[Planetlab-devel] IPv6 support for MyPLC

[Marc E. Fiuczynski]

Hello,

Here is a summary of what we can do for:

> 2) How to get the IPv6 addresses assigned to slivers into DNS?

For 2), regardless of how we assign addresses to slice (or virtual
machines), we will need a solution to look up a sliver's unique IPv6
address.  There are two approaches that I can think of.

a) We can support a dynamic DNS solution at the planet-lab.org DNS server
such that requests for $slivername.$planetlabhost.nodes.planet-lab.org will
resolve to the correct IPv6 address.  The drawback is that there is only one
primary DNS server and if communication to this DynDNS server fails, then
the slice's IPv6 address wont be registered/available.  The benefit of this
approach is that it requires now coordination with the sites that host
PlanetLab nodes.

b) We can put a DynDNS server into the root context of each PlanetLab host
such that it forward resolves the IPv6 addresses of the slivers it hosts.
This addresses the scalability / reliability issues from the solution above
where we only have one primary DNS server.  The drawback is that we need to
ask (and convince) each site to configure their DNS servers to delegate
name looks up to the appropriate PlanetLab nodes that they host.  Another
drawback is that DNS doesn't lend itself well to slice churn on the order of
minutes or hours (e.g., for the short term experiments that folks like
EMULAB would like to run on a PL based system).

Maybe a combo DNS solution of a&b, where the DynDNS server from a) acts
either as a primary when sites do not agree to do b), or as a secondary to
the DNS servers on the PlanetLab hosts themselves.

Marc