The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Thu Jun 16 20:11:09 UTC 2011


On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:43 PM, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> 
> On Jun 13, 2011, at 5:41 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jun 12, 2011, at 11:12 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>> 
>>> On 12 jun 2011, at 15:45, Leo Bicknell wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> Like I said before, that would pollute the network with many multicasts which can seriously degrade wifi performance.
>>> 
>>>> Huh?  This is no worse than IPv4 where a host comes up and sends a
>>>> subnet-broadcast to get DHCP.
>>> 
>>> The IPv4 host does this once and gets its lease. If there is no DHCPv6 server then DHCPv6 clients would keep broadcasting forever. Not a good thing.
>>> 
>> 
>> Which is no worse than the behavior of an IPv4 host on a network without a DHCP server.
> 
> An ipv4 host will in most cases configure itself with a link-local address. A possibly surprising number of people consider this broken, when in fact it's working. the possiblity that autoconfiguration of networks would occur when no routers or dhcp servers exist has some utility just as it did when windows started doing this with ipv4 circa 1998.
> 

Yes, so will an IPv6 host. I'm not understanding your point here.

The point of the conversation is that the DHCPv6 packets going out on a network without a DHCPv6
server would be no worse than the DHCPv4 packets on a network without a DHCPv4 server today.

Owen





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