InfoWeapons-sponsored Website Showcases Dual-stack E-mail, Offers Free IPv6 Tools

Online, March 31, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Are you trying to set up dual-stack e-mail but don't know how or if you're doing it right? Need to test whether your IPv6 connectivity is working via web, e-mail and/or telnet? Searching for a site that helps you with all of these things? Look no further.

InfoWeapons founder and IPv6 guru Lawrence Hughes has created a website just for you. At first glance, it looks like any other site that displays IP addresses, but it's actually more than that. It's a treasure trove for information about IPv6, the new protocol replacing the current foundation protocol of the Internet (IPv4), which is running out of public addresses.

To begin with, www.v6address.com has both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses published in DNS. If your node and network correctly support IPv6, you will connect over IPv6 and see the IPv6 address you connected from. If not, it will fall back to IPv4 and will display your IPv4 address (typically the external address of your NAT gateway). If you specifically want to test connectivity over IPv4, www.v4address.com points to the same server, but publishes only the IPv4 address in DNS. You can even leave off the "www" and connect to "v6address.com" or "v4address.com".

The site also has "how-to" guides to help you set up dual-stack e-mail using open source software such as FreeBSD, Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL, and Postfix Admin. There's also a guide on how to configure DNS records for dual-stack e-mail.

"This site is provided for free use by anyone to help in their deployment of IPv6 and especially dual stack e-mail," says Mr. Hughes, a leading authority on IPv6 and author of the book "Internet E-mail: Protocols, Standards and Implementation". He adds, "This is part of our mission to help individuals and organizations worldwide who are now involved in the creation of the Second Internet, based on IPv6."

For advanced users, the site allows you to analyze your DNS MX records and test connections to all your e-mail servers (over IPv4 and/or IPv6). It sends you a report of the results via e-mail, including whether the top priority mail server supports IPv6 ("v6mail ready") or only IPv4 (not yet "v6mail ready").

The website also features an e-mail autoresponder that replies to the sender with another e-mail message that includes the headers from the sender's message. Simply send any e-mail to the special address "[email protected]". If your domain is "v6mail ready", the response message will be delivered over IPv6.

"When you deploy dual stack e-mail, one of the challenges is finding a working dual stack e-mail system with which to exchange messages for testing. This website provides a correctly configured v6mail that is always ready to respond instantly," explains Mr. Hughes.

Also provided is a telnet autoresponder. This provides much the same service as the basic web functionality, but can be used from a command line using telnet. Simply use any telnet client to connect to v6address.com to test IPv6 connectivity, or v4address.com to test IPv4 connectivity. This is useful for checking IPv6 connectivity on nodes that don't have GUI interfaces or web browsers.

Other resources available are links to IPv6 products, certified IPv6 courseware, IPv6 testing services, and a free 300+ page e-book, "The Second Internet: Reinventing Computer Networks with IPv6", authored by Mr. Hughes. Additional IPv6 related features will be added to the site over time.

The website is sponsored by InfoWeapons and co-created by Dino Madarang, the lead software architect of InfoWeapons' SolidDNS™ appliance.