Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

Every so often an IPv6 router is supposed to send out Router Advertisements saying what IPv6 range(s) should be used on this subnet allowing a host to autoconfigure itself by appending it's MAC address to the IPv6 address and using that. So it's kinda like a built in DHCP.

Some gotcha's

  • You need to configure linux boxen to send RouterAdvertisements, either by running radvd(8)? (Router Adverisement Dameon) or by using zebra(8)? or the like.
  • You don't want to DHCP routers, so if you forward packets you aren't allowed to auto configure yourself. Kinda makes sense.
  • You don't want to DHCP servers, so machines that run services should be manually configured with an IP address, if they aren't, they will auto configure themselves an address.
  • Router configuration doesn't send out DNS servers or anything like that. I guess you're supposed to use AnyCast, except I don't know of anyone doing AnyCast DNS serving.

Other than that, it means that desktop machines and the like just plugin and work, no configuration necessary. Very cool.

Here's a page about how to configure RouterAdvertisements on debian, (although it's not very Debian specific): http://people.debian.org/csmall/ipv6/setup.html