with IPv6 we've taken a number of techniques we've used with ipv4 and we've updated them for the modern network of course there's DHCP for IP version 6 those DHCP servers use a very similar process to what we saw with ipv4 to assign IP addresses with IP version 6 this uses redundant DHCP servers so it's ready for the Enterprise and you as the DHCP administrator will be managing this DHCP version 6 server as well but unlike IP version 4 IP version 6 can assign an IP address to itself and be able to communicate with anyone on the network we refer to this as stateless addressing there's no DHCP server that manages the process you don't have to keep track of IP addresses or Mac addresses and with this stateless addressing there's no lease time so you never have to worry about giving up your IP address and important protocol that's used for IPv6 stateless dressing and other purposes is the NDP protocol that stands for neighbor Discovery protocol in IP version 4 we use the address resolution protocol or ARP to be able to find other devices on the network but ARP requires broadcast to be able to operate with NDP we're using multicast so the overall communication is much more efficient the way that an IPv6 device is able to effectively assign it self an IPv6 address is using stateless address autoconfiguration or slack you don't need a DHCP server the device running IPv6 creates its own IP address to use one of the concerns we obviously have is that if a device is creating its own IP address it could potentially conflict with an existing IP address on the network but in IP version 6 we have duplicate address detection or dad and it checks to be sure that there are no dup duplicate IP addresses on the network neighbor Discovery protocol can do more than simply find other devices on your network can also identify routers using the router solicitation and router advertisement features if a device wants to find a router that's on its local subnet it uses this neighbor Discovery protocol and uses the router solicitation feature and sends that to a multicast that says if there's any router out there please respond back and if a router sees that multicast it will send a router advertisement directly back to that workstation routers can also send their own advertisements out without being queried refer to those as unsolicited ra messages they're sent to a slightly different multicast location and they are sent to all of the devices on the network that might be interested in knowing where routers exist this router advertisement is useful because it can provide information about the local subnet things such as prefix values prefix fix lengths DNS server configuration and other IPv6 configuration parameters so here's how slack or the stateless address autoc configuration works with IP version 6 the first thing your device does is determine what local subnet am I on and it does that by using the neighbor Discovery protocol and asking a router through the router solicitation feature what subnet is this the router will respond back with a router advertisement containing that information for for example we can query the router using this neighbor Discovery protocol and we'll receive back this 64-bit IPv6 subnet prefix you can see an example of that is listed here but of course that's only half of the IPv6 address we also need what's known as the last 64 bits or the interface ID many devices will take a modified version of their Mac address put the letters FF Fe in the middle to create 64 bits that it can then use as the last part of the address other devices will simply randomize this value to create those last 64 bits and just to make sure that this random value or the value associated with the MAC address doesn't somehow already match an IPv6 address on the network the neighbor Discovery protocol is used again it uses a feature called duplicate address detection or dad and checks the rest of the network to be sure that no one else is using that specific IPv6 address now that the stateless address autoconfiguration process is complete your device now has a completely routable IPv6 address that is unique to that particular station