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Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on September 30, 2007 at 01:02 local (server) time

Looks like draft-jeong-dnsop-ipv6-dns-discovery-12.txt recently turned into RFC 5006:

This document specifies a new IPv6 Router Advertisement option to allow IPv6 routers to advertise DNS recursive server addresses to IPv6 hosts.

Overall, I think it's a good idea.

Without this, RA's can only give end hosts a prefix and router address; it's up to the host itself to deal with DNS resolution.  This isn't enough for most small deployments, and I can see many folks turning to DHCPv6 solely for DNS server addresses, which is wasteful, and potentially opens security holes.  (I don't care if it's a hybrid deployment or a full-blown DHCPv6 environment)

This, on the other hand, allows small networks to operate entirely on RA's, and not worry about configuring an additional DHCPv6 services.  If things like NTP, WINS, etc. are needed, then DHCPv6 can be leveraged.  I suppose this opens the door for some of those options being added to RAs, too, which may not necessarily be the best path.

There's already a patch for Linux 2.6.22 out there based on the IETF draft…

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