quietly....

Wed Feb 2 21:06:57 UTC 2011

On Wed, 2 Feb 2011 15:18:55 -0500
John Payne <john at sackheads.org> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 2, 2011, at 3:12 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> 
> > On 2 feb 2011, at 20:37, John Payne wrote:
> > 
> >>>> DHCP fails because you can't get a default router out of it.
> > 
> >>> If you consider that wrong, I don't want to be right.
> > 
> >> Hey, I thought you wanted ops input... Here you are getting it, and look, here all you are doing is saying that its wrong.
> > 
> > I said the IETF wants input.
> > 
> > In case you hadn't noticed, I'm not the IETF. I don't represent them in any way. I'm not even a working group chair. I've gone to a bunch of meetings, spent way too much time on IETF mailinglists and co-wrote all of one RFCs.
> 
> You may not represent the IETF, but you are representative of the attitude of the IETF.
> 

And I'm afraid you're representative of the "IPv4 thinking" attitude,
that seems to believe that the past IPv4 ways are not just the only
ways of solving a problem but are also naturally the best. They also
seem assume that the way IPv6 is going to be used is exactly the same as
IPv4, so the IPv4 methods will be perfect in all IPv6 applications.

It's a bit of a shame that people who've gotten into networking in the
last 10 to 15 years haven't studied or worked with anything more than
IPv4. They've missed out on seeing a variety of different ways to solve
the same types of problems and therefore been exposed to the various
benefits and trade-offs of the different methods. With that sort of
exposure, people may find out that there are other better ways to
solve problems, but IPv4's limitations and constraints prevented them
being possible.

> > 
> > I read some great writing advice once. It applies to much more than just writing. It goes like this: whenever a reader tells you that there's something wrong with your book, there is something wrong with your book. But if they tell you how to fix it, they're pretty much always wrong.
> 
> There's something wrong with your attitude towards operators.
> There's a lot wrong with the IETF attitude towards operators, but you're here :)
> 
> 
> > I'm not part of the DHC working group and I'm not a big DHCP user myself, so I don't claim to know the issues that exist with DHCPv6 in the operational community. But I'm sure there are some valid issues there. However, I'm equally sure that adding IPv4-DHCP-style router addresses to DHCPv6 is a big mistake that will create a lot of operational problems. Maybe not in the networks of the people that want this feature, but the problems will be there.
> 
> Having machines listen to any RA they receive is _today_ a cause of a lot of operational problems.  Why do we need mommy-IETF telling us no for default routes in DHCP but letting RAs run wild?
> Why does the mere mention of NAT cause daddy-IETF to round up the troops and insist that everyone is wrong?
> 
> 