Re: IPV6 renumbering painless?

["Christopher L. Morrow" <christopher.morrow () mci com>]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Simon Leinen wrote:

> Daniel Roesen writes:
> > On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 08:44:57AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > > We have renumbered IPv6 space a couple of times when we were
> > > developing our addressing plan. (We have a /32.) Renumbering was
> > > pretty trivial for most systems, but servers requiring a fixed
> > > address were usually configured with an explicit prefix. This
> > > should not have been the case, but most people configured IPv6
> > > addresses pretty much like IPv4 and specified the entire 128
> > > bits. Of course, after a renumbering, this gets fixed, so those
> > > systems are usually OK the next time.
>
> > "specified the entire 128 bits"... how do you specify only part of
> > it?
>
> On Solaris, you would use the "token" option (see the extract from
> "man ifconfig" output below).  You can simply put "token ::1234:5678"

one presumes solaris <> 7 or 8 then, which solaris would this be in?

> : man ifconfig | grep token
Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done

I'd note that a simple:
echo "up" >> /etc/hostname6.hme0

will get you 'autoconfigured' v6 on solaris 8 though, and add to
/etc/inet/ipnodes:
<node address> <node name>

and fix /etc/nsswitch.conf:
ipnodes:    files dns

after that, ping/traceroute/telnet/ftp all work correctly with ipv6. I was
cursing sun/solaris until I figured that part out :)

> I think it's an advantage if servers can get their prefixes from
> router announcements rather than from local config files.  Sure, you
> still have to update the DNS at some point(s) during renumbering, but
> that can't be avoided anyway.

and change that all when the interface on the server fries out and a
replacement is put into the box, with a new 'autoconfigured' ip address...
or if your 'service' is a virtual ip on a server... things get
complicated, it's 'fun' :) Autoconfig has it's place, which is far from
'everywhere'.

-chris
ipv6-n00b