On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 7:06 AM, Jack Bates <jba...@brightok.net> wrote: > On 10/22/2010 8:38 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote: >> >> Unfortunately the folks in the IETF don't even want to listen, to the >> point a working group chair when I tried to explain why I wanted such a >> feater told the rest of the group "He's an operator and thus doesn't >> understand how any of this works, ignore him." That's when I gave up >> on the IETF, and started working on my vendor for the solution. >> > It's popped around multiple times. The drafts won't stop until it's > implemented. The lack of it in DHCPv6, despite obvious desire for it, seems > to indicate a bias on the part of the IETF.
The interesting thing is that while the IETF may have a certain bias, the hardware manufacturers have a different bias; they do what needs to be done to sell hardware. And while we may be 'just operators', if we tell vendors we won't buy their hardware unless they support draft-X-Y-Z, you can believe they'll listen to that a lot more closely than they will the IETF. The IETF has teeth only so long as those with money to spend on vendors support their decisions. When a vendor is forced to choose between complying with the IETF, or getting a $5M purchase order from a customer, they're going to look long and hard at what the customer is requesting. We've gotten knobs added to software that go explicitly against standards that way; they're off by default, they're hidden, and they have ugly names like "enable broken-ass-feature-for-customer-X" but the vendors *do* put them in, because without them, they don't get paid. Matt > Here's a current draft > http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dec-dhcpv6-route-option-05 > > Jack