The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Ricky Beam jfbeam at gmail.com
Tue Jun 14 20:30:11 UTC 2011


On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:00:22 -0400, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> You would need an AWFUL lot of hosts for this to add up to a few 100pps  
> (or even 10pps) of multicast traffic.

You're missing the point... most WAPs are horrible with multicast.  It  
doesn't matter if it's v4 or v6, at L2, multicast is multicast.

At 100pps the WAP disappears from the network. "It's dead, Jim!"  In many  
cases, a single multicast packet is enough to disrupt traffic flow as the  
AP stops to fire the multicast frame, individually, at each associated  
peer.

As others have pointed out, IPv6 uses multicast all over the place.   
DHCPv6 is just one of many sources.

All we're saying is DHCPv6 should be like DHCPv4... have a backoff period  
and eventually give up entirely. (yes, there are v4 agents that continue  
to try, i.e. restart every 5min, etc.)




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