[Xorp-users] RFC 2461 - Neighbor Discovery for IPv6

[Bruce Simpson]

Samuel Portero Bolanos wrote:
> i just installed xorp and i try configure to do automatic neighbor
> discovery for ipv6. i dont know how do it or its posible.
>
> i was used zebra and 'ipv6 nd prefix-advertisement' command in another
> machine and it was work fine.
>   

Anything's possible, it's just about how you do it.

    I am still spinning up here, so I don't know if this is already on 
the feature roadmap for XORP 2.0. The XORP architecture is changing, so 
I'm not up to date with what's involved in implementing all of this.

    You'd have to step outside of XORP to do this for the time being. 
For example in FreeBSD (and other KAME based BSDs) there is the 'rtadvd' 
daemon which takes care of this. I don't know offhand what the 
equivalent would be in whatever platformyou're using, as you don't 
mention which platform you are using.

    It looks like this Zebra option got renamed to plain old 'ipv6 nd 
prefix ...' although the wording you quote is the Juniper wording. Based 
on a quick examination of what Quagga does to implement this option, it 
looks like it does implement it at protocol level. NDP itself is not 
really a router component as such; it's a function of the host's IPv6 stack.

    So what we'd be ideally looking for is a code contribution to do 
this. Speaking Router Advertisements is done in NDP, and that is 
encapsulated in ICMPv6. The FEA already supports raw IPv6 sockets, so 
ideally there just needs to be a component which takes router 
configuration and sets up a bunch of timers to multicast the RA on the 
local link. It is perhaps an afternoon to a day's work for someone who 
knows the XORP source tree well, and an educational exercise for someone 
who wishes to learn.

thanks,
BMS