[yjftsjthsd-h]

> addressing hosts via IPv6 is the wrong way to go about it. On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".

.local is fine as long as all the daemons work correctly, but AFAIK there's no way to have SLAAC and put hosts in "normal" internal DNS, so .lan/.home/.internal are probably out.

[alwillis]

> On your lan, you really want to be doing ".local" / ".lan" / ".home".

The "official" is home.arpa according to RFC 8375 [1]:

    Users and devices within a home network (hereafter referred to as
    "homenet") require devices and services to be identified by names
    that are unique within the boundaries of the homenet [RFC7368].  The
    naming mechanism needs to function without configuration from the
    user.  While it may be possible for a name to be delegated by an ISP,
    homenets must also function in the absence of such a delegation.
    This document reserves the name 'home.arpa.' to serve as the default
    name for this purpose, with a scope limited to each individual
    homenet.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8375

[yjftsjthsd-h]

It may be the most officially-recommended for home use, but .internal is also officially endorsed for "private-use applications" (deciding the semantics of these is left as an exercise to the reader): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

[jorvi]

That is a classical "design by committee" thing.

".home" and ".lan" along with a bunch of other historic tlds are on the reserved list and cannot be registered.

Call techy people pathologically lazy but no one is going to switch to typing ".home.arpa" or ".internal". They should have stuck with the original proposal of making ".home" official, instead of sticking ".arpa" behind it. That immediately doomed the RFC.

[somat]

I do it by abusing the static slaac address. I have a set of wierd vms where they are cloned from a reference image, so no fixed config allowed. I should have probably just have used dhcp6 but I started by trying slaac and the static address were stable enough for my purposes so it stuck.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

How does that work? I initially assumed you meant you just statically assigned machines to addresses, which I think would work courtesy of collision avoidance (and the massive address space), but I can't see how that would work for VMs. Are you just letting VMs pick an IP at random and then having them never change it, at which point you manually add them to DNS?

[somat]

Pretty much. A given mac address assigned in the vm config maps directly to a static slaac address(the ones they recommend you not use) and those preknown slaac address are in dns, Like I said, I should probably use dhcp6 but it was a personal experiment in cloning a vm for a sandbox execution environment. and those slacc address were stable enough for that. every time it gets cloned to the same mac address it ended up with the same ip6 address. works for me, don't have to faf around with dhcp6, put it in dns. time for a drink.

But the point is that is the address you would put in dns if you also wanted to use slaac. Most of the time however you will just set a manual address. And this was with obsd, where when slaac is setup you get the slaac address and a temporary address. I don't really know what linux does. Might have to try now.

[jorvi]

Clarification for others: with privacy extensions disabled, SLAAC'd IPv6 addresses are deterministically generated based on MAC addresses. There's also an inbetween (IPv6 are stable per network by hashing).