Apps and network layers

[Dancer]

Luciano Rabelo wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have some doubts. Applications and services like telnet, ftp, apache
> (http), and others, are implemented at application layer. So they wouldn´t
> need to be patched to IPv6 because the network layer functions should by
> transparency for them. Am I right? If yes, why that programs have patches
> to work with IPv6? Will every applications have to be patched?
>

IPv6 addresses are larger than IPv4 addresses and stored in different
structures. More recent API's provide generic containment and encapsulation
of addresses so that you do not need to know which type or protocol you are
using, but applications older than those API's need to be converted to deal
with them.

In short, you can't just stuff the result from gethostbyname() into an
unsigned int, unless you have a BITS implementation running underneath.

D