On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2012-01-21, Michael Mol <[email protected]> wrote: >> Thinking about it, in your device's case, I suspect you won't want >> link-local scope to be your only IPv6 address; > > You're right. We don't plan on supporting only link-local IPv6 > addressing. But, I wanted to get all the basic features from the > IPv4-only version working and tested before I started worrying about > DHCPv6, router advertisements, or adding support for a user-configured > static IPv6 address. I was surprised how difficult it was to use > link-local addresses on the development host (Gentoo) side of things. > After banging my head against the wall trying to use link-local > addresses, I've now added the capability to configure a static IPv6 > address (and I set up a ULA subnet for my testing). > > Now, I can use Firefox instead of curl, and I can assign the device a > hostname via Gentoo's /etc/hosts file.
Cool. >> Something you might think about: Register a ULA subnet, and configure >> your devices to use it. That would allow the network operators at >> destination sites to include network routing as a means to >> restrict/allow access to it. You'll also want to allow configuration >> of global-scope addresses via RAs and DHCPv6. (Though >> enabling/disabling that on initial device setup will be interesting; >> Having a ULA address preconfigured when you ship would be much like >> one's SOHO router being preconfigured with '192.168.0.220" on its >> internal interface. > > That's basically how the existing device works with IPv4 it comes with > a pre-configured static address -- however, there are Windows and > Linux management apps (that don't use IP) that the customer can use to > change that static IP address (the most common use-case) or to using > DHCP (very rare). I assume we'll update the management apps to handle > configuration of IPv6 as well. Here's an elucidation of what I was thinking. I'll assume the company building the product builds many embedded systems. I was thinking you could use an assumed ULA prefix as associated with all of these products, e.g. fd62:f67b:fcb9::/48.[1] You've then got 32 bits of address space for product organization and categorization before you come down to a /64, whereupon each device in the line gets its own unique address derived from its MAC. You could then either have the device broadcast an RA for that /64 or manually configure another host to use that /64 to access that device's initial configuration interface. Anyway, that's what I was thinking there. Just food for thought. :) [1] I used an Android app which implements RFC4193 to generate this prefix; you'd obviously want to come up with your own prefix. -- :wq
