Joel, History is not nearly as simple as you are suggesting...
"Joel M. Halpern" <j...@joelhalpern.com> writes: > Doug, I am confused by your comments. > Let me describe how I understand the situation. We claimed, when we > crafted IPv6, that hosts did not need to use DHCP for address > assignment. As such, many host stacks did not use DHCP for address > assignment. More complicated than that. SLAAC was defined in an RFC years before DHCP was. This had the obvious result in terms of what was implemented... (I.e., RFC 2462 was first published in December, 1998, RFC 3315 was not published until July 2003.) But yes, there were many who felt that SLAAC was the Holy Grail, and DHCP should be a relic of IPv4, and that didn't help do the pragmatic and sensible thing and get DHCP out the door sooner. > Now, operators wanted to offer IPv6 service. I hope we think that is a > good thing. For residential, they looked at what they could count on > from the hosts. And some of them concluded that they could not count on > DHCP, so they designed an architecture around SLAAC. In other words, > they ddi what we told them to do. Only partly true. The proposal is to use SLAAC and RAs in an environment in which basic assumptions on which SLACC and RAs were built do not hold. RAs/SLAAC work very well when RAs can be multicast to *all* nodes on a link, and *all* nodes receive exactly the same information about prefixes and SLAAC. I.e, your normal subnet model. What BBF is proposing to do, is to use RAs/SLAAC where each customer node (i.e, each node on the access network) recieves *different* configuration information. This means that multicast model on which RAs were built doesn't work. This is hardly a "normal" IPv4 subnet model even. (I.e., the nodes don't share a common prefix, even though they are in the same broadcast domain.) > There are other constraints, and the problems that result are not simple > to solve. But they do not matter for your comment. > You seem to be saying that even though the operators did what we told > them, we should tell them "sorry, you need to redesign your network, and > you need to assume DHCP based address assignment for all devices in the > home, even if you can not count on actually having that work??" I take strong exception with the notion that operators are taking our "advice" in what they are attempting to do. It's probably more fair to say that they decided on their own, based on their (possibly limited) understanding of how IPv6 actually works, that RAs would work for what they wanted to do. Thomas -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
