When connecting a device to a PC which has a network interface configured to DHCP, you can find out the IP address with link-local.
When connecting a Raspberry Pi to a Notebook for example,
both devices will get a 169.254.0.0/16 IPv4 address
and a fe80::/10 IPv6 address.
So far, so good. But the IP ranges are so huge, that it would take hours to find the Raspberry Pi by port scan.
So IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol to the rescue! The protocol makes it possible to list all devices which are connected to your notebook.
IPv6 Multicast Ping
The NDP list shows only devices, which had communicated to each other. So we need to issue a multicast ping. This will trigger a answer from all members of the subnet.
We need the interface name for this. In Linux it is just the normal
interface name (eth0, wlan0, usb0, …), in Windows it is
a number, which can be found in ipconfig:
Ethernet-Adapter Ethernet:
Verbindungslokale IPv6-Adresse . : fe80::9059:69ff:fed5:8dc9%3
In this case the interface ID is 3. It can be found behind the
IPv6 address, separated with a %.
Do the ping:
# linux
ping6 ff02::1%br0
# windows
ping ff02::1%3
If both devices running Linux, the IPv6 Address can be found in the
ping output:
64 bytes from fe80::9059:69ff:fed5:8dc9%br0: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.153 ms
64 bytes from fe80::84cd:88ff:fe97:b181%br0: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.11 ms (DUP!)
See the line with the (DUP!) at the end.
List Neighbors
# windows
netsh interface ipv6 show neighbors
# linux
ip -6 neigh show
# windows
Interface 3: Ethernet 2
Internet Address Physical Address Type
-------------------------------------------- ----------------- -----------
fe80::9059:69ff:fed5:8dc9 aa-c6-cf-a9-30-fa Stale
# linux
fe80::9059:69ff:fed5:8dc9 dev usb0 lladdr aa:c6:cf:a9:30:fa REACHABLE
Now it should be at least one entry in the list where the IPv6 address
starts with fe80:. This should be the address of the connected device.
