The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Jun 15 05:33:09 UTC 2011


On Jun 14, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 15 jun 2011, at 0:05, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> Yes, the right solution would be to at least separate the VLANs and clean up this
>> mess. However, due to software packages that need to talk to each other over
>> common local broadcast across that boundary, this isn't possible in this particular
>> organization (don't get me started on the bad software, but, that's what there is.)
> 
> Strange that you don't apply the logic of "the existing software is what there is" to the code deep inside hundreds of millions of hosts, but rather to obscure stuff that presumably hardly anyone uses.
> 
> If changing this software is so hard, what these people need is some filtering switches so the application multicasts get forwarded but the IP provisioning multicasts don't. No standards action required.
> 
> BTW, does this broken software run over IPv6, anyway?

No, but, it require the v4 stack on the hosts to be on the same link, which means that the v6 stack will also be on the same link.

There are less broken scenarios, too.

Bottom line, I expect it's easier to get cooperation from OS vendors and BIOS vendors to make changes
because experience has shown that they are more willing to do so than vertical software vendors.

As such, yes, I'd like to see some harmless extensions added to DHCPv6 that solve some real world
problems.

Owen





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