I wonder if there is key question here that the community has simply not agreed on (yet), and that that question is at the heart of all this "confusion".
Does the community feel that operators need RA bits that control/indicate whether a client is to invoke DHC? That is, is there a need for the sys admin to signal to client whether DHC is to be invoked? Second, is it important that such a signal be honored by clients? (That is, if clients end up mostly ignoring the flags, does their presence become useless?) For example, should the sys admin be able to say "do not run DHC, doing so wastes local resources and won't get you any config info"? (And should that be honored by clients?) Fundamentally, it is only the access network that has knowledge of whether running DHC is useful. Thus, by default, clients (arguably) can't know whether running DHC is useful, so by default they shold invoke DHC (unless the sys admin signals "don't invoke DHC"). Or (switching the argument), by default, client should not invoke DHC, unless the local sys admin indicates doing so is appropriate. If we can't agree that the above is necessary (i.e., is a "problem statement" of sorts), I really have to wonder what purpose the R/A bits can serve or whether we will ever have a shared understanding of what they are supposed to do. Having them be a hint (that clients in practice ignore half the time) would seem to solve no useful purpose (IMO) and would provide the sys admin with useless tools (since clients wouldn't respond to the usage of the tool in predicatable ways). The result would simply be more confusion. (Oh, that is already the state we are in!!! :-)) So, what is it? Thomas -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
