Forum - Got everything working, now, how do I assign a hostname to a dynamic address. :: SixXS

Got everything working, now, how do I assign a hostname to a dynamic address.

Shadow Hawkins on Thursday, 06 October 2011 19:39:54

Hi: I see all those wonderful features in SIXXS in which still need to learn about all the options (frankly, it is overwhelming). But that's ok... I have connectivity all the hosts are connected to the IPv6 domain. (with the exception of one stubborn Ubuntu laptop, but is the laptop's fault, but I digress). So... My "major" systems have a statically assigned IPv6 address. Minor systems (or client systems) use automatically generated addresses from radvd.conf. It works wonderfully. Now, how can I assign these dynamically assigned addresses to a legible, easy to type hostname? ?? It seems that you should not bother being that these are client systems, and if you want to do that; you have to assign a static address. Which is fine... But I wanted to make sure that I'm not missing other options on this. Luis

Got everything working, now, how do I assign a hostname to a dynamic address.

Shadow Hawkins on Thursday, 06 October 2011 20:20:02

Why not use DNS?

Got everything working, now, how do I assign a hostname to a dynamic address.

Shadow Hawkins on Thursday, 06 October 2011 21:23:40

Why not indeed? I guess I have to read more about DNS configuration. But I thought that DNS required to map a single address to a single name and that the address should not change. It is my understanding that the dynamic addresses even though these addresses are built from the MAC address, they are not permanently assigned to a host. Probably this is where I have it confused, because if that's the case, I could get by with creating host tables or NIS.

Got everything working, now, how do I assign a hostname to a dynamic address.

Jeroen Massar SixXS Staff

on Friday, 07 October 2011 11:25:13

But I thought that DNS required to map a single address to a single name

One can definitely do something like:

hostname AAAA 2001:db8::1 AAAA 2001:db8::2

But that of course only makes sense when those addresses are live otherwise applications need to try all of them, which is not a good thing.

and that the address should not change.

DNS has a per-record TTL (time to live) as such, one can set that very short and presto. This is what all these Dynamic DNS services are for.

It is my understanding that the dynamic addresses even though these addresses

are built from the MAC address, they are not permanently assigned to a host.

You mean EUI-64 addresses. These are very static actually, as your MAC address does not change and thus that EUI-48 component is always mapped to the same EUI-64 equivalent. Most Operating Systems support IPv6 Privacy Extensions (see RFC4941) and because of that though, not the real MAC address is used for calculating the EUI-64 portion, but a random number. These are very dynamic and change all the time. You can disable this fortunately and then you only get to use the mostly static EUI-64 address.

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