Re: interop problems with getaddrinfo() address selection

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, Keith Moore wrote:
>
> this seems like an almost-inherent consequence of IPv6's expecting hosts
> to have multiple addresses and asking hosts initiating a communication
> to do address selection.  it's not specific to getaddrinfo() - any API
> that tried to solve that problem would be likely to reorder addresses to
> some degree.

The problem isn't specific to IPv6 - for example see the comments about
address selection for "multihomed" MXs in RFC 2821. However in practice we
ignore this possibility and treat host names with multiple IP addresses as
equally reachable at any address. I don't think IPv6 substantially changes
this situation, because most of its common extra addresses have limited
scope and will not be published in the DNS.

> though it should be possible for the client implementation to go through
> the list of addresses, assign a preference value to each one (based on
> address type and number of leading bits in common with one of the
> hosts's local addresses), then perform a stable sort by preference value.

That's essentially what RFC 3484 recommends, and what causes the problem.

Tony.
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