Background

This page contains resources for a talk I delivered at the 2025 CEN Member Conference. After my previous talk on IPv6, people had asked for a talk geared more for people who are just getting serious about the protocol.

This talk covers neighbor discovery in IPv6, which is a crucial (if not terribly sexy) part of the protocol. If you’re serious about running IPv6, you need to have at least a basic understanding of how this works.

Here’s the abstract for the talk:

IPv6 isn’t just IPv4 with bigger addresses; several fundamental differences exist in the management and configuration of addresses. This talk aims to provide a strong technical understanding of IPv6 Neighbor Discovery, a fundamental part of the protocol which replaces much or all of the functionality provided to IPv4 by ARP and DHCP.

We’ll look at packet details to see how IPv6 nodes find each other on the network, how routers can broadcast configuration information, and how these features provide the underpinnings for automatic address assignment (SLAAC). This knowledge will help participants to design and configure their own networks, and also troubleshoot issues when they arise.

If you have any questions, or if you found the talk helpful, please let me know!

Downloads

• PDF version of the slide deck, including some extra slides that I didn’t quite have time to get to
• Audio from the talk, with accompanying slides h264 | h265