[Dnsmasq-discuss] Do we have good way to register SLAAC clients?

[Petr Menšík]

Hello everyone.

I have attended IPv6 seminar yesterday (it was IPv6 day they said), 
where I have asked how to make similar registration of IPv6 address 
obtained by SLAAC with hostname of a client. They have said there 
Android is serious about not supporting DHCPv6 and that is not going to 
change except for Prefix Delegation.

Anyway, I have claimed on Fedora list [1] that the user friendly way to 
type IPv6 address is to type a name instead. Which is the best feature 
of dnsmasq I think, it provides DHCP clients registration in the dns 
out-of-the-box. Problem is SLAAC do not have any DHCP transaction, where 
they will tell us their name. So what works nicely on IPv4 networks, it 
does not on IPv6-only network. Or at least usually.

I thought whether a client on trusted network should try to use DNS 
UPDATE message  [2] on servers configured. Especially if the dns server 
is on the same network as the client, that might allow to "register" its 
name temporarily. If the client used domain sent over router 
advertisement message, would it be good idea to insert a limited time 
record just like for DHCP? Since there is no strong authentication in 
DHCP either, maybe we could accept update coming from the IP used in the 
record. And create also PTR record for it.

Is there any better way, how to provide more friendly names for IPv6 
devices? Sometime we want privacy instead, but that is not needed in 
trusted network like our own network. Apple devices use Multicast DNS to 
announce themselves anyway. Since IPv6 addresses are longer, they should 
have name resolution working by default. But they don't.

Do you know any best practice, how something similar is solved by other 
vendors? How should that be improved?

Cheers,
Petr

1. 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/Y4FBSNAO2NRWB3YAY6YWE5767ORZRSOY/
2. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2136

-- 
Petr Menšík
Software Engineer, RHEL
Red Hat, http://www.redhat.com/
PGP: DFCF908DB7C87E8E529925BC4931CA5B6C9FC5CB