IPV6 and broadcasts

[carl_townshend]

Hi all, I read that ipv6 does not broadcast, in which case how does it find the other local hosts and gateway on the lan ?

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Carl,

this is one of the most interesting aspects in IPv6.

IPv6 has built-in multicast address support.

So all processes like neighbor discovery use ICMPv6 messages with special multicast destinations in order to:

find possible duplicated address

to find out the MAC address of a neighbor (substitutes IPv4 ARP)

see

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipv6/configuration/guide/ip6-addrg_bsc_con.html#wp1282543

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[carl_townshend]

hi there

can you ellaborate on this?

if it uses multicast, switches still treat this as broadcast so wont it effectivly flood the network still ?