Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

Tue Nov 9 08:25:02 UTC 2004

On 8-nov-04, at 23:42, Daniel Senie wrote:

>> Setting up local v6 addressing for this reason seems like a bad idea 
>> because there is no NAT and no global connectivity, so the box will 
>> need some automated configuration protocol in any case.

> Autoconfiguration is probably not the answer to every piece of routing 
> gear or every embedded system built. I guess designers will need to 
> continue installing a serial port on every device to ensure there is 
> some way to get into the device and configure it if autoconfiguration 
> isn't able to conquer the world.

This is a solved problem. For instance, Apple sells wifi base stations 
that don't have a console port. When you turn the base station on, it 
will grab a link local address (169.254.0.0/16 in IPv4) and announce 
its presence using multicast DNS / zeroconf (Rendezvous in Applespeak). 
The configuration software can thus easily build a list of available 
base stations so the admin can configure them.

However, there is a caveat as a host with a "real" address can't 
generally talk with one that has an 169.254.x.x address. In IPv6 this 
isn't a problem because all hosts must have link local addresses in 
addition to any global addresses.