IPv6 Conventions

Wed May 18 15:04:09 UTC 2011

On 2011-May-18 16:44, Todd Snyder wrote:
> As I start working more and more with IPv6 and find myself having to address
> services, I am wondering if there are any sort of written or unwritten
> 'conventions'/best practices that are being adopted about how to address
> devices/servers/services.
> 
> Specifically:
> 
> 1) Is there a general convention about addresses for DNS servers? NTP
> servers? dhcp servers?
> 2) Are we tending to use different IPs for each service on a device?
> 3) Any common addresses/schemes for other common services?
> (smtp/snmp/http/ldap/etc)?

Depends mostly on personal preference I would say.
Same applies to IPv4 as IPv6.

If you want a service to map always to a specific IP, eg because you
anycast/failover-IP it, then a "service IP" makes sense.

If you have a smaller deployment then just a service per host and/or
using CNAMEs (except for MX :) can make sense.

> Similarly, I've been referring to
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xml for
> a list of the 'reserved' space - are there any other blocks/conventions
> around addressing that exist?

Only thing you might want to know is that 2000::/3 is global unicast,
that there is ULA and link-local. For the rest you don't need to know
anything about address blocks, just what the address space is that is
routed to you and that is what you get to use.

Except maybe for BGP where you want to limit what you want to
receive/announce. See google(gert ipv6) aka
http://www.space.net/~gert/RIPE/ipv6-filters.html for information on that.

> Finally, what tools do people find themselves using to manage IPv6 and
> addressing?  It seems to me that IPAM is almost required to manage IPv6 in
> any sane way, even for very small deployments (My home ISP gave me a /56 and
> a /64).

Textfiles, SQL databases. Depends on your need.

Greets,
 Jeroen