IPv6 Deployment for the LAN

Thu Oct 22 21:37:14 UTC 2009

On 22 okt 2009, at 22:52, Mark Smith wrote:

>>> Seriously, we're all adults.  So treating us like children and
>>> taking away the power tools is not appreciated.

>> Stop trying to break the internet and I'll treat you like an adult.

> Great way to shoot down your own credibility. Just because you don't
> have or don't understand problems other people have doesn't mean they
> don't have them or they're invalid.

When people want something which is clearly a bad idea (doing default  
gateways in DHCPv6 the same way as in DHCPv4) and they ignore it when  
a better solution is suggested (having a DHCP option that allows a  
DHCPv6 server to tell hosts which of the available routers to use)  
then the discussion tends to take a turn for the worse.

> You'd be far better off proposing
> alternative solutions that use methods that you believe in, or looking
> to understand better why your methods aren't appropriate.

I often do that. Unfortunately, in many cases, people not only insist  
on bad ideas, but they won't even take suggestions on how to achieve  
what they want in less harmful ways. That annoys me a great deal.

> (I don't believe in your agenda to add a prefix length option to
> DHCPv6 (you probably haven't run an IPX or Appletalk network, and
> therefore haven't experienced the convenience of fixed length
> subnets/node addresses), but I don't think it's appropriate to call  
> you
> a child because of you naivety in this area ...)

But wouldn't hardcoding a prefix length also be a bad idea? We now  
pretty much always have /64 but there are just enough exceptions to  
make it dangerous to just assume /64.

However, I firmly believe that whether is done with DHCPv6 it will  
continue to have problems. Even if DHCPv6 itself would operate well  
and consistently in all cases, then there are still the permuations  
between hosts that support stateless autoconfig and not DHCP, those  
that support both, those that are configured to only do DHCP, those  
that listen for the M/O bits and those that don't... There's simply no  
way to get consistent behavior out of a set of hosts unless those  
hosts all run the same version of the same OS. Now for anything else  
than a configuration protocol that wouldn't be a disaster but for a  
configuration protocol this is fairly inconvenient.