Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which of your releases support IPv4 and/or IPv6?
A: All our releaseses support both IPv4 and IPv6.

Q: What is my host HIT?
A: If you haven't done any changes to the standard installation you can find your HI private key file under /etc/hip. The file is named as the HIT of your host e.g:

$ ls /etc/hip
2001:13:b9b7:bcdd:6371:82b4:c8db:1672.priv
2001:13:b9b7:bcdd:6371:82b4:c8db:1672.pub
$

From the above example the HIT is 2001:13:b9b7:bcdd:6371:82b4:c8db:1672.

Q: Do I need to recompile applications?
A: No you do not need to recompile your applications with our release. Our release provides a new version of libc which communicates with the HIP daemon process and returns the HITs to the application through the resolver calls (gethostbyname, getaddrinfo).

Q: I don't have DNS server. How can I test HIP?
A: You can put your peer host's HIT and IP address in to /etc/hosts file e.g:

2001:13:b9b7:bcdd:6371:82b4:c8db:1672 hippeer
10.1.10.202 hippeer

Q: Does your implementation support OPPORTUNISTIC mode?
A: Unfortunately our current implementation does NOT support OPPORTUNISTIC mode.

Q: Which of your releases support LSIs?
A: All our releaseses support LSIs.

Q: How can I get an LSI for a host?
A: LSI is 1.x.x.x where x.x.x is the 24 lowest bits of the host HIT. The LSI is resolved similarly as HITs. The application should call the gethostbyname which then returns the LSI instead of an IP address if the FQDN resolves to a HIT and a set of IP addresses.

Q: Can a client application that supports only IPv4 communicate with IPv6 server
A: Yes it can because the client application sees the peer host as an LSI which then is mapped to a HIT. Simple way to demostrate it is to run in the initiator telnet -4 peerfqdn then you should see that the telnet application Trying statement should have 1.x.x.x as an address which is the LSI of your peer. When you have logged in run the command w and the FROM field should contain the initiator HIT. Note: You have to enable telnet6 server from your inetd.conf at the peer node

Q: Can a client application that supports only IPv6 communicate with IPv4 server
A: The answer is the same as above but in this case you must bind the server to the LSI. If you have server that listen's to INADDR_ANY then it wont work. The server application must bind to LSI.

Q: I have only one machine how can I test the HIP?
A: We have a HIP server running in our network. You should be able to ping the machine using HIP. If your host is connected to IPv4 network then run command ping6 woodstock4.hip4inter.net (yes, you MUST use ping6 NOT ping). If your host is connected to IPv6 network then run command ping6 woodstock6.hip4inter.net.