IPv6 Extensions to Solaris Name Services

This section describes naming changes that were introduced by the implementation of IPv6. You can store IPv6 addresses in any of the Solaris naming services, NIS, LDAP, DNS, and files. You can also use NIS over IPv6 RPC transports to retrieve any NIS data.

DNS Extensions for IPv6

An IPv6-specific resource record, the AAAA resource record, has been specified by in RFC 1886 DNS Extensions to Support IP Version 6. This AAAA record maps a host name into a 128 bit IPv6 address. The PTR record is still used with IPv6 to map IP addresses into host names. The 32 four bit nibbles of the 128 bit address are reversed for an IPv6 address. Each nibble is converted to its corresponding hexadecimal ASCII value. Then, ip6.int is appended.

Changes to the nsswitch.conf File

IPv6 support has been added to the NIS, LDAP, and DNS name services. Consequently, the nsswitch.conf file has been modified to support IPv6 lookups.

The following diagram shows the new relationship between the nsswitch.conf file and the new name services databases for applications that use the gethostbyname and getipnodebyname commands. Items in italics are new. The gethostbyname command checks only for IPv4 addresses that are stored in /etc/inet/hosts. If the lookup fails, then the command checks the database that is specified in the hosts entry in the nsswitch.conf file.

Figure 11-8 Relationship Between nsswitch.conf and Name Services

For more information on name services, see System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP).

Changes to Name Service Commands

To support IPv6, you can look up IPv6 addresses with the existing name service commands. For example, the ypmatch command works with the new NIS maps. The nslookup command can look up the new AAAA records in DNS.