Support for Internet Protocol version 6

HCL Workload Automation supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in addition to the legacy IPv4. To assist customers in staging the transition from an IPv4 environment to a complete IPv6 environment, HCL Workload Automation provides IP dual-stack support. In other terms, the product is designed to communicate using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously with other applications using IPv4 or IPv6.

To this end, the gethostbyname and the gethostbyaddr functions were dropped from HCL Workload Automation as they exclusively support IPv4. They are replaced by the new getaddrinfo API that makes the client-server mechanism entirely protocol independent.

The getaddrinfo function handles both name-to-address and service-to-port translation, and returns sockaddr structures instead of a list of addresses These sockaddr structures can then be used by the socket functions directly. In this way, getaddrinfo hides all the protocol dependencies in the library function, which is where they belong. The application deals only with the socket address structures that are filled in by getaddrinfo.