The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

Sun Jun 12 13:45:01 UTC 2011

In a message written on Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 01:04:41PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> But what's the alternative? Always run DHCPv6 even if there are no router advertisements or router advertisements with O=0, M=0?

Yes.

> 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.  I have never heard of a network
brought to its knees from these requests.  A single packet each
time a host boots is hardly a high PPS rate.

> And networks without RAs are very common. We call those networks "IPv4-only networks".

No, we call those server networks.  I've seen lots of IPv6 networks with
RA's disabled and all static devices on them.  Sometimes having hosts
dynamically get addresses and default routes is a bad thing.

> And in the current situation DHCPv6 without router advertisements is pointless because you may get an address, but you have no place to send your packets.

Which is what we would like to fix.

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