Since my employer (ITsjefen AS of Trondheim, Norway) have given me the opportunity to work with free software (we base most of our customer-fronting solutions on free software) I’m mostly spending my days deep within the realms of servers, command line options and back end systems (that is when I’m not on a one month holiday).

Yesterday, after getting a report from a co-worker that a customer using our free wireless network on a dual stack (IPv4/IPv6) Windows 7 could not read his e-mail I dug into a tiny, but yet, frustrating problem with our mail proxy software — perdition.
While perdition it self does indeed support IPv6 it seemed to be a bit easier to enable IPv6 for the xinetd service for perdition (I really, really thought IPv6 was in place as a default these days). After setting the proper flags (you just add the line “flags = IPv6” to the service you wish to enable IPv6 for) I went about restarting xinetd, discovering that no IPv6 was functioning in xinetd. I promptly tried to add other services to xinetd with IPv6, thinking perdition must be the culprit, but no dice.

Thus, downloading a reading in the source for the Debian-package I soon discovered that the tiny config-option of “–with-inet6” was left out.
A quick recompile on the compile-box and pinning of packages later, IPv6 was working flawlessly for the perdition services.

Does anyone know of other, possibly more easily ways of getting proper IPv6-support for services in xinetd? If so, do let me know! 🙂