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Packet Pub Quiz Answer - IPv6 Doesn't Use ARP

In the last Packet Pub Quiz, a whopping 40% of people said "ARPv6" is used by IPv6 to discover the hardware address of a local router.


Nope.


In the IPv4 environment, ARP is used to check for duplicate IP addresses and discover the IP address of the local router and local hosts.


IPv6 doesn't use ARP for anything. Instead, IPv6 uses ICMPv6 Router Solicitation (Type 133) packets sent to the All Routers IPv6 multicast address (defined in Section 2.7.1 of RFC 4291, IPv6 Addressing Architecture).

The local router should respond with an ICMPv6 Router Advertisement (Type 134) packet.


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