TABLE OF CONTENTS Autoconfiguration is an important feature of IPv6 as already emphasized in other chapters of this series of books. The Neighbor Discover protocol (Chapter 5 of IPv6 Core Protocols Implementation) has a significant role in this area, through the stateless address autoconfiguration mechanism and by providing the addresses of the default routers.
However, autoconfiguration is not only a matter of configuring addresses and default routers, but also of getting any other higher level information. One common and important example is the address of a recursive (caching) DNS server. The Neighbor Discovery protocol is intended to provide information specific to the network (and in some cases lower) layer, and cannot provide this type of higher level information. [1]
Meanwhile, the large address space that IPv6 can provide each end user creates a new challenge for site-level autoconfiguration. When home network users connect the local networks to their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and are allocated blocks of IPv6 addresses, how can these home users configure the entire local networks? In particular, the elimination of NAT as a result of introducing IPv6 means that the gateway to the ISP must act as a router. In the context of autoconfiguration, this also means we need automatic router configuration.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6), with its simple but powerful mechanism, fills in all the missing pieces, and, in some areas, is the only standardized solution.
This chapter discusses all the details of DHCPv6. It is organized as follows: Section 4.2...
