IPv6 Network Administration

Management

Any moderate-size network will have mechanisms for the automatic configuration and monitoring of the network. We've already talked about IPv6 autoconfiguration, but we'll mention DHCPv6 in this section again. We'll also take a look at the state of SNMP for IPv6.

Running DHCPv6

At the time of writing, the 800-pound gorilla of DHCP implementations, ISC DHCPd, does not support IPv6. More importantly, most of the operating systems we have mentioned do not yet support configuration via DHCPv6.

If you cannot wait, there are a variety of implementations out there. For example, HP provide a dhcpv6d for HP-UX, and also include a client. KAME has a minimal DHCPv6 implementation, which isn't really designed for managing addresses, but can provide simple additional configuration information. In particular, it can be used to distribute the address of the local DNS server. The setup of their small server and client programs is described at http://www.kame.net/newsletter/20030411/. The only additional advice we can add is to explicitly specify the location of the client and server configuration files using the -c option to dhcp6c and dhcp6s.

There is a port of the KAME DHCPd to Linux available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhcpv6. It actually includes more complete address assignment features.

With respect to integrating the DHCP and DHCPv6 services, at the moment, the closest you can get is running the two in parallel from the same information and have both servers hand out static ...