c++ - How to support both IPv4 and IPv6 connections

Question

I'm currently working on a UDP socket application and I need to build in support so that IPV4 and IPV6 connections can send packets to a server.

I was hoping that someone could help me out and point me in the right direction; the majority of the documentation that I found was not complete. It'd also be helpful if you could point out any differences between Winsock and BSD sockets.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The best approach is to create an IPv6 server socket that can also accept IPv4 connections. To do so, create a regular IPv6 socket, turn off the socket option IPV6_V6ONLY, bind it to the "any" address, and start receiving. IPv4 addresses will be presented as IPv6 addresses, in the IPv4-mapped format.

The major difference across systems is whether IPV6_V6ONLY is a) available, and b) turned on or off by default. It is turned off by default on Linux (i.e. allowing dual-stack sockets without setsockopt), and is turned on on most other systems.

In addition, the IPv6 stack on Windows XP doesn't support that option. In these cases, you will need to create two separate server sockets, and place them into select or into multiple threads.