Interested in DHCPv6?

Simon Hobson dhcp1 at thehobsons.co.uk
Fri Jun 30 20:03:47 UTC 2006


Keith.Neufeld at wichita.edu wrote:

>To throw in my $.02, I still hold out hope that there will be an ISC
>DHCPv6 server.  I've found the software quality, the project management,
>and the support community for ISC's DHCP(v4) server to be absolutely
>topnotch in the open source world, and I dread having to switch DHCP to
>something that might work and be supported no better than various other
>pieces of software I've used.

I'll second that, and add that it would be nice if there were some 
commonality* between the ip4 and ip6 servers - that way us poor 
sysadmins wouldn't have to learn yet another totally new bit of 
software (just learning to admin IP6 could be enough fun for one day).

* Yes I know there's a lot of differences, but I'm sure there's a lot 
of common stuff as well. Little details like not having a virtually 
identical config structure EXCEPT for needing quotes in slightly 
different places (cf dhcpd vs bind) !

Random thoughts that come to mind (as someone who hasn't used ip6 
yet) include :


Could they share a common config file ? Or are they best kept as 
completely separate entities ?


Would it be easier for sysadmins to do some intelligent stuff, or 
keep separate options ? Eg, would it be better to have :

option domain-name-servers=dns0.domain.com;dns1.domain.com;
option domain-name-servers6=dns60.domain.com;dns61.domain.com;

or just :

option domain-name-servers=dns0.domain.com;dns1.domain.com;

and the server take care of only giving ip4 address with ip4 leases, 
and ip6 addresses with ip6 leases ? I'm assuming in this latter case 
that dns0.domain.com might resolve to a.b.c.d in ip4 space, and 
1234:5678::90ab in ip6 space for example.

Supplemental to that, how will the current server behave if resolving 
a fqdn returns both an A and an AAAA record ?


How do dual-stack machines handle resolver config ? Do they have a 
separate config for the IP6 stack, or else how do they manage two 
separate dhcp clients playing with one config file ?


How are multiple ip6 leases managed, I believe multiple addresses are 
a standard feature of IP6 ? How does that fit in with changes 
planned/under way with the current server and how it handles client 
identity ?


Simon


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