• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    I mean, if there’s only three ways, couldn’t routers be set up to just try all three to see which works? Or if they each need specific parameters that aren’t discoverable, have a form that takes all of them but says “just enter what your ISP gives you, the others are optional”. Or set it up such that the client can just get whatever information it needs from the server to communicate with other nodes beyond the server. IPv4 has DHCP. Is there something in the way of applying a similar solution to IPv6?

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      19 hours ago

      IPv4 has DHCP. Is there something in the way of applying a similar solution to IPv6?

      That in itself is implemented a few different ways, and each one is more useful dependent on your use-case, but these also have very little to do with how your ISP hands out the IP to your modem. When you get an IP handed out to your modem by your ISP, it’s often not being handed out by DHCP but an entirely different technology purpose built for whatever medium (cable/DSL/fiber) is actually going into your modem, so knowing their implementation is still important. Things work a little differently at enterprise-level. Although you’re not wrong that eventually there could be routers with auto-configuration based on which type of IPv6 network the router detects, there just currently aren’t any that I know of.

      But if you’re interested in the modern equivalents of DHCP you should look into SLAAC vs. DHCPv6 which are similar but oh so very different.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        That’s disappointing that they have different methods for each physical layer. That should be handled on the link layer using common methods once the physical layer is able to send bits back and forth.

        Getting an IP address shouldn’t be affected by whether it will be transmitted using fibre, dsl, cable, a 56k line, a quantum teleporter, signal fires, or carrier pigeons.