IPv6 support in xymon 🔗 link

Hi

I'm brand new to this list, so hopefully this has not already been done to death.  

We are deploying IPv6 across our organisation (spread across Australia) and use xymon for a lot of our monitoring.  We have scripts which allow xymon to ping hosts via IPv6 to monitor IPv6 connectivity although it is a bit ugly.

I understand that IPv6 support is coming in a later release.  I'm curious whether there is an estimate of when this might come out.

Also, I just hit an issue with some Windows systems that run BBwin.  They were complaining that they could not talk to the xymon server.  The problem turned out to be that clients were configured with the DNS name of the xymon server and the server had both an A record (IPv4 address) and a AAAA record (IPv6 address) in DNS.  The operating system chooses the IPv6 address first and BBWin was trying to contact the server using IPv6.  The server responded with a RST and the communication failed.  The client did not fail back to IPv4.

The workaround I am planning on doing is to have a separate DNS name for the server just for xymon use (the server does various things) which only has an IPv4 address in DNS until xymon supports server communication over IPv6.  I don't want to hardcode the IPv4 address on the clients as that would make it harder to change later.

In August, Josh Luthman suggested that most uses of xymon would be dual stack so would not need IPv6 support.  I completely agree that most people are going to be using dual-stack for the foreseeable future, but wanted to point out that we want to be able to monitor our IPv6 network as well as our IPv4 network so IPv6 support is important.  In a dual stack environment, IPv6 is used in preference, but if there is a problem with IPv6 connectivity systems will normally fail back to IPv4.  This can hide IPv6 network problems.  As a result it is important to monitor IPv6 and IPv4 independently otherwise you may not know you have a problem.

Also as indicated above, having IPv6 support on the server means we can avoid ugly kludges.

My 2c worth.

Regards
johng
--
John Gibbins
Technical Lead - IT Security/Authentication 
CSIRO Information Management & Technology (IM&T)

On 30-03-2012 11:05, user-78688c9a000f@xymon.invalid wrote:

It is actually fairly close. I have IPv6 working on the Xymon server main daemon (xymond), and the client-side tool (xymon) that communicates with xymond also supports it. So basic IPv6 support is working.

Support in the xymonnet tool - that runs the network tests - is underway; it is taking longer than I first expected because I've ended up writing a completely new network test tool instead of hacking the old code. The original xymonnet tool was almost 10 years old, and I've learned a lot about C programming during that time. Also, I wanted to make network tests be analysed in a manner similar to client data - i.e. feed it all into the Xymon server, then have a tool analyse and correlate data centrally. This is currently at a point where the new "xymonnet2" tool can perform the network tests, also against IPv6 enabled hosts and send the data to Xymon, but I have only started doing the analysis module.

"ping" tests also haven't been implemented yet, but that should be a very simple thing to do - it will rely on "fping" for both IPv4 and IPv6 hosts.

I hope to have it finished for release in a few months.


Regards,
Henrik

Thanks Henrik,

That is good to hear.  
We did find that fping on SuSE Linux Enterprise was an ancient one that did not support IPv6.  Even on SLES 11 SP2 it is still fping-2.4b2-94.22.  We downloaded and installed fping-2.4b2_to-ipv6 (which is over 10 years old!) in order to support IPv6.  I don't know what other distributions provide.

Great work.  I look forward to the upcoming release.

regards
johng
--
John Gibbins
Team Leader - IT Security/Authentication (and IPv6 Evangelist)
CSIRO Information Management & Technology (IM&T)
Phone: +XX X XXXX XXXX  | Fax: +XX X XXXX XXXX | Mob: 0419 605 562
user-78688c9a000f@xymon.invalid | www.csiro.au PO BOX 225, Dickson  ACT 2602
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. - Clarke's Second Law

-----Original Message-----

Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:20:53 +0200
From: Henrik St?rner <user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid>
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] IPv6 support in xymon
Message-ID: <user-26721e916704@xymon.invalid>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 30-03-2012 11:05, user-78688c9a000f@xymon.invalid wrote:

It is actually fairly close. I have IPv6 working on the Xymon server main daemon (xymond), and the client-side tool (xymon) that communicates with xymond also supports it. So basic IPv6 support is working.

Support in the xymonnet tool - that runs the network tests - is underway; it is taking longer than I first expected because I've ended up writing a completely new network test tool instead of hacking the old code. The original xymonnet tool was almost 10 years old, and I've learned a lot about C programming during that time. Also, I wanted to make network tests be analysed in a manner similar to client data - i.e. feed it all into the Xymon server, then have a tool analyse and correlate data centrally. This is currently at a point where the new "xymonnet2" tool can perform the network tests, also against IPv6 enabled hosts and send the data to Xymon, but I have only started doing the analysis module.

"ping" tests also haven't been implemented yet, but that should be a very simple thing to do - it will rely on "fping" for both IPv4 and IPv6 hosts.

I hope to have it finished for release in a few months.


Regards,
Henrik

End of Xymon Digest, Vol 14, Issue 27
*************************************

(Apologies if this is old news) the fping development is continued by 
David Schweikert as the old maintainer(s)/developer were not reachable 
any more.
First tests with v3.0 confirm that the performance is far better than 
the previous v2.4 (in fact in my test-setup it was 40-45% faster).

http://fping.org/

All the best
Thomas

On 04/01/2012 05:19 AM, user-78688c9a000f@xymon.invalid wrote:

Message-ID:<user-26721e916704@xymon.invalid>

-- 
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------

| IT-Beratung Eckert | Hartkirchweg 54      | fon: +49 (0)761/ 594 9898
| Thomas Eckert      | 79111 Freiburg i.Br. | fax: +XX (X)XXX/ XXX XXXX
|                    | Germany              | http://www.it-eckert.de/

Hi Thomas,

On 01-04-2012 10:09, Thomas Eckert wrote:

thanks - I didn't know that. It is good to see that this tool is now
being maintained, and the speedup looks very interesting for my large
Xymon installation. I'll definitely have to check that out!


Regards,
Henrik