I've been watching the discussion about recursive DHCPv6-PD with more than a little discomfort; I did not want to throw this bomb until the issue had been discussed in depth (as prefix delegation is a problem we must solve).
The hardest problem I've ever had to debug in my home network (by far) was a rogue DHCP server, which occasionally would give me a bad address. It was located on a tiny, size of a deck of cards, VOIP box I was no longer using. It being on a slow processor, my main DHCP server responded much faster, so it was a very intermittent failure, solved only by perusal of logs, wireshark, lookup into the MAC address to vendor assignments, and then guessing which device in my house it might be. This is well beyond the usual home user, at the edge of what I am capable of (I'm primarily a designer of application network protocols, not a true 'friend of the packet'). I dare say that most ISP's could not have debugged the problem, even if they had access to my network (nor do I want them to have to have access). So the recursive DHCP-PD scheme strikes me as something possibly very fragile. I really, really don't want to repeat the experience I had with having extra DHCP servers, and I would guess few ISP's do either. It seems to me much more robust to flood the key configuration information (prefixes, DNS, NTP, and the like) via a protocol that is really designed for the job (whether specifically for configuration, ie. ahcp http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~jch/software/ahcp/, or via the hacks on routing protocols like Ari has done with OSPF). What is more, this configuration information should be revocable; we don't want one upstream provider to induce problems in service to the other. I think I goal for Homenet should be/must be robustness, and "hotplug". You should be able to plug in new devices and have them "just work"; that includes networks, whether ISP networks or not. Telling a home user to replug all their devices isn't an option. That I often have to do this with my cable modem and home router (and then possibly clients), I see as a failure already happening. We should judge alternative proposals by this touchstone. - Jim
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