Provide ease-of-use on larger networks

[Michael B. Trausch]

In order to be easily deployed in networks which which to provide IPv6 service, but require the ability to use DHCP instead of static or stateless automatic addressing, this functionality should be supported on both the client and the server. Also, NetworkManager should be able to set the name and domain name of the machine when the network comes up, and it should "come up" earlier in the boot process and be tweakable later when a wired network connection is present.

In particular:

  * ISC DHCP v4 should be included in Ubuntu 9.04.
  * NetworkManager in Ubuntu 9.04 should have support for DHCPv6.
  * NetworkManager in Ubuntu 9.04 should use the information provided by the DHCP server to set the network parameters (or to reset them, if already set). This functionality should be on by default, but easily disabled for those who may not want it.

Otherwise, deploying a network requires pulling upstream software manually on the server, and then manually configuring every client by pulling software not currently in the system, configuring DHCPv6 on the clients, and configuring the hostname/domain. When one is managing a network with more than 30 nodes, this quickly becomes impractical.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

please file the NM features in bugzilla.gnome.org against networkmanager and give us your bug id there so we can track and help out.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

any news about this? did you sent the bug upstream? may you tell us the bug number there? thanks.

[Davíð Steinn Geirsson (david-dsg)]

NetworkManager does not yet support IPv6. I added the gnome bugtracker bug calling for IPv6 support in general to this report. While that bug does not specifically deal with DHCPv6, it is a prerequisite for it, and presumably DHCPv6 support will be added when IPv6 support is finalised.

Also, this is not only for larger networks. I run IPv6 on my small local network, and I would like to be able to do DDNS to automatically register IPv6 addresses in DNS like I do for IPv4. It would have to be something that "just works" however, as I don't want to force friends who come over to install extra software on their machines just to get IPv6 connectivity.

It would definately be good if ubuntu could finally claim to be fully IPv6-compliant out-of-the-box. It's kind of embarrasing that windows has the edge here.

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

This was fixed upstream some time ago, and I believe all current Ubuntu versions have this support.