IPv6 and DNS

[Laurence Hurst <L.A.Hurst@lboro.ac.uk>]

Hi folks,

I notice a couple of other IPv6 related questions on this list so I hope this isn't too far of topic...

I currently have an IPv4-only network (192.168.0.0/24 behind a NAT firewall/router) at home which includes a variety of systems (Windows, Debian, OSX and some embedded devices). All of these devices support IPv4 DHCP so the least painful and most reliable method of configuring them with hostnames has been to run my own DHCP server and DNS with static mappings for most of the devices (I do not allow dynamic updating of the DNS) including reverse DNS.

I am curious, if I wanted to translate my IPv4 configuration into an IPv6 world;
  * I know there's a lot of talk about IPv6's wonderful auto-configuration eliminating the need for DHCP but how does this work with a static DNS setup?
  * Would I need to use DHCP6 and DNS, or auto-configuration and allow dynamic DNS updating (assuming IPv6's router discovery allows the clients to discover and update the DNS themselves)?
  * Would I have to trust the clients to update their own DNS records (I don't at the moment)?
  * In the DHCP-less world, how would clients "discover" the local DNS suffix (e.g. (fictitous) "internal.home.my.tld")?

As I'm sure you can see I've got a whole load of questions and no compelling answers so I hope that some of the well informed folks on this list might be willing to point me in something approximating the right direction!

Cheers,
Laurence