Question about Pidgin and ipv6

[Ford, Michael]

To whom it may concern,

 

I had been wondering about the ability of pidgin to utilize ipv6, so I
downloaded openfire, along with two instances of the pidgin client. I
have the openfire server and a pidgin client running on one machine, and
the pidgin client running on a second machine with a switch in between
them. Although it wasn't the best practice, I started off assuming that
I would have to do some reconfigurations in order to allow for ipv6
support on the client side; Openfire already advertises as being ipv6
compatible. Looking for resources, I found this:

 

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/1075

 

...which says that I have to make some changes to the source code in
order to support ipv6. This actually made sense to me, because a lot of
the original socket code used ipv4 specific functions. However, after
only changing the code in one client, I decided to try and send messages
to see if I could in ipv6. I gave both machines ipv6 addresses, and then
used those addresses to register the clients to the server. To my
surprise, I was able to send messages in ipv6 while having only changed
the code in one client. I ran wireshark just to be sure, and sure
enough, wireshark only caught ipv6 packets instead of ipv4 ones. 

 

I'm happy that pidgin supports ipv6, but I don't like not knowing how
it's done. Can someone explain to me why pidgin would be able to send
ipv6 packets even if I didn't make the code changes in both clients?

 

Michael Ford                      

Software Engineering Associate

Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services

700 North Frederick Avenue

Gaithersburg, MD 20879

Phone: 301.240.6392

Fax: 301.240.5749

Email: michael.ford at lmco.com <mailto:michael.ford at lmco.com> 

 

 

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