On Linux this program is called radvd, which stands for Router ADVertisement Daemon. This daemon listens to router solicitations (RS) and answers with router advertisement (RA). Furthermore unsolicited RAs are also send from time to time.
These RAs contain information, which is used by hosts to configure their interfaces. This information includes address prefixes, the MTU of the link and information about default routers.
Of course the routers can't autoconfigure themself, so the information on the routers has to be provided by the administrator of the system. This is done by manually configuring the interfaces and routes and by configuring the router advertisement daemon.
A small and simple configuration file for radvd might look like this:
interface eth0 {
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix 5f15:9100:c2dd:1400:8000::0/80
{
AdvOnLink on;
AdvAutonomous on;
};
};
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Autonomous means that the prefix can be used for automatic address configuration and on-link means that the hosts can assume that all the hosts which use this prefix are reachable via the interface on which the host received this RA.
The prefix wasn't choosen randomly for this example, but was determined according to the rules outlined in RFC 1897 (IPv6 Testing Address Allocation). Furthermore the prefix length is also not freely choosen but is determined by the network media used. For ethernet the prefix lenght is 80 because the prefix combined with the ethernet hardware address, which is 48 bit long, yields a full 128 bit IPv6 address. See RFC 1971 (IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) and RFC 1972 (A Method for the Transmission of IPv6 Packets over Ethernet Networks) for details.
For more information on configuring radvd please look at the documentation which is included in the radvd distribution.
So when an interface on a hosts is UPed and a RA is received, the host can configure an address on the interface by using the prefix and appending the ethernet hardware address (also called link-layer token), for example:
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The host can also choose a default router by examining the RA. This means that an IPv6-only host merely has to UP its interfaces and the rest works automatically.
So now we've configured radvd, but we still need to configure the interfaces and set the routes (on the router). For simplicities sake we'll assume that there's only one interface and that the router communicates via tunnels with the "outer world".
Below is an example shell script which sets up IPv6 on a router. It's actually identical to the file I use on my router... :)
As you can see it adds the address and the route manually and also configures a IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel.
/etc/init.d/functions is a small collection of helper functions and is only needed for the killproc function which kills radvd on "stop". The directory /usr/ipv6/sbin is where I've installed the new IPv6 capable net-tools and radvd. It is added to the beginning of the PATH, so that the IPv6 capable tools are found before the old ones.
The script assumes that the "normal" interfaces (e.g. eth0) are already configured and UP (most certainly for IPv4).
---8<--------------------------------------------------------------------
#! /bin/sh
. /etc/init.d/functions
PATH=/usr/ipv6/sbin:/usr/ipv6/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
export PATH
case "$1" in
start)
# enable forwarding
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv6/ipv6_forwarding
# get IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels up (enables automatic tunneling to 0::0/96)
ifconfig sit0 up
# configure the local interface
ifconfig eth0 add 5f15:9100:c2dd:1400:8000:0080:ad1c:22ca/80
route -A inet6 add 5f15:9100:c2dd:1400:8000::0/80 dev eth0
# if you're on the 6bone you can setup tunnels like shown below.
# every ifconfig sit0 tunnel 0::<other-tunnel-endpoint-ip>
# creates a new sit interface. they're named sequentially (sit1,
# sit2, sit3 and so on)
# setup a tunnel to NRL
ifconfig sit0 tunnel 0::132.250.90.5
ifconfig sit1 up
route -A inet6 add 5f00::0/8 gw fe80::132.250.90.5 dev sit1
# setup a tunnel to G6
ifconfig sit0 tunnel 0::129.88.26.1
ifconfig sit2 up
route -A inet6 add 5f06:b500::/32 gw fe80::129.88.26.1 dev sit2
# start router advertisement daemon
radvd
;;
stop)
killproc radvd
ifconfig sit0 down
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/ipv6 {start|stop}"
exit 1
esac
exit 0
---8<--------------------------------------------------------------------