Pools and IPv6

[Simon Hobson]

sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:

>But then IPv6 DNS is another ball game in
>the first place (not obvious that reverse DNS make much sense, for
>instance).

OH, I think DNS, both forward and reverse, is far more important in 
IPv6 that IPv4. Most people can learn a handful of IPv4 addresses, I 
doubt the same can be said for IPv6 - I know our helpdesk are not 
looking forward to the day when they have to dictate over the phone 
something like "can you ping fe80::216:cbff:fe88:aab8 ?" (and that's 
only a short one).

Paolo Prandini wrote:

>I think the point here has been missed.
>We are an ISP, we would like to hand out IPv6 addresses like we do
>with IPv4 ones.

Then it just might have been an idea to mention that up front !

>Given a certain UID, the address given to the router and the subnet given
>to the customer (/48) have to stay the same even if something happens
>to our DHCP server. Let's imagine a customer that has a network of some
>10s or 100s PCs, all addresses have to change even those of internal
>servers if we change the subnet.

That's different to the normal request - though I have to say I've 
not seen it here for a while now. We used to get regular requests 
along the lines of "how can we make the address change every renew/x 
hours/whatever ?" to which the answer has always been that a) the 
server doesn't support it, and b) look for a new job because 
customers won't like it and will switch providers.

If you want to give customers static addresses, then you would 
probably be best doing just that rather than dynamic ones. I haven't 
played with IPv6 yet so I don't know what options are available to 
you.

What I can say is that if your clients have static addresses, then 
you do not need failover to provide multiple (can be more than 2) 
DHCP servers since each will always offer the same address. You would 
need your provisioning system to track which client (how's it 
identified ?) gets which address block and build the dhcp server 
config as required.


-- 
Simon Hobson

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