[Planetlab-devel] IPv6 support for MyPLC

[Marc E. Fiuczynski]

Hi Jim + *,

Thanks for the feedback.  The problem with static IPv6 assignment is that it
involves some sort of central/coordinated management.  It is not clear that
we can request 300+ sites to set this up on our behalf, especially as we
insist to be on the outside of firewalls etc.  Before resorting to such a
solution (which I personally consider a cop out and IPv6 not delivering on
its promise), I wanted to explore what one could do with the EUI.
Continuing the search for a reasonable zero-admin autoconf solution, my
sense is that we could do the following:

1) acquire a 24bit IEEE company id + assign some random 24 bit value and
rely on DaD to ensure uniqueness

or

2) overload the special 15bit value for EUI/MAC-48 encapsulation into EUI-64
and hope it wont conflict with IPv6 over firewire

or

3) leverage the fact that all PL nodes will be dual stacked and that each
physical link will have a proper IPv4 address that is either statically
assigned or obtained by an existing DHCP server to generate a unique EUI
that identifies the VM.  One idea is to leverage something that essentially
looks like a IPv4-mapped-IPv6 address, except that it is permitted to have a
proper IPv6 prefix.  E.g., suppose the host is assigned 128.112.139.71, then
its corresponding link local address could be fe80::ffff:128.112.139.71,
right?!  We can now use the unused upper 16bits to uniquely identify each
sliver.  E.g., sliver #500 would be fe80::500:ffff:128.112.139.71.

Thoughts?

Marc