v6 & DSL / Cable modems

Fri Feb 6 17:22:30 UTC 2009

> The problem is that DHCP seemed like a good idea at the time but it  
> doesn't make any sense today. We know that parsing complex binary data  
> formats is asking for security problems.

And parsing complex text data structures is better?

> What we need is a simple, fast, efficient way to distribute the basic  
> information that a host needs to start sending and receiving packets  
> and a pointer to a place where additional location dependent  
> configuration information can be found. That would be: address+prefix,  
> gateway and (arguably) DNS and then something like a URL for a server  
> that has the config info. The system and applications can then load  
> information from the config server over HTTP in XML format or some such.

No, this information must be available in *one* place. It's called a
DHCP server. As an operator, this is clearly what I want, both for IPv4
and IPv6.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no