<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 17:56, Lennart Sorensen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca" target="_blank">lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I thought it was common to have 127.0.0.1 for localhost and ::1 for<br>
localhost6. Maybe some people don't do things sensibly.<br></blockquote><div><br>For the benefit of the archive, I'll assume your meaning and say you're absolutely right -- localhost6 is very silly indeed.<br>
<br>Anyone is free to use it, of course, but it shouldn't be advocated, and it isn't present in contemporary stock hosts files. The right idea, ostensibly, is for the same hostname to get you to the right place, transparently to the user.<br>
<br>More to the point, the obligation isn't on the user to configure it right -- it's on the applications to support it right. Tricks like localhost6 actually *prevent* good applications from doing the right thing. Thankfully, this is only an /etc/hosts issue, since an ipv6-ignorant application will never ask for (and therefore never receive) an AAAA record from DNS.<br>
<br>So, better to tell the ipv6-ignorant application to use ipv4 numerically, say in mysql.txt, than to tell the whole system wrongly that localhost is only on ipv4 in /etc/hosts.<br><br>Anyway, we'll all get there, eventually -- even if it takes until about 2025, at the current rate. ;) <br>
<br>(Off-topic rant: People are going to keep squeezing every last drop out of ipv4 for years to come, with all sorts of chicanery and nonsense in the face of RIR and IANA exhaustion. This is due to the unfortunate design consequences of ipv6 -- while anyone can turn on ipv6, and absolutely should, no one can *entirely* shut off ipv4 until *everyone* can.)<br>
<br>$0.02,<br>Eric<br></div></div>