[6bone] Some dumb questions

[Chuck Yerkes]

Quoting John Andrews (john at silverhighway.com):
> As a relative newbie to IPv6 I have to ask dumb questions.

A boss taught me:
   "There is no dumb question.  Except for what you're about to ask me now"
(I quit that job)

> 1. How easy is it to setup an IPv6 host for DNS?
Simple.
foo.example.com   IN AAAA    3ffe:666:1:6::2

> 2. How do I add an AAAA record into DNS?
See above.

> 3. Is it possible for an IPv6 host to find an IPv4 host using DNS?
Sure, in DNS.
> 4. Is it possible for an IPv4 host to find an IPv6 host using DNS?
Sure, in DNS.
> 5. There must be some sort of gateway between IPv4 and IPv6 to allow two-way communication. How is this done?
Depends on OS.
> 6. Is it possible to setup an IPv6-only mail server? How does the mail exchanger record work in this case?
Yes. (below)
> 7. Is it possible to setup an IPv6-DNS server?
Sure, why not?
> 8. Where do I find resources on IPv6 autoconfiguration and how to set it up?
Depends on OS somewhat.  Books to.
> 9. Are there IPv6 DHCP/bootp servers available and what software do they use?

Dunno, seems kinda redundant to lots of the autoconf stuff.


okay, I have a machine with IPv6 running on it.  It may be
able to reach 6 hosts on the internet, or might be isolated on
my internal LAN.

I want to ssh to "host.example.com"

my ssh will look for an AAAA record for "host.example.com"
  Found?  -> try to connect to it?
      Connected?  -> done.
If *either* of those fail, then back down to IPv4.

Easy.

I have 2 hosts on a segment using 6 they will, if their client
speaks it (smtp, ssh, dsn, telnet, sql, whatever), use IPv6.  If
the client (nfs on many OSs) doesn't, it will use IPv4.

Hey, my whole segment is using IPv6!  And across the router (which
can use IPv6, another segment has IPv6.  we'll all talk IPv6 happily
and IPv4 to the other segments (see, we can SLOWLY introduce IPv6
to a network).

Hey, the whole damn LAN has IPv6 (except perhaps for those stupid
Jetdirect cards and that 1991 terminal server (this would be my house)).
Some machines use IPv4 for NFS (that's ok), but about everything else
if IPv6.

I go out the gateway and *it* speaks IPv6 to 6bone machines.
But I have "faithd" running (BSD) to translate IPv4 requests down
to IPv4.

All the IPv4 addresses are inside a small chunk of the IPv6 address space.
(what's 32 bits when we have 128?).