IPv6 Network Administration

ICMPv6

TCP and UDP have both remained unchanged from IPv4 to IPv6. ICMP is a very different story, as ICMPv6 encompasses the roles filled by ICMP, IGMP and ARP in the IPv4 world. Some aspects of ICPMv6 will be familiar to those who have worked with their IPv4 equivalents: ICMP Echoes and Errors, for example. However, the most important changes are in the area of neighbor discovery, which will be unfamiliar to IPv6 newcomers. We discuss this in the Section 3.4.2 section later in this chapter.

ICMP Echoes and Errors

RFC 2463 covers the part of ICMPv6 that is most similar to the familiar parts of ICMPv4. It covers ICMP Echo Requests and Replies, which are used to implement the well-known ping program. It also covers ICMP errors, which are returned when there is a problem with a packet: Destination Unreachable (because of routing, packet filtering or other unavailability), Packet Too Big, Time Exceeded (when the packet has travelled too many hops) and Parameter Problem (unknown or bad headers).

Out of Time

The original Time to Live field in IPv4 was supposed to be the maximum number of seconds a packet could live in the network before being discarded. In practice, this field was decremented by one by every router that forwarded the packet, regardless of how long the router had held the packet for. Thus, Time to Live is really the largest number of hops a packet can travel.

This has been recognized in IPv6, and the field is now called Hop Limit. However, the ICMPv6 message generated when ...