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DEMO: Setting Up DHCPv6 Server on Pi

A Raspberry Pi is configured as a DHCPv6 server by editing the ISC DHCP server configuration files and defining an IPv6 address scope, then verified by successfully leasing an address to a client machine.

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About this video

Configuring a Raspberry Pi as a DHCPv6 server builds on the same ISC DHCP server infrastructure used for DHCPv4, with IPv6-specific adjustments made across two configuration files. The first step involves editing the ISC DHCP server defaults file to assign the eth0 interface to the DHCPv6 service, referencing the dhcpd6.conf file as the primary configuration source for IPv6 settings. This file is separate from its DHCPv4 counterpart and must be edited independently to define the IPv6 scope. Inside dhcpd6.conf, a subnet block is located and uncommented to specify the IPv6 subnet the server is attached to, along with an address range from which leases will be issued. The range configured here mirrors the .150 to .160 range used on the same test network for IPv6, maintaining consistency across protocol versions. With the configuration saved, a client machine previously set to a static IPv6 address is reconfigured to obtain an address automatically. Running ipconfig /renew on the client confirms that the DHCPv6 server is operating correctly, as the machine receives an address within the defined range, validating the end-to-end setup.

What you'll learn

What's covered

DHCPv6 Server Setup on Pi

Aligned to

CompTIA Network+
3.4 Given a scenario, implement IPv4 and IPv6 network services.
Cisco CCNA
4.3 Explain the role of DHCP and DNS within the network
1.8 Configure and verify IPv6 addressing and prefix
CompTIA Server+
2.2 Given a scenario, configure servers to use network infrastructure services.

Key terms

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
DHCP
A network protocol that automatically assigns IP addresses and other configuration parameters to devices on a network.
IP Address
A numerical label assigned to each device connected to a network that uses the Internet Protocol.
Subnet
A logical subdivision of an IP network, used to organize and segment network traffic.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6
DHCPv6
An extension of DHCP for IPv6 networks that provides stateful IPv6 address assignment and delivers configuration options such as DNS server addresses to IPv6 clients. DHCPv6 can operate alongside SLAAC to supply options that Router Advertisements cannot carry.
IPv6 Address Scope
A defined range of IPv6 addresses that a DHCPv6 server is configured to assign to requesting clients on a network.
ISC DHCP Server
An open-source DHCP server implementation from the Internet Systems Consortium, configured through files such as dhcpd.conf and dhcpd6.conf to serve IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Transcript

Let's set up our demo Pi to be a DHCP server for IP version 6 addresses.

Editing the ISC DHCP server file

The first thing that I'm going to do is get into that file that we edited when we configured it with the DHCP version 4 address. So I'm going to jump into this ISC DHCP server file right here, and I'm going to go down to where it says interfaces version 6. I'm going to type in eth0 in there once again.

What I can do is — it's actually referencing a couple of different files up here. It says the default file is this file right here, but I'm going to reference both these files right here. So I'll reference — notice that this is the dhcpd6.com.

Let's go now into there and edit that document. I'm going to save this out, so I'll hit Ctrl-X. I want to save, and I'll save it to there.

Defining the scope

Next, I'm going to get into that dhcpd6.com file and we'll edit that file. As we scroll through here, we will find a very similar line where it's specifying the scope. There's a lot of extra configurations, and a lot of these configurations mimic those that we saw in the DHCP version 4. But I'm going to go down to where I see where it defines my different scopes, and let's define a scope.

Here we go. This is the section where it's the subnet where the server is attached, and I have defined this subnet 6. This is the address range that we've been working with on our test network. Then I have specified the range that I want handed out through this IP version 6 DHCP. So the range is specified here. It's actually the same range, 150 to 160, as the IP version 4 addresses. And then we put the end curly bracket here to end the statement. So I just uncommented these three lines, and let's save this out and see what it looks like.

Testing from the client

Currently we have a static IP address assigned to our demo laptop. So what we're going to do is get on there, on the properties of this interface, and we will go to IP version 6 here. Click on properties, and we'll say obtain automatically, and we'll close that out. We'll give it a second to update and then we'll check to see if it's updated.

I did ipconfig /renew on this machine and you can see it's got an updated address here. We now see that FC0000:1:60. So this is the address within the address range that we set up on that DHCP server. So it got a DHCP address.

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