# IPV6 rtatv vs dhcp6?



## BlueCoder (Jul 24, 2014)

What is everyone's option here as to what is the best practice? I think I prefer DHCP myself since everything is all under one roof. Rtadv is supposedly the "native" way to do this on IPV6 but I can't imagine a usage scenario where I would prefer it. One thing I really like about DHCP is being able to configure hostnames dynamically on my DNS. I can also design my own numbering scheme so that I can remember and type IP addresses from memory. If I want to assign addresses based on MAC addresses then I can. Not sure if DHCP6 allow assigning multiple addresses though but I can easily image it would be easy to extend.

What do you get from rtadv that you can't from DHCP? 

I think the whole point of stateless addresses was to do away with NAT. With rtadv you still need a daemon listening on a network just like DHCP so I don't get why one is stateful and the other stateless. The only way I can think of to do truly stateless configuration would be if you NAT'd linklocal addresses.


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## SirDice (Jul 24, 2014)

BlueCoder said:
			
		

> One thing I really like about DHCP is being able to configure hostnames dynamically on my DNS.


Unfortunately this is the one part that doesn't work yet.



> I think the whole point of stateless addresses was to do away with NAT.


No, the whole point of IPv6 is to do away with NAT.



> With rtadv you still need a daemon listing on a network just like DHCP so I don't get why one is stateful and the other stateless.


Because you don't need something like dhclient(8) to get an IP address. Keep in mind that with DHCPv6 you also need a DHCPv6 aware dhclient(8), the default FreeBSD one doesn't support it. With stateless auto-configuration you don't need to have something running on the client and you'd still get a functional IPv6 address.


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## kpa (Jul 24, 2014)

On top of that only SLAAC gives you what is known as the IPv6 privacy extensions, the extra randomly generated IPv6 address that no longer reveals your MAC address (well part of it at least) when you connect to the internet and could be used for tracking purposes.

Of course with DHCPv6 your IPv6 address is not going reveal your MAC address because you have full control of what addresses the DHCPv6 server is going to hand out. However, DHCP is all about reusing the previous leases and you don't get the unpredictability of the random addresses that the IPv6 privacy extensions will give you.


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## Melvyn (Aug 2, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> With stateless auto-configuration you don't need to have something running on the client and you'd still get a functional IPv6 address.



Well, it does help to have rtsold running.


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