[pkg-dhcp-devel] Bug#670865: IPv6 status on Debian for workstations / DHCP networks?

[Daniel Pocock]

On 06/07/13 18:25, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 03:59:41PM -0700, Kenyon Ralph wrote:
>> On 2013-07-05T10:38:44-0400, Michael Richardson <mcr at sandelman.ca> wrote:
>>> Daniel Pocock <daniel at pocock.com.au> wrote:
>>>     >> dhcpd does not have to run on the router.  DHCPv6 servers are found by
>>>     >> multicast.  Unless you set M=1 in your RAs, your hosts will not use
>>>     >> DHCPv6 for address allocation, so it makes little sense to attempt to
>>>     >> tie DNS updates to DHCPv6 in my opinion.
>>>     > I've configured radvd on the router for M=1 - so all hosts should be
>>>     > using DHCPv6 and therefore DDNS should be maintained
>>> okay.... my observation is that client side dhcpv6 is unusual still at this
>>> point.  Certainly none of my phone/tablet devices will do that, and they all
>>> speak ipv6 RA just fine.
>> Windows 7, Mac OS X, and iOS devices, to name some examples that I've
>> seen, have done client-side DHCPv6 correctly by default for a while.
> As should Debian Wheezy with network-manager. (It also does RDNSS, but that can
> be tricky to send with non-OSS gear.)

The original intent of my question was about what mechanism is offered
for those people who choose not to use NetworkManager (I'm assuming that
NM will support all these permutations of SLAAC and DHCPv6 in a plug and
play manner)

For IPv4, if somebody doesn't want NM, they can just put

iface eth0 inet dhcp

in their interfaces file and it works for just about any network.  Since
wheezy, the line "send host-name = gethostname();" was added to
dhclient.conf, Debian machines have also been automatically added to
dynamic DNS wherever the DHCP server supports it[1]

My feeling is that IPv6 doesn't currently give this type of "one-liner"
plug and play experience and given that people are accustomed to this
convenience, they will feel deterred by IPv6 if it takes any of these
things away from them.

The DDNS issue is one thing that Debian appears to have deferred on for
the moment[2] and when Ubuntu tried to fix it[3] they ran into trouble
and rolled back[4].  I think this is an issue that should be driven from
Debian though.

1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=151820

2. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=670865

3. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/isc-dhcp/+bug/991360

4. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/isc-dhcp/+bug/1088682

(I've CC'd the Debian bug on this message so that it will have the
information about the Ubuntu experience)