Dan Anderson's Weblog

Solaris IPv6 Packages

Solaris 10 & OpenSolaris are IPv6 Ready (phase I and II)

IPv6 addresses, 128 bits in length, are the new addresses for Internet. It replaces the old 32-bit IPv4 addresses, 32 bits in length, because the latter are running out. With the explosion of non-computer Internet devices (such as cell/mobile phones, PDAs, music devices, etc.) and growth of Internet in third-world countries, the need for new IPv6 addresses will grow quickly.

Most Solaris applications support IPv6 out-of-the box (for example, Apache web server, Mozilla Firefox, FTP, SSH, Sendmail, etc.). However, there's a few of my favorite applications that have IPv6 capabilities missing. These are either not available in standard Solaris OS, or the Solaris-built version is missing a special source patch for IPv6, the Solaris-built version didn't enable IPv6 features, or a newer version of the software is required for IPv6.

For these reasons, I have a small collection of Solaris packages that have IPv6 functionality. These packages are built for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, SPARC and x86. These are SVR4-format packages that install with pkgadd or similar tools. They are also available at the OpenSolaris IPS Repository at http://dan.drydog.com:10000/ if you prefer to use OpenSolaris Package Manager or pkg(1). In any case, the packages install under /usr/local/ These packages are unsupported and are provided "as is" under these terms and conditions.

• ISC's Lynx, a screen-oriented web browser. These packages have SSL and IPv6 enabled (uses text-based curses instead of a graphical GUI). Lynx is not a part of Solaris OS. Some versions of Solaris has Links, which is similar, but doesn't support IPv6 (it's on their TODO list). See http://lynx.isc.org/
  
  
• Mike Gleason's NcFTP, a screen-oriented FTP (file transfer) client (uses text-based curses instead of a graphical GUI). I built this version with a source patch from KAME to enable IPv6 on NcFTP. See http://www.ncftp.com/
  
  
• David Mills' NTP (Network Time Protocol) software. This version has IPv6 enabled and NTP 4 features not in the ancient, out-of-the-box Solaris version, NTP 3 (CR 6580659). See http://www.ntp.org/
  
  
• Tin, a screen-oriented USENET NNTP newsreader client (uses text-based curses instead of a graphical GUI). These packages have IPv6 enabled. Tin requires package SUNWicu (Unicode). Tin is not provided with Solaris OS. See http://www.tin.org/

Posted at 05:56PM Dec 01, 2008 by DanX in Solaris  |  Comments[2]