[BUGS] Anyone for IPv6?

[Dean Hamstead]

Hi Andrew,

> Impending office moves and associated network migrations have me
> thinking about (more like wondering idly, really) IPv6 again.
> Is anyone here running an IPv6 internal network, rather than the
> usual NAT-gated IPv4 one?  Is that even possible, or do you have

Yes, you can also to ipv6 to the internet regardless of your carrier 
thanks to a number of tunneling solutions. Many of which are trivial to 
configure on DD-WRT and other open source gateways, and become 
transparent to the machines on your LAN.

> to maintain a working IPv4-NAT infrastructure so that your web
> browsers and mail clients and what-not can find IPv4 hosts on
> the wider internet?  (I.e., is there such a thing as an
> IPv6-to-IPv4 NAT gateway?)

There are mechanisms to deal with this, without resorting to NAT.

> Other idle questions: I believe that IPv6 does some form of
> LAN-based auto-config, based on MAC addresses, right?  So

Correct, all machines receive a link-local address. There are no 
broadcasts in ipv6, just multi-casts.

> there's no place for DHCP in an IPv6 network?  So what is the

There is, DHCP is useful for providing org-local and internet addresses. 
As well as for provisioning customer devices (cable, dsl,
ftth etc)

> IPv6 way for doing name resolution?  Do you use zero-conf/avahi
> to build the name database dynamically, or just manually enter
> the auto-generated local IPv6 addresses into your tinydns
> database, or ... (other options?)

That is a limitation with the link-local mechanism.

> Anyone have any good pointers to war-stories and howtos on the
> web?  It's been a while since I looked, but didn't have any joy
> the last time I did.

Check out this book from amazon, http://t.co/Ij1zoYE
Of all the ipv6 books ive purchased, its the only one worth reading.

Dean
-- 
http://fragfest.com.au