Preparing network configurations for IPv6 renumbering

The difficulty of renumbering a network – i.e., adding and removing an IP prefix due to a provider change or a network merging – is a real issue for most network administrators. It is even considered by a lot of people as a bottleneck issue in adopting Provider Aggregatable addressing for IPv6. In this paper, we propose a set of macros that can be used in configuration files to permit network administrators to write generic configurations that are independent from the public IPv6 prefixes allocated to their network. We apply our macros to key configuration files, namely firewall access lists, DNS and DHCP based on observations made from real networks.