DHCPv6, was: Re: IPv6 Finally gets off the ground

Mon Apr 16 22:34:06 UTC 2007

On 16-apr-2007, at 23:42, David W. Hankins wrote:

>> Router Advertisements let you automatically configure as many IPv6
>> addresses as you feel like.

> Remember that in XP, which Iljitsch recently cited to support his
> claim of "years of operating system support," you must click IPv6
> into your configuration.  It probably wants your XP install disc,
> or something like that.

You have to enable IPv6. After that, stateless autoconfiguration  
takes care of your addresses and default gateway. No support for DNS  
lookups over IPv6, though, as far as I've been able to discern.

But there are more operating systems than just Windows. Basic IPv6  
support has been available in most of them since the early 2000s.

> "There has been router and operating system support for years" is
> a statement which predicates that the World has no technical excuse
> for not running IPv6 globally edge-to-edge already.

That's an interesting way of putting it. I would concede that you  
can't reasonably run IPv6-only today, the DNS situation being an  
important reason for that.

But if you want to run dual stack, and you're willing to get rid of  
some old stuff to accomplish that, you should be able to.

I've been running IPv6 for years, literally longer than I can  
remember. In the beginning. I could only ping6 and traceroute6 from a  
FreeBSD box. These days, I ssh and ftp over IPv6, read and send email  
from/to my server over IPv6, I visit IPv6-enabled web pages and more,  
all with software that came with the system without specifically  
enabling anything. (On a Mac.)

Some people even run IPv6 without realizing it. This is common at  
RIPE and IETF meetings and the like, where there is a conference  
network with one or more IPv6 routers. And the first home gateway  
that provides IPv6 connectivity out of the box has arrived in the  
form of the latest Apple Airport Express base station.

> RTADV won't help you here (tho they keep talking about putting
> domain-search and nameservers in it), and neither will DHCPv6
> as it turns out (it carries a domain-search list, but not "your
> domain suffix" which is more what WPAD should really want).

> This is not "years of operating system support."

> What has had "years of operating system support," is the
> unfortunate practice of acquiring option code 252 in DHCPv4.

Yes, despite the incredible level of IPv6 activity in the IETF some  
rather fundamental things never got the attention they needed. It  
reminds me of the situation with ISDN 11 years ago. Dial-up was  
pretty mature by then, and worked without much trouble. However,  
connecting to an ISP over ISDN was a nightmare of incompatible  
framings, hand-installing drivers and the like. However, the main  
issue was that there wasn't a generally accepted standard way of  
doing things. Once everyone settled on synchronous PPP and the  
drivers were tailored for that, it was smooth sailing.

The same thing will happen for IPv6 DNS etc configuration once people  
realize that running dual stack isn't a long term solution.