Subj : IPv6/4 indicator
To   : Bj”rn Felten
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Thu Jun 23 2011 10:29:46

Hello Bj”rn,

On Wednesday June 22 2011 15:52, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> If you want IPv6 connectivity, "messing with IPv6 addresses"
 MvdV>> may be unavoidable.

I put your words in quotes to indicate they are your words. IMHO, it is not all that messy at all, I would have used the words "dealing with IPv6 addresses"

 BF>    It mustn't be. DHCP6 *does* exist.

It exist, but it is IPv4 think. Read on...

 MvdV>> How about that Linksys with USB addition? Have you give up?

 BF>    Yes, it still doesn't work for me -- and each time I try it I have
 BF> a helluvva time getting the old dd-wrt back into it.

Pity. It looked like a good idea....

 MvdV>> It seems to me that a dedicated router will makes things a lot
 MvdV>> more transparent.

 BF>    Actually I feel more free when using a dedicated "real" computer
 BF> for the job.


A linksys with DD-WRT *is* a dedicated real computer. As I found out to my surprise...

 MvdV>> Now take a step back and try to look at it from the POV of
 MvdV>> those that grew up with IPv4 *before* NAT.

 BF>    Why not go all the way to NetBIOS, where I started...? :)

I did not mean that you should go back and stay there. What I meant is go back to before NAt and take tho other side of the fork in the road. The road that does not have the sign "to NAT" on it. And move on from there.

Do you remember those very first cars? The ones with the driver out in the open and the passengers in a clsed compartment? They looked a lot like horse driven carriages with the horse removed and an enigine added. It took the engineers quite some time before they designed carriages not optimised for horses, but for combustion engines.

I see the same in the transition to IPv6. Lots of people that keep thinking "horses" instead of "automobiles".

 MvdV>> In IPv6 every interface that needs internet access get its own
 MvdV>> unique globally routable address.

 BF>    It's the *get* that I'm interested in, I don't want to *give* them
 BF> their addresses.

With stateless autoconfiguration you don't give the out. The systems configure themselves. That is why it is called AUTOconfiguration. A link local address is always generated. (fe80:xxx). If there is a router that sends out router advertisements, a unique global address will also be configured when a system is hooked up to the LAN.

http://tinyurl.com/8xzgl9

 BF>    That's just it. I plug in my customers computers here on the LAN
 BF> ever so often.

Customers? with your age.? ;-)


Well... If these are real customers - not just some distant friends and relatives that you help out for a crate of beer - but real customers that require professional service and pay accordingly, I would stop messing with XP machines moonlightig as routers and invest SK 2k for  state of the art router like the latest Fritzbox or Draytek. They have it all plus an isolated "guest" subnet.

 BF> And quite often I make a VMWare copy of them, so I don't have to
 BF> change anything at all for them -- plus I can access their copy over
 BF> the internet. But I don't want to mess with their network settings.

You don't have to. Stateless autoconfiguration is enabled by default. (For systems that have IPv6 enabled)

 BF> More often than not those settings are even disabled.

You mean IPv6 is diabled?

Cheers, Michiel

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