Tag Archives: IPv6 Neighbor Discovery

SharkFest’19 EUROPE: IPv6 Crash Course

I gave a session about IPv6 at SharkFest’19 EUROPE, the annual Wireshark developer and user community conference, named “IPv6 Crash Course: Understanding IPv6 as seen on the wire“. The talk is about the IPv6 basics, which are: IPv6 addresses & address assignment, link-layer address resolution, and ICMPv6. Tips for using Wireshark coloring rules and display filters round things up.

As I have not yet published the slides, here they are. Unfortunately, we were not able to record the session due to technical problems. Neither the video nor the audio. ;( Hence, here are only mere slides.

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Palo Alto NDP Monitoring

With PAN-OS version 8.0 Palo Alto Networks introduced another IPv6 feature, namely “NDP Monitoring for Fast Device Location“. It basically adds a few information to the existing neighbor cache such as the User-ID (if present) and a “last reported” timestamp. That is: the admin has a new reporting window within the Palo Alto GUI that shows the reported IPv6 addresses along with its MAC addresses. This is really helpful for two reasons: 1) a single IPv6 node can have multiple IPv6 addresses which makes it much more difficult to track them back to the MAC address and 2) if SLAAC is used you now have a central point where you can look up the MAC-IPv6 bindings (comparable to the DHCP server lease for legacy IPv4).

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Basic IPv6 Messages: Wireshark Capture

When explaining IPv6 I am always showing a few Wireshark screenshots to give a feeling on how IPv6 looks like. Basically, the stateless autoconfiguration feature (SLAAC), DHCPv6, Neighbor Discovery, and a simple ping should be seen/understood by any network administrator before using the new protocol.

Therefore I captured the basic IPv6 autoconfiguration with a Knoppix Linux behind a Telekom Speedport router (German ISP, dual-stack) and publish this capture file here. I am using this capture to explain the basic IPv6 features.

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