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Exact Globe consists of a network share containing an installer, and an SQL Server. Clients map the network drive and install the software on their computer.
File sharing
Windows 2008 R2 support does SMB (File sharing) over IPv6-only without any problems:
Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) does not work with IPv6. But because this was a piece of junk anyway, nothing is lost here.
SQL Server
Once installed, the Exact software then initiates a connection to TCP port 1433 of an SQL Server. In our case this is the same server.
The old (Windows 2003) server runs SQL Server 2000, but starting from release 404 (July 2012), the Exact software does not support this any more. So I had to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2.
That software This supports IPv6 just fine, but I was a bit wary of potential client side issues. All . All users in accounting all run Windows 7, so the operating system itself shouldn't be a problem.While , but I was a bit wary of potential client side application issues. While testing I quickly found out that the Exact application was using ODBC, which did support IPv6 right away, so the application works on IPv6 .
Delta software
This is another piece of proprietary software , this time made by Dutch company BCS HRM en Salarisadministratie B.V..
Recently we bought a server license, and after some research I found out that is made up of a network share with files, and a database component.
The network share can do IPv6 as mentioned earlier. The database component turns out to be
Sybase SQL AnyWhere
The database is a Windows Service, based on a file called dbeng11.exe
. It's not stated as such in the BCS documentation, but this is an instance of Sybase SQL AnyWhere version 11.Personal Server:
The BCS support desk Again the vendor had no clue what IPv6 was, so I did some research myself, and it actually looked good right away.
Apparently Sybase does support IPv6 already for years. The earliest doc I could find was for version 10 (from 2006).
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There is a nice and very clear PDF that explains SQL AnyWhere networking essentials. According to this document, SQL AnyWhere supports IPv6 from version 10, which is from 2006. Version 11 and 12 support it explicitly. These links were docs came in handy , because the software needed some custom they list some special connection options that I needed.
Since we only have one instance of SQL Anywhere, which is running in a different network than the clients, I figured it didn't make much sense to implement the broadcast/multicast stuff that is needed for the service discovery. Instead, I hardcoded the server FQDN, which worked fine. After opening up TCP port 2638 to the appropriate IPv6 addresses, the software worked
Crypto
I wasn't really sure if the SQL Server traffic was plain text or not, and after running Wireshark it turned out that is wasn't...
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