[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#858351: ntpq: if connection to IPv6 address fails, retry with IPv4 address

[Paul Slootman]

Package: ntp
Version: 1:4.2.8p9+dfsg-2.1
Severity: wishlist

If ntpq tries to contact localhost via IPv6, and that fails because ntpd
isn't listening there, it doesn't try the IPv4 localhost address. It
would be great if it did try that.

This may also be seen as a documentation bug report, apparently running
ntpd with -4 option (which according to the manpage only affects DNS
name resolution) also prevents ntpd listening to ::1, and ntpq tries to
connect to ::1 port 123 and fails.

The problem is that I don't have IPv6 connectivity with the internet,
so ntpq resolves IPv6 addresses and tries to connect to them. I thought
that passing -4 would solve this, but apparently not just the resolving
is affected, all IPv6 processing is disabled.  Maybe split these two
aspects of IPv6 into separate options?


Thanks,
Paul

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.9-wurtel-ws (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Versions of packages ntp depends on:
ii  adduser    3.115
ii  dpkg       1.18.22
ii  libc6      2.24-9
ii  libcap2    1:2.25-1
ii  libedit2   3.1-20160903-3
ii  libopts25  1:5.18.12-3
ii  libssl1.1  1.1.0d-2
ii  lsb-base   9.20161125
ii  netbase    5.4

Versions of packages ntp recommends:
pn  perl:any  <none>

Versions of packages ntp suggests:
pn  ntp-doc  <none>

-- no debconf information