A relay agent forwards DHCP messages containing Prefix Delegation options in the same way as other DHCP messages.
RFC 3633 says “If a delegating router communicates with a requesting router through a relay agent (sitting in between the Aggregation device (PE) and the CPE), the delegating router may need a protocol or other out-of-band communication to add routing information for delegated prefixes into the provider edge router.”
The requesting router acts as a DHCPv6 server behind the CPE and assigns IPv6 subnets to the customer devices. Since there is no mechanism to notify the delegating router about the IPv6 subnets assigned by the requesting router, the core routers have no clue about these IPv6 subnets and therefore have no dynamic route added into the routing tables in the core. RFC 3633 leaves it to the implementations to device a mechanism to solve this problem.
When the ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent relays the DHCP messages with IA_PD options and detects that a successful prefix delegation operation has been completed and a prefix or a set of prefixes have been delegated, it installs one route for each of prefixes that has been delegated. This ensures reachability between the customer devices and the service provider network.
When ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent detects a successful DHCP prefix delegation transaction (Solicit-Advertise-Request-Reply), it looks into the details of the prefix(es) that are being delegated. Each DHCP message with IA_PD option can have multiple IAPREFIX options in it. Each IAPREFIX option represents a prefix that is being delegated.
ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent installs one route for each of the delegated prefixes. The route is installed on the VLAN on which the requesting router (CPE) is reachable and with the requesting router (CPE) as the gateway for the route, if the requesting router is directly connected to our ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 Relay agent. If the DHCPv6 messages from the requesting router have been received via another DHCPv6 Relay agent, the route is installed with the next hop DHCPv6 Relay agent as the gateway. If the DHCPv6 packets from the next hop DHCPv6 Relay agent have been IPv6 forwarded via other routers in between (which did not do DHCPv6 Relay, but just IPv6 forwarding), the next hop router to reach the next hop DHCPv6 Relay agent is used as the gateway for the route. ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 Relay uses Route Manager (rtMgr) client library APIs for adding and deleting these routes.
To ensure that the routes are retained across reboots (or restart process netTools), ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent stores these routes along with their validity times in an internal file. After a reboot, ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent reads this file and installs the routes once again. This file will be a flat file with the following format: vlanName ipv6Prefix ipv6GatewayAddr startTime validTime.
Only those IPv6 prefixes which are still valid after the reboot are added again. The expired IPv6 prefixes are discarded. As the file format denotes, this file contains the details about the VLAN, the actual delegated IPv6 prefix, the IPv6 Gateway Address, the start time when it got delegated and the time for which the delegated prefix is deemed to be valid (in seconds). This file is internal to ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent and cannot/should not be edited by anyone else.
ExtremeXOS DHCPv6 relay agent checkpoints the prefix delegations that have been detected.
create vlan v1
enable bootprelay ipv6
conf bootprelay ipv6 prefix-del snooping on vlan v1
con bootprelay ipv6 prefix-delegation snooping add 5001:db8:3553:bf00::/56 fe80::a440:cfd5:c05b:d324 vlan v1 valid-time 300
* (Engineering) Slot-1 Sharmila_DUT1_Stack-->.13 # sh bootprelay ipv6 prefix-delegation snooping
Delegated Prefix Interface
Gateway Valid For
--------------------------------------------------------------------
5001:db8:3553:bf00::/56 v1
fe80::a440:cfd5:c05b:d324 300 secs
* (Engineering) Slot-1 Sharmila_DUT1_Stack-->.14 # show iproute ipv6
Ori Destination Mtr Flags Duration
Gateway Interface
bo 5001:db8:3553:bf00::/56 1 -G-D---um---- 0d:0h:0m:32s
fe80::a440:cfd5:c05b:d324 [VR-Default]
Origin(Ori):(b) BlackHole, (be) EBGP, (bg) BGP, (bi) IBGP, (bo) BOOTP,
(ct) CBT, (d) Direct, (df) DownIF, (dv) DVMRP, (e1) ISISL1Ext,
(e2) ISISL2Ext, (h) Hardcoded, (i) ICMP, (i1) ISISL1 (i2) ISISL2,
(is) ISIS, (mb) MBGP, (mbe) MBGPExt, (mbi) MBGPInter, (ma) MPLSIntra,
(mr) MPLSInter, (mo) MOSPF (o) OSPFv3, (o1) OSPFv3Ext1, (o2) OSPFv3Ext2,
(oa) OSPFv3Intra, (oe) OSPFv3AsExt, (or) OSPFv3Inter, (pd) PIM-DM, (ps) PIM-SM,
(r) RIPng, (ra) RtAdvrt, (s) Static, (sv) SLB_VIP, (un) UnKnown,
(*) Preferred unicast route (@) Preferred multicast route,
(#) Preferred unicast and multicast route.
Flags: (b) BFD protection requested, (B) BlackHole, (c) Compressed Route,
(D) Dynamic, (f) Provided to FIB, (G) Gateway, (H) Host Route,
(l) Calculated LDP LSP, (L) Matching LDP LSP, (m) Multicast,
(p) BFD protection active, (P) LPM-routing, (R) Modified, (s) Static LSP,
(S) Static, (t) Calculated RSVP-TE LSP, (T) Matching RSVP-TE LSP,
(u) Unicast, (U) Up, (3) L3VPN Route.
Mask distribution:
1 routes at length 56
Route Origin distribution:
1 routes from Bootp
Total number of routes = 1