Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 20:19 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467)
Parent article: Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

This was a helpful article, but the "with Ubuntu 10.10" part appears to be irrelevant. The author didn't integrate his changes via /etc/network/ as far as I can tell, and left a number of questions open. What is this router advertisement daemon? It doesn't seem to be a replacement for DHCPv6, it seems like something more along the lines of zeroconf. How does it work and what are the dangers?

Aside from distro integration, can I have a purely ipv6 LAN and still use PXE? If not, what are the benefits and drawbacks of running v6 and v4 on the LAN at once?

to post comments

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 20:48 UTC (Wed) by CrackerJackMack (guest, #66114) [Link] (2 responses)

Aside from distro integration, can I have a purely ipv6 LAN and still use PXE? If not, what are the benefits and drawbacks of running v6 and v4 on the LAN at once?

The PXE specification uses only IPv4. You will need to look at and work on gPXE (etherboot.org) to even think about getting PXE over IPv6 working. I believe there was a GSoC project for it. There is not a disadvantage to running dual stack just for PXE booting. But use gPXE anyway so you can avoid TFTP after the initial load.

Router advertisments are no good for PXE booting as you can't pass options through it (it's ICMPv6) and is not a replacement for DHCPv6. The concept was based on zeroconf, but it actually works (minus DNS, though there is work going on for that).

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 21:12 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

It does not seem to be practical to run pure v6 on the LAN anyway. I just checked my switch and it supports management only via v4, and I'm sure there are many other embedded things without v6 stacks.

Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 22:35 UTC (Wed) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link]

Things are getting there. A lot of what's driving IPv6 adoption at the moment is very large enterprises needing to address all their manageable devices and not having enough 1918 addresses to do so without the yuckiness of internal NAT and overlapping address space. Apparently Dell's iDRAC systems have had IPv6 support for more than a year now:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2009/06/mor...