IPv6 Compliance

[Ghada El-Zoghbi]

Mahara: 15.04
DB: any
Browser: any
OS: any

Currently, Mahara is not compliant with the IPv6 protocol.

Some places that need to change (where IP addresses are validated/checked):

 - SAML auth - validate URL Syntax (preg_match for IPv6 also).

 - DB: table - host.ipaddress needs to cater for 128 bit address.

 - Peer bootstrap:
     1) preg-match should also include IPv6 format;
     2) use of PHP function gethostbyname().

 - Zend third part library - current version only supports IPv4. We currently use version 1.10.6.

 MNET heavily relise on Zend.
 The latest Zend is on version 3. But there is a release for 1.12.11 - which still doesn't support IPv6 (as far as I can tell).

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

It's 2015, we really should support IPv6! :)

Probably the biggest problem out of the cases listed above is the "HOST.IPADDRESS" column. If the IP address of an MNet host comes back as IPv6, this bug would prevent it from being useable.

In the other cases, it's only a problem if you're accessing a server by its IP address instead of by a hostname. If you're doing admin type stuff, and the server you need to connect to doesn't have a hostname for some reason, there is the workaround of assigning the IP a hostname in the /etc/hosts file.

I guess there's also the scenario where you are a user trying to specify an IP address, like maybe putting one in for the URL of an RSS feed. But that seems like it should be somewhat rarer. There are not that many web servers that are only identified by IP address.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Since Moodle doesn't really support MNet anymore, should we look into making it IPv6 compatible? I'd rather focus the energy on getting the web services to do so which should then also update SAML as that would then make it into core (or at least the bits that aren't already).

[Ghada El-Zoghbi (ghada-z)]

Hi Kristina,

No, I don't think we really shouldn't waste our time with MNet. We
should be concentrating on the web services. That's a more effective
use of our time.

Ghada

On 13/07/15 05:26, Kristina Hoeppner wrote:
> Since Moodle doesn't really support MNet anymore, should we look into
> making it IPv6 compatible? I'd rather focus the energy on getting the
> web services to do so which should then also update SAML as that would
> then make it into core (or at least the bits that aren't already).
>

--

Ghada El-Zoghbi
*Catalyst IT Australia Pty Ltd*
Desk:[phone]
Extension: 8425
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