Bug 695782

Summary: Improve clarity of IPv6 usage syntax in ssh man page
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Reporter: Justin I. Nevill <jnevill>
Component: opensshAssignee: Jan F. Chadima <jchadima>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: BaseOS QE Security Team <qe-baseos-security>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 5.5CC: mdimaio, rdassen
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2011-04-12 17:00:53 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Justin I. Nevill 2011-04-12 16:56:23 UTC
Description of problem:
In the ssh utilities, IPv6 addresses need to be enclosed in square brackets "[]". The man page specifies this in descriptions of port forwarding options (-L, -R. -D), but there is no other indication of this requirement.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
n/a


How reproducible:
Always.


Steps to Reproduce:
1. man ssh
  
Actual results:
Initially the customer thought IPv6 was not working at all since this detail was not specified.


Expected results:
A simple "IPv6 note" in all the ssh man pages. A note could also be added for the "-6" switch description, however that option is only to force IPv6, so the square bracket necessity can apply to other cases as well.


Additional info:
I would recommend something like the following (based on the hostaccess(5) man page):

$ diff -c old new
*** old	2011-04-12 12:52:36.000000000 -0400
--- new	2011-04-12 12:53:40.000000000 -0400
***************
*** 1,2 ****
       ssh connects and logs into the specified hostname (with optional user name).  The user must prove his/her identity to the
!      remote machine using one of several methods depending on the protocol version used (see below).
--- 1,3 ----
       ssh connects and logs into the specified hostname (with optional user name).  The user must prove his/her identity to the
!      remote machine using one of several methods depending on the protocol version used (see below).  If hostname is of the
!      form `[n:n:n:n:n:n:n:n]/m´ it is interpreted as an IPv6 host address.

Comment 1 J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) 2011-04-12 17:00:53 UTC
Closing as a duplicate of 695783 which follows the RFE process conventions.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 695783 ***