Nginx with IPv6 and vhosts

Linode.com has recently setup IPv6 natively and is deploying it across their data-centers.  This is great as I now have a native IPv6 address for my VPS.

I use Nginx as a replacement for Apache and I noticed today that my vhosts where not correctly responding on the IPv6 address.  Since I use a wildcard for my subdomains, it still would respond with my main domain, but it wouldn’t recongize any additional or subdomain.  From the configuration documentation it makes it sound like I only need to add “listen [::]:80;” to my vhosts in order to get this to work.  However despite my tries I received an error:

[emerg]: bind() to [::]:80 failed (98: Address already in use)

All documentation supports the suggested command and some suggest running the sockets separately (by adding ip6only=on to that listen).  However this still failed to make it work.

So, after going through all my configs, test configs (for test subdomains I have) and disabling any listen directives (which broke a few things), I still couldn’t get it to work.  In the end I am not quite sure how I got it to work.  I even checked with “lsof -i :80” to see anything that might of been running and couldn’t find anything.

But what I did to finally get this to work right was add this to my default config (ie for my main domain):

listen 80 default;
listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on;

Then for each other vhost I added:

listen [::]:80;

This seems to make things work without any problem.  No errors whatsoever and ipv6 responds as it should.

As a final note, I should mention my ISP does not natively support IPv6 yet.  I am using a tunnel broker via HE.