Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Link-local ipv6 address in /etc/hosts? in browsers?

[Michael Mol]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 2012-01-21, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote:
>> Thinking about it, in your device's case, I suspect you won't want
>> link-local scope to be your only IPv6 address;
>
> You're right.  We don't plan on supporting only link-local IPv6
> addressing. But, I wanted to get all the basic features from the
> IPv4-only version working and tested before I started worrying about
> DHCPv6, router advertisements, or adding support for a user-configured
> static IPv6 address.  I was surprised how difficult it was to use
> link-local addresses on the development host (Gentoo) side of things.
> After banging my head against the wall trying to use link-local
> addresses, I've now added the capability to configure a static IPv6
> address (and I set up a ULA subnet for my testing).
>
> Now, I can use Firefox instead of curl, and I can assign the device a
> hostname via Gentoo's /etc/hosts file.

Cool.

>> Something you might think about: Register a ULA subnet, and configure
>> your devices to use it. That would allow the network operators at
>> destination sites to include network routing as a means to
>> restrict/allow access to it. You'll also want to allow configuration
>> of global-scope addresses via RAs and DHCPv6. (Though
>> enabling/disabling that on initial device setup will be interesting;
>> Having a ULA address preconfigured when you ship would be much like
>> one's SOHO router being preconfigured with '192.168.0.220" on its
>> internal interface.
>
> That's basically how the existing device works with IPv4 it comes with
> a pre-configured static address -- however, there are Windows and
> Linux management apps (that don't use IP) that the customer can use to
> change that static IP address (the most common use-case) or to using
> DHCP (very rare). I assume we'll update the management apps to handle
> configuration of IPv6 as well.

Here's an elucidation of what I was thinking. I'll assume the company
building the product builds many embedded systems. I was thinking you
could use an assumed ULA prefix as associated with all of these
products, e.g. fd62:f67b:fcb9::/48.[1] You've then got 32 bits of
address space for product organization and categorization before you
come down to a /64, whereupon each device in the line gets its own
unique address derived from its MAC. You could then either have the
device broadcast an RA for that /64 or manually configure another host
to use that /64 to access that device's initial configuration
interface.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking there. Just food for thought. :)

[1] I used an Android app which implements RFC4193 to generate this
prefix; you'd obviously want to come up with your own prefix.

-- 
:wq