blog/_posts/2011-10-18-using-ipvwith-inetd.markdown

layout	title	date
post	using ipv6 with inetd	18.10.2011 10:58

I am the administrator of the ctdo own jabber server over at jabber.ctdo.de. It is currently running on the old but working jabberd and also hosts a bitlbee server on several ports including ssl-protected ones.

Now that the world is migrating to IPv6 I wanted to make every single service on this machine available on IPv6, too.

Not that easy for old, never-really-updated software. Complete taking down the machine and reinstalling everything was not an option, so I just updated jabberd to the latest version (back in spring).

By default the jabber server listens on all IPv6 addresses of the host machine, so all I needed to do here was enabling ssl-serving over IPv6 for it:

<tls port="5223">2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344</tls>

{:lang="text"} (this is a completeley random ipv6 addresses ;)

Now to the "hard" part: the bitlbee thing. As bitlbee does not speak ssl itself, it makes use of stunnel, a small SSL tunneling proxy. Now stunnel and bitlbee are not just started on boot, but handled by inetd, a super-server daemon listening on ports and starting associated programs on need.

But, as I told before, the server is a rather old installation and uses netkit-inetd, which, as to my testings, does not work over IPv6.

So I had to replace this one:

apt-get install netbsd-inetd

{:lang="text"}

One line in /etc/inetd.conf reads as the following:

9999 stream tcp nowait bitlbee /usr/bin/stunnel stunnel -v 0 -l /usr/sbin/bitlbee

{:lang="text"}

This needs to be duplicated and changed to listen on v6, too.

9999 stream tcp6 nowait bitlbee /usr/bin/stunnel stunnel -v 0 -l /usr/sbin/bitlbee

{:lang="text"}

And that's it.

/etc/init.d/netbsd-inetd start
/etc/init.d/jabberd14 restart

{:lang="text"}

and you should be ready to go.

This is live right now on jabber.ctdo.de.