Should an IPv6 UDP socket that is set up to receive multicast packets also be able to receive unicast packets?

Question

I've got a little client program that listens on an IPv6 multicast group (e.g. ff12::blah:blah%en0) for multicast packets that are sent out by a server. It works well.

The server would also like to sometimes send a unicast packet to my client (since if the packet is only relevant to one client there is no point in bothering all the other members of the multicast group with it). So my server just does a sendto() to my client's IP address and the port that the client's IPv6 multicast socket is listening on.

If my client is running under MacOS/X, this works fine; the unicast packet is received by the same socket that receives the multicast packets. Under Windows, OTOH, the client never receives the unicast packet (even though it does receive the multicast packets without any problems).

My question is, is it expected that a multicast-listener IPv6 UDP socket should also be able to receive unicast packets on that same port (in which case perhaps I'm doing something wrong, or have Windows misconfigured)? Or is this something that "just happens to work" under MacOS/X but isn't guaranteed, so the fact that it doesn't work for me under Windows just means I had the wrong expectations?

Answer 1

It should work fine. As long as you bind to IN6ADDR_ANY, then join the multicast groups, you should be able to send and receive unicast packets with no problem.

It's important to bind to IN6ADDR_ANY (or INADDR_ANY for IPv4) when using multicast. If you bind to a specific interface, this breaks multicast on Linux systems.