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I have a Win7 embedded system that has a Ubuntu 16.04 peripheral. They are connected by an ethernet cable and the Ubuntu host can't be allowed to connect to anything but the Win7 host. The Win7 host is multihomed, with an Internet connection through customer firewalls. There is a history of problems using static IPv4 addresses colliding with the netmasks of customer subnets. If we use link-local IPv6 addresses between Win7 and Ubuntu we might have zero problems in our customer subnets. However, I'd like the addresses to be unique and automatically discovered, so that the Ubuntu unit can be plugged into the Win7 host and just work. Also I'd like to use the host files to be DNS-like to associate hostname and IP I'd like scripts to use a known non-unique hostname. An init script could be used to configure the host file, or some better simple way could be used.

We need to be able to clone these systems from an image. Hence the non-unique host names. But maybe theres a better way to provide programmatic connections?

(edit-add) Perhaps dnsmasq on the linux side could provide both hosts with pre-set dns names and unique link-local addresses?

Whats a good way to solve this problem?

John P. Fisher
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  • I'm not sure there _is_ a good way on Windows 7. It would be trivial on Linux, of course. – Michael Hampton Aug 13 '16 at 05:18
  • Is letting the Linux box send out router advertisements and letting the Windows box auto configure its interface an option? – Sander Steffann Aug 13 '16 at 08:40
  • Thats an interesting idea @SanderSteffann. I am going to try autoconfiguration, but I've not done IPv6 before, and well Windows is always a problem. – John P. Fisher Aug 14 '16 at 23:59
  • On Linux you probably have to configure the interface manually, enable `net.ipv6.conf.*.forwarding` and run `radvd` to send out router advertisements (RAs). The Windows box should see those and automatically configure its interface based on the information in the RA. – Sander Steffann Aug 15 '16 at 10:34
  • Though, ideally, your software should be communicating using (IPv6) multicast groups, making the actual assigned IPv6 addresses irrelevant. – Michael Hampton Aug 16 '16 at 05:41
  • @MichaelHampton feel free to elaborate - link-local does not look usable (it seems to if you use the interface name), multicast groups would be OK, but a simple ping6 FF02:: doesn't work? – John P. Fisher Aug 16 '16 at 17:04
  • ping6 -I ff02::1 works on Linux after changing ip6tables but on windows 7 ping -6 ff02::1 times out. still googling that. – John P. Fisher Aug 16 '16 at 20:44

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