Mac OS X 10.7, still no DHCPv6

Sun Feb 27 20:45:12 UTC 2011

On Mon Feb 28, 2011 at 07:22:08AM +1100, Mark Andrews wrote:
> > This is often required for legislation compliance. DHCP does this well.
> 
> Does it really matter what address a customer has as long as it comes from
> the /64, /56 or /48 assigned to them?

You are assuming an access technology that lends itself to subnet-per-customer.

I run a network with 50,000+ end users using ethernet-based access to the
user's room. In IPv4, I run 1 or more subnets per building (depending on the 
number of rooms in the build). I use DHCP to assign IPs, and record the 
DHCP assignments allow me to trace users in the event of abuse complaints. I
use DHCP Option82 to allow me to correlate multiple devices in a user's room.
I feed the DHCP information into my bandwidth management platform to enforce
different levels (i.e. speeds) of service per user depending on what they've
purchased.

I have yet to come up with a viable solution to do all of the above in IPv6
without using DHCPv6. At the moment, that means that OSX users are not going
to get IPv6.

Simon

For IPv4, I use DHCP to