Bob,
On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 09:48, Bob Hinden wrote: > > Part of me is starting to think that we might be better off waiting for > there to be more operational experience with deployments of DHCPv6 to see > how much confusion there really is. I agree it is good for vendors to > implement similar knobs, but I wonder how much of a problem there really is. > More than part of me is thinking this. It seems to me that there is a continuing confusion about how these bits interact with local decisions by the administrator of a specific machine or network. People are asking questions like "What happens if the M and/or O bits are clear but there is a DHCP server?" or "What happens if the M and/or O bits are clear but the client wants to use DHCP anyway" or "What happens if the M and/or O bits are set and the client doesn't want to run DHCP". None of these questions are in the realm of protocol design. Clearly, local administrators will do as they please with their machines. In this respect the M and O bits have never been anything but strong hints as to what the client should do. The client is always free to ignore the hints. Further network administrators are free to misconfigure their networks as they please. The current text describing these bits is clear almost to the point of being infantile. This isn't an indictment of the authors. Rather it is an indictment of attempts to enforce system configuration and management rules via protocol specifications. This is impossible. We should stop trying. tim -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
