quietly....

Jamie Bowden jamie at photon.com
Thu Feb 3 13:08:17 UTC 2011


I don't mean to rain on your parade here...oh wait, yeah, I do actually.
I have an SGI Indigo (MIPS R3000/25 with 32MB RAM baby, it's a
screamer!) that still runs with no problems.  Show me an eighteen year
old router that's still up and running.  The Dell hardware we ran NT4
Server on for providing DHCP until I replaced it is still as functional
today as it was when it was purchased in 1998.  I have a five year old
Cisco doorstop.  Don't tell me routers are made of magic hardware that
is somehow immune to failure.

Jamie

-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Hess [mailto:mysidia at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 11:48 PM
To: Brandon Butterworth
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: quietly....

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Brandon Butterworth
<brandon at rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Just need to add default route in there and make dhcpd do RA
> then the user can turn off RA on their routers and not care
> that DHCPv6 doesn't include default router.
>
Having a DHCP server generate RA messages kind of defeats the point of
having RA messages
in the first place,  resulting in loss of robustness, and now a new
mode of failure.

The point of having RA messages is they are simple,  and integrated
into the routers,
so there is not a separate server to fail  (a "DHCP server")  to cause
loss of connectivity,
due to  server appliances (computers)  being less reliable than routers.

With the RA integrated into the routers properly,  clients can
maintain connectivity
(and establish connectivity, provided DNS details obtained in the past),
even
if  DHCP server(s) should fail.

--
-JH





More information about the NANOG mailing list