Choosing an open source DHCPv6 client

Bjørn Mork bjorn at mork.no
Tue Dec 22 14:07:52 CET 2009


Hello,

I'm wondering if I have missed something obvious, as I cannot really
find any open source DHCPv6 client which is either reasonably complete
or has some sort of development activity.  My main focus is PD support.

I've looked at these:

* KAME/WIDE wide-dhcpv6: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wide-dhcpv6/

 seems the most complete, but lacks reconfigure support and needs a few
 obvious bug fixes (most importantly: adding an unreacheable route for
 the delegated prefix to avoid routing loops)

 No(?) recent upstream activity, but the Debian maintainer is very
 responsive and has a few patches in his repository

* Dibbler: http://klub.com.pl/dhcpv6/
 
 seems to have had the highest recent activity, but the main (only?)
 developer has now announced that "Active development and non-critical
 bug fixing is on hold".  And the PD implementation is currently not
 useable (will assign a /48 to a single interface).

* RedHat dhcpv6: https://fedorahosted.org/dhcpv6/

 "No new development" announced, pointing to ISC dhcp version 4.1.0 as a
 replacement 

 Don't know the PD status.  The announcement is too discouraging to even
 bother checking.

* ISC: https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp

 Don't support PD (yet).  Will be interesting when it does.  But I'm not
 convinced the IPv4/IPv6 integration is a good idea.  It might help
 increase development resources though, which is definitely good.


* DHCPv6-linux: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhcpv6-linux/

 Seems to be used by OpenWRT (in addition to Dibbler)?  No activity.  No
 PD.  No future.



My choice so far has been the KAME/WIDE wide-dhcpv6, as it is in a
useable state.  But I cannot help thinking that if anyone else is
actually using this, then it is strange that the obvious bugs haven't
been fixed.  Are there no open source DHCPv6-PD users, or is it just me
not finding the correct client?

And which client are the CPE vendors going to use?  With a few
exceptions, I can't imagine them all implementing DHCPv6 themselves.
That would be a nightmare...


Bjørn


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