In Wireshark, we check that Router Advertisements are being sent periodically by the router (identified by its unique MAC) to the multicast address ff02::1 (to all hosts). These messages contains information about prefix information (global unique routable) and even the DNS to use.
Please note that all this work (of dynamic configuration) has been done without the use of DHCPv6 (IP version 6 of DHCP) or any centralized and configuration tracking solution.
Processing the host part of the IPv6 address
Another question that may arise is how my test PC calculates the interface or host part of the IPv6 address it uses? The presence of FFFE in the address indicates the use of the EUI-64 method that uses physical MAC addresses for this purpose, otherwise, it is a random value… which is another important security feature.
Let’s conclude and further our investigation
In this post we’ve introduced IPv6 using a simple example of a home network (setup). Some interesting features have been already shown including : the possbility for an interface to be configured with many routable or not routable, gloabl or unique, unicast, anycast or multicast, addresses at the same time; the no need to configure those interface manually or through DHCP to gain access to internet; some security applied to duplicate address detection, protocol message advertisement, etc.
In the next posts, we will focus on the operation of IPv6 in the core (internet) network and especially try to understand how our box wan interface gets configured with IPv6 information before it passes it to the local network. In the core network we would expect routing protocols such ISIS, OSPF, BGP, etc. that support the operation of IPv6… and services.
