There are many networks that devices do not through routers. So asking the router for their addresses is not sufficient.
-----Original Message----- From: Pekka Savola [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 4:38 To: Pashby, Ronald W CTR NSWCDD-B35 Cc: Jari Arkko; ipv6@ietf.org Subject: RE: Solicit comments on draft-pashby-ipv6-network-discovery-00.txt On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Pashby, Ronald W CTR NSWCDD-B35 wrote: >> 2) Requiring all nodes implement Inverse Neighbor Discover with the >> addidtion of the response holdoff timer. >> > The feature exists. But an all-nodes mandatory implementation > requirement is additional functionality, and I'm not sure > there's justification for that yet - but I admit that I did not > follow the discussion in the last meeting about this, so > I may be missing something. One approach would be > to publish INDbis spec, but not make it mandatory for > everyone. As Jari said, I do not think adding mandatory-to-implement mechanisms solves the problem. A solution already exists (to a degree), but the vendors have voted with their feet (i.e., nobody actually wants the feature). In more general, I do not see sufficiently strong justification for this approach. A typical operational approach in scenarios like these is to collect the source IP addresses which send traffic at routers (e.g., with logging access lists or netflow). That approach can reliably identify any active node in the network -- mechanisms which rely on active probing (e.g., pings) will never be able to find all the nodes anyway (e.g., because the hosts may filter out pings in their local firewalls). So, if you'd want to pursue the work on discovering the hosts in the network, I'd put a lot more emphasis on describing why exactly this is needed ("problem statement") and particularly why the existing operational techniques are not sufficient. -- Pekka Savola "You each name yourselves king, yet the Netcore Oy kingdom bleeds." Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
