2012/07/10 IPv6 and bip

As a keen IPv6 advocate I have been playing around with the various applications and services I use on a regular basis and have been trying to enable IPv6 use; today it was my IRC proxy 'bip'. bip turns out to be very simple to convert indeed. Simply requesting bip bind on the IPv6 unspecified address (::) triggers it to switch to IPv6 and (through the magic of the Linux dual-stack IPv4 handling) this enables either IPv4 or IPv6 clients to connect to the proxy.

To change the default bind address in bip simply change the ip configuration in your .bip/.bip.conf to use the IPv6 unspecified address as below:

ip = "::";

As simple as that. Probably the default behaviour of bip should be to bind :: (IPv6) and on failure bind 0.0.0.0 (IPv4).