post by Paul Wise, here
are my personal goals (in no particular order) during the Wheezy development
cycle:
After almost 8 months from the previous release, the Bash Completion Team is
proud to announce the release of bash-completion 1.3!
Nothing really innovative in this release. Just "boring" new completions, and
bugfixes 
For some stats, this release features 184 completions, the previous (1.2) had
168. For more numbers, please read 
Debian 6.0 (squeeze) has 
Debian got squeeze released, and ideas are brewing for what to do during
the next release cycle. Here's an idea I had lying around. I'm throwing
it out there, since I won't have time to do anything about it for at
least a little while, but perhaps someone else thinks it's a good idea?
Or, better yet, you can all tell me in comments why this is a bad idea,
or at least why it should be designed in a different way.
Debian just published 
I spent a solid 12 hours hosting the 
I can't believe I didn't notice that swirl sooner. It will join my
picture of the 
pommed v1.36 is out and brings support for the MacBook7,1, along with a few fixes and updates.
A typo in the pmac keyboard backlight has been fixed, so fading now works there too. Product IDs for the ANSI and JIS keyboard variants for pmac machines were also added. It s been like forever since I last touched that code; not a lot of people still use those (great) machines.
This release also contains a small update that will make it compatible with future kernel releases as applesmc will no longer have a fixed a name and location in sysfs.
Update: I just noticed a bug in 1.36, so 1.37 is out now. It also contains two patches that were submitted through Alioth.
The Debian Press Team will provide a live coverage of today's squeeze release
(Yaaay!) via identi.ca. Follow us at 
In addition to lecturing for two courses at MIT this term, I recently
had the pleasure of giving a lecture on antifeatures at the 
It was completely non-obvious; In some cases I had to figure it out by reading kFreeBSD source code; I write it down here so it s not forgotten ;-)
This is a short guide on how to boot Debian GNU/kFreeBSD via network on a diskless machine, using GRUB as the bootloader.
