[CUWiN-Dev] RADVD and Domain Names

[David Young]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 06:53:52PM -0600, Quantum Scientific wrote:
> Asking this here, in case anyone's into advanced IPV6.
> 
> IPV6 does not need DHCP, instead using inherent IP allocation via ICMP6, 
> assigned by a RAdvD daemon on the gateway.
> 
> My ideal situation is where a machine calls out for an IP, stating its name in 
> the domain (turnip.garden.com), and gets an IPV6 IP from the server.  Because 
> the name was provided, the RAdvD server will then be able to record and know 
> which name in the domain is assigned to which interface/machine, for 
> resolvconf and dnsmasq to reference (like with IPV4 DHCP).  So while using 
> dynamic assignment of random IP's, I could still ping6 a node -name- without 
> having to know its IP all the time.
> 
> However I can't see that RAdvD is capable of this.  Is this possible?  If not, 
> is there another IPV6 advertising daemon that can do it?  I'm probably beyond 
> the technology again.

I doubt that name assignment is part of router advertisement, since
that would be a stateful extension to a stateless protocol.  Router
advertisement is a stateless protocol.  The router does not actually
assign anybody an IPv6 number, it just advertises prefixes.  Hosts make
unique IPv6 numbers by tacking an advertised prefix to the front of
their EUI64---it is the host's responsibility to ensure uniqueness.
If the router was going to assign names, it would have to remember which
names it had assigned already, so it wouldn't be stateless any longer.

In the stateless configuration pattern, a router could advertise domain
names, and the hosts could "claim and defend" an arbitrary name in
that domain.  E.g., the router advertises cuwireless.net., my powerbook
chooses 'davez-powerbook.cuwireless.net.', and advertises the name to the
router [*] and the other hosts on the subnet using, say, Multicast DNS.
What I've just described is a hybrid of Multicast DNS and link-local
IPv4 auto-configuration.  I'm sure that somebody has already described
a similar protocol in a proposal for IETF.

BTW, there is something called DHCPv6.  That may be what you're after.

Dave

[*] Really, you want to auto-configure a host name with the help of the
    nameserver, not the router.

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933