Re: Simplifying the Connections Editor

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 14:18 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 February 2009, Dan Williams wrote:
> >On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 19:28 +0100, Fanen Ahua wrote:
> >> Someone called me up today asking me how to configure a manual IP
> >> address in Ubuntu 8.10.
> >>
> >> He was most likely intimidated by the naming of the tabs in the
> >> connection editor dialog.
> >>
> >> Won't it be better to make the "IPv4 Settings" tab the first thing, and
> >> rename it to something more familiar, "Settings" perhaps?
> >>
> >> This makes sense because nearly everytime I use the dialog, I only
> >> change the connection name, and input the IP details, and the only tab I
> >> use is the "IPv4 Setings" tab, where i choose the manual method, and
> >> input the DNS servers.
> >
> >So when we add the IPv6 tab, then what? :)
> >
> >dan
> >
> Then what Dan, is a decent tut on setting up the local networks ipv6 addresses 
> using no intervention from dhcp.  It may be around, I haven't looked for it 
> yet, but from the lack of posted links I'm getting the impression that it 
> doesn't exist in a human readable form.  With the switchover looming to take 
> place yet within my life if I'm lucky, it seems to me that ipv6 somehow has 
> this shroud on invisibility over it.  Those of use using 192.168 based home 
> networks need to be able to figure out how to set this up ahead of time so we 
> aren't caught in a no mans land when the switch is done.

IPv6 has a few different modes, and only one requires no configuration,
but you don't even get nameservers in that case, so the connection is
pretty much good for local only.

If you want to actually *use* the IPv6 setup, then you need to either
statically configure nameservers, or you can use DHCP.  DHCP in IPv6
works in two modes, "lease" and "information-only".  In lease mode, DHCP
works exactly like in IPv4; a DHCP server is found and a lease obtained,
along with DHCP options just like IPv4.  In information-only mode, the
router advertisements (or static methods) provide the actual IPv6
address, but DHCP is additionally run, not to get a lease, but only to
retrieve DNS and other information.

In addition, static routes, search domains, etc can be used with IPv6.
Thus, IPv6 config will look a lot like IPv4.

Dan