quietly....

Ricky Beam jfbeam at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 22:53:48 UTC 2011


On Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:04:33 -0500, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
> They didn't fail.  They were designed to complement each other.  It
> just that somewhere along the way people forgot that.

No.  They failed.  In all respects.

The political agendas within IPng were anti-NAT and anti-DHCP.  So they  
designed a system without either completely ignoring the way the real  
world works.

NAT certainly has it's place, but I won't go on any crusades for it.

DHCP, however, is an integral part of most networks today.  And that's  
been the case for many years (decades even.)  RA is the IPv6 version of  
stupidity we've forgotten existed in IPv4 -- ICMP router discovery.  The  
idiots that dreamed up RA/SLAAC completely ignored the necessities of  
modern networking... hostnames, domain names, DNS resolvers, netboot  
information, ...  In the first days, SLAAC looked great because you had  
IPv4 DHCP filling in everything else, and an IPv4 stack providing support  
for all that.

Now we're seeing DHCPv6 bolted on after the fact.  And it's a peicemeal  
band-aid after band-aid, instead of the logical process of taking DHCPv4  
and making all the address fields bigger.  If you did, then in one *poof*  
DHCPv6 would be able to deliver IPv6 addresses for *EVERYTHING* DHCPv4  
can.  But you still have to have that awefull RA spewed into your network  
to tell systems to use DHCPv6.

--Ricky




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