IPv6 Network Administration

Network Design

Just as in IPv4 network design, any engineer with responsibility for deploying, migrating or inter-operating with IPv6 will have to have a plan for answering the three main questions of networking:

1. How do we address things?

2. How do we route things?

3. How do we name things?

The topic of primary importance is obviously addressing, but we will also talk about intra-site communication, multihoming, and VLANs. DNS we talk about primarily in Chapter 6. (For the moment, suffice it to say that you can put IPv6 addresses in the DNS just as well as IPv4 ones.)

Addressing

Planning the addressing of networks in IPv6 is simpler than IPv4. The algorithm to use is to first identify which networks under your control require distinct prefixes. You might assign different prefixes in order to apply different security or QoS properties to groups of addresses. When you've decided on your subnets, you then need to decide on automatic or manual addressing. In the automatic configuration scenario envisaged by RFC 2462, the addressing within a prefix is taken care of by the usual EUI-64 procedure. Conversely, in a manually configured situation, the same procedures with respect to address allocation within a prefix will have to be undergone as with IPv4: recording which machines have which addresses, and so on.

As in IPv4, you can of course still manually assign addresses. However, manual address assignment is considered harmful for many common pieces of network equipment. For example, assigning static ...