Forums Bug Reports 7.08 - Binding to an ipv6 address

Thanks for fixing the editbox issue.
Binding to an ipv6 address works fine now.
I've ran into a new issue tho, it's now impossible to connect to an ipv4 ircd if mIRC is bound to an ipv6 address :

* Unable to resolve server

Maybe it should fallback to ipv4 when ipv6 resolving fails in this case ?

The bind option forces mIRC to bind all connections to a specific network adapter. If you want mIRC to use IPv6 and to fallback to IPv4, you should use the "Enable IPv6 support and prioritize IPv6 over IPv4 connections" option without entering a bind address.

That's what I did but I want to bind my ipv6 connections to a specific ipv6 address.
As you may know, you can have multiple ipv6 addresses on the same adapter, and I need to bind my irc ipv6 connections to a specific one.
But it prevents me from :
1/ Connecting to multiple networks/ircds if one of them isn't ipv6-ready
2/ Connecting to another ircd on the same network, if the ipv6 ircd goes down, and the other one(s) is/are ipv4 only.

It looks like that would require a new option since the bind address is there not only to make mIRC use one particular connection but also to prevent mIRC from using any other connection. I would probably have to add a "Fallback to default connection if necessary" option.

I am really trying to avoid adding a complicated set of options for micro-managing bind addresses and connection types. I expect some users will have complex network configurations and would like to be able to create a prioritized list of bind addresses, with connection types and fallback methods for each one. Unfortunately I do have to draw the line somewhere.

Just out of curiosity, what type of network configuration are you using? It sounds like you have at least one IPv4 connection, and at least two IPv6 connections, and you want mIRC to use the non-default IPv6 connection and to fallback to the default IPv4 connection?

Exactly.
One adapter, one ipv4 address, multiple ipv6 addresses, binding mIRC to the one ipv6 address which isn't the default one.
I'm trying to connect to multiple networks, and not all of them got ircds with ipv6 support sadly, and when they do, they often only got a couple of ipv6 enabled ircds which would make it impossible to fallback to another ircd if the ipv6 one(s) go(es) down.
I also understand that adding options which wouldn't be widely used isn't your primary goal, and I have no idea how complicated it is to allow ipv6 and ipv4 at the same time if mIRC is bound to an ipv6 address.

I'm guessing he has privacy extensions turned on (which they are by default), and he wants to connect outwards using the non-privacy address (which you can add an rDNS entry for), rather than the random and frequently changing privacy addresses (which are a bit of a pain to add to DNS), and to do so without also losing the ability to connect to IPv4 servers.

This seems like a fairly common use case (and it is the one I came here to find a solution for). It's certainly not a complex network configuration.

The correct behaviour here is probably for bind addresses to be per-server (i.e. specifiable in servers.ini and to /server). Failing that, I guess the bind addresses should be per-family, i.e. if no address is specified for a particular address family then you should treat it as if no bind address was specified, rather than refusing to connect. The ability to specify multiple (comma-separated?) bind addresses would be useful here, but not strictly necessary for my or rastamanx's use case.

While I'm here, I also noticed that

• You don't appear to be able to bind to a hostname
  
• Binding to a connection name seems to break IPv6. I'm guessing it's actually binding to one of the IPv4 addresses of the connection (the first? the last? a random?).
  
• It's kinda hard to test all this, because all you get is "Unable to resolve server" and I can't exactly work out what's going on by looking at the source...

Bootnote: after some more testing, it seems that mIRC does exactly what I want if I use IP addresses, not DNS names (i.e. binding to the specified address if the address family is the same as the IP I give and ignoring it otherwise). It would be kind of nice to get this behaviour with DNS names too...