The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Tue Jun 14 22:25:10 UTC 2011


On Jun 14, 2011, at 1:30 PM, Ricky Beam wrote:

> 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.)

Dude... I said that from the beginning.

Point is that DHCPv6 isn't going to be the thing that pushes your AP over the edge.

Owen





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