ISP customer assignments

Mon Oct 5 20:43:16 UTC 2009

[here we go again]

On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:37:49 -0400, William Herrin  
<herrin-nanog at dirtside.com> wrote:
> Some clever guy figured out that ... why not
> add an extra 64 bits for that very convenient improvement? This is
> called "stateless autoconfiguration."

Except that "clever guy" was in fact an idiot blinded by idealism.  Not  
only did he fail to see the security implications of having a fixed  
address, but he'd apparently spent his entire life under a rock, on an  
island, on another planet... he completely ignored the fact that people  
were using DHCP [formerly known as BOOTP] (and have been now for over a  
decade) to provide machines with FAR MORE than just an address.  A machine  
needs more than just an address to be useful -- something IPv6 users learn  
very quickly after turning off IPv4 and it's DHCP learned info.

> Some even more clever guy figured out that if the first clever guy's
> strategy is used, it becomes a trivial matter to track someone
> online... ...
> stateless autoconfiguration will probably end up being a waste.

It's ALWAYS been a waste.  All these supposed "clever guys" failed to  
learn from the mistakes that preceded them and have doomed us to repeat  
them... ICMP router discovery (technology abandoned so long ago, I'd  
forgotten about it), RARP, bootp, dhcp.  SLAAC loops us back around to the  
beginning.  Only this time, it's inescapable: I still have to have  
something on the network spewing RAs for the sole purpose of telling  
everything to use DHCP instead; there's a hard "class" boundary smack in  
the middle of a "classless network" because these "clever guys" were lazy  
and didn't want to figure out ways to avoid address collisions. (something  
modern IPv6 stacks do by default for privacy -- randomly generated  
addresses have to be tested for uniqueness.)

--Ricky