IPv6 in the enterprise

[Andrew Yourtchenko]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Erik Kline <ek at google.com> wrote:
> On 20 April 2011 10:17, Andrew Yourtchenko <ayourtch at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Asbjorn Hojmark - Lists
>> <lists at hojmark.org> wrote:
>>>> I don't understand what the benefits are of then using a GUA a
>>>> default gateway address on the end-nodes is.
>>>
>>> In practice, pinging a link-local address can be difficult for the end-users.
>>>
>>> A Windows user, for example, can't just "ping fe80::1" if he has multiple interfaces (most do). >They have to enter something like "ping fe80::1%10" and you won't know in advance which >interface number the end-user has to ping. The same goes for ping6 on a Linux machine, where >you can't just "ping6 fe80::1" but have to do something like "ping6 -I eth2 fe80::1".
>>
>> What about something like the below impro:
>>
>> ping6 `ip -6 route | grep default | awk '{ print fe80::1"%"$5; }'`
>
> What if instead %0 meant use the (lowest indexed, in case there's more
> than one) interface through which there exists a default route?
> Assuming 0 won't be a valid interface ID that might be handy.
> Alternatively, "%default" might be a handy syntax.

So this would hide the above alphabet soup into the OS. Even better.

There is one more useful property of this approach -  an app that
would sit e.g. on the routers and resend the packets to
ff02::2%default while encapsulating the information about the source
into the packet, would allow the border router to know the entirety of
the home net topology - and, with the use of RH0... oh, wait :-)

>
> I know this may seem strange, but I think such a thing may be handy in
> the future for support personnel trying to walk someone through
> debugging something over the phone.
>

I think it's not strange, it's useful. Speculating further: if we are
a-priori pinging the default gateway address, why do we need to
specify the address at all ? just shorten it to "ping6 %default" - and
then take the default gateway addr and the interface from the  routing
table ?

cheers,
andrew