The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Fri Jun 10 16:06:28 UTC 2011

In a message written on Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 05:49:51PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> One of my main points is that you can't do that for many years to come, becasue CURRENT hosts require them. It took us 8 years to get from the publication of the DHCPv6 RFC to the deployment of DHCPv6 in all big operating systems. What's the point of doing all kinds of stuff now just so you can turn off RAs in 2019? By that time the switches will have all the necessary options so the problem is moot.

You may be correct for folks who deploy the free public WiFi at the
local beverage vendor.

However, many networks are much more closed deployments.  Enterprises
have not deployed IPv6 internally yet.  Many will not deploy it for
another 3-5 years, chosing instead to use web proxies at the edge
that speak IPv4 (RFC1918) internally and IPv6 externally.  They
often can enforce the software deployed on the boxes connected.

I very much think there are a lot of people who could deploy RA-less
networks in the timeframe you describe, if and only if the standard
to do so where published.  If we had a standard today you could
have patches from a vendor in a year, and still be well before many
of these folks deploy anything.

The fact that bad standards and software exist today should never be an
argument to not design and deploy better software.  So what if it takes
until 2019, at least from 2019 to the end of IPv6 we'll have something
better.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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