HP-UX IPv6 Transport Administrator's Guide (September 2004)

Features Overview

IPv6 Transport

Chapter 1 3

The HP-UX networking utilities ifconfig, netstat, lanadmin,

lanscan, arp, rtradvd and ndp have all been enhanced to be

capable of handling IPoIB-related data. (Note that rarp has not been

enhanced for handling IPoIB.)

For more information on InﬁniBand and the IPoIB protocol, refer to

the HP-UX InﬁniBand Support Guide available at

http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/netcom/index.html#InfiniBand.

• Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Support (Host Portion

Only): The host part of Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol

for IPv6 based on RFC 2710 “Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) for

IPv6”, is supported. MLD is automatically enabled when an IPv6

interface is initialized. The Management Information Base for MLD,

based on RFC 3019, is also supported.

RFC 2710 speciﬁes the protocol used by an IPv6 router to discover

the presence of multicast listeners (that is, nodes wishing to receive

multicast packets) on its directly attached links, and to discover

speciﬁcally, which multicast addresses are of interest to those

neighboring nodes. This protocol is referred to as Multicast Listener

Discovery or MLD. MLD is derived from version 2 of IPv4’s Internet

Group Management Protocol, IGMPv2. One important difference to

note is that MLD uses ICMPv6 (IP Protocol 58) message types,

rather than IGMP (IP Protocol 2) message types.

For more MLD information refer to RFC 2710, “Multicast Listener

Discovery (MLD) for IPv6”.

• Router Advertisement: Router Functionality as speciﬁed in RFC

2461 “Neighbor Discovery for IP Version 6 (IPv6)”, is implemented

with a daemon, rtradvd, and an accompanying conﬁguration ﬁle,

/etc/rtradvd.conf. The rtradvd daemon listens to router

solicitation and sends router advertisement messages on demand or

periodically (as described in RFC 2461). These advertisements allow

any listening host to conﬁgure their addresses and some other

parameters automatically without manual intervention. They can

also choose a default router based on these advertisements

Router advertisement is conﬁgured on a per interface basis. Refer to

the rtradvd.conf(4) man page for more information.

• IPv6 Transition Mechanism Enhancements: The HP-UX 11i v2

September 2004 release provides several IPv6 transition mechanism

changes from those previously offered in base (default) HP-UX 11i v2

release. Highlights of these changes are provided below. There have