Browsing to https://[ff02::2%eth0]

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Hi,

It all started out as a bit of laziness on my part.

I want to browse to my local router, which has an admin web server on it.

Then I thought, well I need to administer my parents' router too, and it has a different ipv4 address. But with ipv6 I should be able to get there anyway with the url in the subject.

So the thing is, I can browse to a global scope address just fine, but not to a link-local or site-local.

I found a 2007 thread talking about this as a bug in http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=513822&start=0.

In the command line we can, for example, ping6 -I eth0 ff02::2 and it works. I've seen reference to using % as a delimiter for the nic in places, but this doesn't work.

Does this work for anyone? What's the secret decoder ring?

Thanks.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

ff02::* is a local network broadcast address. The correct IP will begin in fe80::.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

Multicast, but yeah I know.

The thing is, I think we should be able to address the link-level router (or link-level some other multicast address) in a browser, and then the browser hook up to whatever one comes back first. In most cases I think it would be a single device anyway.

Technically I understand that multicast addresses are not supposed to be used as regular network locations, but in this case it's interfering with my strong desire to be lazy. It's one of those scenarios that your desire to be lazy causes me to work my @$$ off in order to find a happy answer. I've since found no happy solution though, so I may be stuck.

The only solution I can come up with would be to make a localhost webapp which pings the net for a multicast address and then directs the browser to that location.

Sounds like a neat Open Source project....

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

If you want to do something like that, maybe you can: give every target machine an identical fd00::/8 address, and use babel or some sort of iptables voodoo to fake an anycast address on your LAN. It's crazy, not something I'd have a use for myself, but not impossible.