[75210] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Iljitsch van Beijnum)
Tue Nov 9 03:25:30 2004
In-Reply-To: <6.1.2.0.2.20041108170511.06b27378@mail.amaranth.net>
Cc: NANGO Gripes <nanog@merit.edu>
From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 09:25:02 +0100
To: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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.
